Interesting article about Maggie Gallagher in Salon.com today.
Maybe it would be different if I read more and kept up with the news more, but I find it hard to wrap my head around people's reasons for objecting to gay marriage (especially if those reasons are non-religious). Articles like this one provide interesting insights.
I don't know. I didn't see a lot of insights here, and the article struck me as extremely intrusive.
ReplyDeleteNow I know all this stuff about her, including what her college boyfriend and his grandmother think of her and how she was separated from her husband while he lived with his parents, but her argument still boils down to: Something that is out of my experience must be wrong. I think that's just an error of thought that doesn't need to be explained by biography.
I thought the biographical part was interesting in the way that any biography matching a past to a famous name is interesting (and it seemed that she was open to talking about that part of her life, so I don't know that I felt it was that intrusive). But by "insights," I was referring more to general anti-gay-marriage philosophy tidbits in the article. Like I was saying, I don't do nearly enough reading about current issues, so what might be well known to most other people is still new to me -- but I was interested to hear her thoughts on, for example, marriage as a means of societal protection for women based on differences (which I guess that side sees as inherent and unchangeable?) between the genders. Also, the fact that people like Gallagher consider adoptive parents non-ideal even if they are a traditional male/female couple. The article helped a little in fleshing out the "same-sex-marriage-threatens-our-society" stance that always left me scratching my head before.
ReplyDeleteYou didn't find it intrusive that the author tracked down all these people from her life and interviewed them about her, like the ex-boyfriend (who, according to the article, was not pleased to be found) and his grandmother?
ReplyDeleteTo me all her anti-gay-marriage thoughts are based on certain assumptions that she refuses to question. Like, "All children need a biological mother and father and anything else is inferior." You can't really argue with someone who thinks they are the sole possessor of the capital-T Truth, and it seemed condescending to me that the author tried to point to her history as a way to say, "Look, she believes these things because she's trying to reconstruct the life she always wanted." Especially how he kept emphasizing at the end that even though she presents herself as "pure thought," actually she's full of "uncauterized emotion." I thought it was a very dismissive way of handling someone he didn't agree with. Oh, she's so emotional.
Didn't mean to attack your comment -- I just don't understand how it's helpful to know that someone who is against same-sex marriage because they have certain views of marriage/family that come from their own background. Everyone's beliefs are influenced by their background. But if we blindly go on believing them, there can be no debate. So why does it help to identify the underlying, totally arbitrary beliefs if the person holding them is not willing to examine them?
ReplyDeleteI didn't find the article more intrusive than your standard biography, for which a writer generally interviews people from the subject's life. If anything, I thought it was more intrusive for the people interviewed (the boyfriend, the grandmother, etc. -- and I did worry that now someone is going to root out the boyfriend's identity and make it public), but in the end, they did choose to talk to the reporter.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your comments on the connections the writer was trying to draw between Gallagher's background and her beliefs. To be honest, I skimmed that part because it didn't make immediate sense to me or seem like an interesting conclusion. If you look at my comment above, the part that I thought was interesting was getting a look into her own thoughts on her beliefs. I didn't say that I found her reasoning logical or convincing, but I do think there's value in seeing how people arrive at a conclusion you find hard to understand, and PARTICULARLY the underlying assumptions on which they base their beliefs, if those assumptions aren't obvious to you. You're right, you can't have a debate with someone who won't admit that their beliefs could be anything but fact, but I just enjoy having more information.
Anyway, it's pretty clear that you read the article much more thoroughly than I did. I read in skimming mode at work, and only paused on the parts I cared to think about in more depth.
As you can see, this article really rubbed me the wrong way. I'm no fan of Maggie Gallagher, but I felt like this was going after her in a vindictive way.
ReplyDeleteThen again, didn't realize how prominent she was. A quick Google search of her name shows her all over the place, saying pretty hateful things in a very public setting. I've seen things she's said/written in the past, but I thought she was just another pundit. So, understanding more about how powerful she is, this article seems more fair. It does try to humanize her while at the same time pointing out that she's a hypocrite. On first reading, I thought Maggie Gallagher was basically a think tank person who wrote the occasional article, and that level of prominence didn't seem to justify someone digging so deeply into her personal life and writing an article about it in a national publication.
In general, I agree that it's useful to understand the assumptions on which people base their beliefs. And I guess there's value in finding out that those assumptions are baseless. It just frustrates me that so many people base their beliefs on faith instead of reality. If you delve into someone's reasons for saying they oppose gay marriage, and the reason is that they think it is crucial for children to live with their biological parents, and maybe it's because blah blah blah college pregnancy, well, where does that get you? I did find it interesting to read that she doesn't necessarily have a problem (at least personally, if not publicly) with gay relationships, just marriage.