Posted on: November 29th, 2015 Gay Marriage & Assimilation
In his article “How is Christianity thinkable today?” Michel de Certeau provides a lucid statement about what might be called “alterity,” that is, the question of how one deals with the Alter, the other. The other who is Muslim, the other who is racist, the other who is gay. It matters not here who the other is.
He shows, very simply, that there are two ways of making the other disappear: you can simply (try to) exclude them, or you can assimilate or reduce them into a version (or a subset) of the same.
Here is why, if I were a gay man, I would oppose “gay marriage” in the United States. Surely it assimilates gay people into the category of “married people.” This is a reduction of two different groups–groups that need each other precisely because they are different–to a single, univocal element.
It effaces and eclipses difference by reducing everything to the same. By arbitrarily redefining marriage, we have homogenized our political culture: now (more than before) we are all the same.
And the result, of course, is that we are far more manipulatable by the state.
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