The meaning of “Family Values”

As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, gays and lesbians face a wide range of human rights challenges, including the right to work, the right to serve in the military, the right to healthcare and freedom from violence and stigma. From a long list of controversial topics, one might assume that gay marriage should be the least divisive of these. After all, gay marriage is a relatively private venture, compared to the more public arenas of the workforce, healthcare system and hate-crimes legislation. As a personal enterprise, it has by far the smallest direct impact on the straight population. Yet strangely, the single issue of whether or not we will allow gay people to marry has risen above all other concerns to become easily the most notorious, the most hotly-contested of all the gay-rights topics. Why is this so?

The debate raging over gay marriage represents a line in the sand which many conservatives believe we must not cross. Some who are willing to concede every other freedom to gays and lesbians cannot bring themselves to compromise on this one point. But why? What is it about gay marriage in particular that so greatly aggravates so many? To answer this question, it may be best to take conservatives at their word: Marriage, more than any other gay-rights issue seems to disturb the conservative spirit, a spirit that chiefly goes by the name of “family values.”

Family values versus gay marriage

Our national dispute between family values and gay marriage has arrived at a place where it’s hard for either side to stay calm or objective. On the side of family values are conservative Christians who believe they’re answering the call of God and protecting what remains of human decency. On the side of gay marriage is a group that believes it is caught up in a dire struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For some, the stakes are nothing less monumental than the bible and tradition. For others, the rights of an entire people to marriage, inheritance, and child-raising all hang in the balance.

I’ve long been perplexed by the phrase, “family values.” How was it that this particular motto became the conservative rallying cry? And how was it that the existence of gays (and generally gay families) could be so threatening to the conservative order, an order most often described by those same two seemingly harmless words?

If, by “family values,” we intended “value in family,” then I would think it a common, if obvious ambition. But family values is actually a complex set of beliefs plucked from the pages of the bible and common practice, and made especially puzzling, since there’s little agreement on which pages we should be using.

In general, the argument against same-sex couples claims they’re incompatible with family values because they aren’t defined as being a family. Before we’ve even begun, family values are asserted only for certain kinds of families. If homosexuality disallows this kind, gays can only put things right by quitting their charade. They must disband their families altogether, and re-make them in the shape of the conservative model, firmly prescribed as one straight female mother, one straight male father, and straight children. In other words, if gays want to participate in family, they must first become straight. Any variation from this family model threatens the principle of family values and, by inference, the fabric of our nation, if not civilization itself.

When we try to understand the roots of the argument – the “why” behind the social mandate – the closest we usually get is a vague argument about the family being the fundamental building block from which our nation was made. We’re then warned that messing with the fundamental unit threatens the stability of the entire building. Think of America as a pyramid and its families are the stone blocks. Enter the gays, who want to use blocks made out of wood or plastic (or worse, feather boas) and, well, you get the idea. But families aren’t really blocks, after all, and no one has ever adequately explained why our larger community of families cannot also include gay families.¹

Then one day I came across an essay by black feminist Hortense Spillers that caused a domino-like chain reaction of realizations in me. After a long struggle with the mystery of family values, the bundled meanings began to unravel. My first insight was that the modern dispute over gay marriage isn’t the first time in history some people have contrived to fiddle with other peoples’ families.

A brief history of power: family values and pater familias

When American and British entrepreneurs were in the business of importing slaves to Southern plantations, many were afraid these dark-skinned foreigners might get out of control, so strict measures were adopted to make sure the power structure was maintained. Like modern gay families, black families weren’t defined as families at all. Negro slaves, aside from being prohibited from marrying, were not allowed to raise their own children. Father, mother and child were all sent to different plantations, assuring that existing families were first broken and then remade. The new head of the family, the “pater familias” was now the slave owner, and each slave took the name of the master of the plantation to which he or she had been sold. In her essay, Spillers quotes from Frederick Douglas’ poignant 1845 Narrative, where he writes of being separated in infancy from his mother:

For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.²

Why was it so important for the slave owners to separate slave families? Spillers makes the case that it was used to maintain power over them:

It is this rhetorical and symbolic move [remaking the family] that declares primacy over any other human and social claim.³

Slave owners had discovered a way to replace, with surgical precision, the black heads-of-household with white ones. In doing so, they were able to exert a level of control not possible otherwise. Rather than being mere employers, the slave owners now had complete control over the newly reconstructed black family units. This gave them power over all affairs, public and private, which was supreme authority, and in the spirit of the old Roman expression “pater familias,” the power of life and death.⁴ As I read Spillers’ essay, I began to understand what’s at stake when we say “family values,” and the resultant belief that our newly-forming (gay) families must be dismantled. Could it be that the reason gays can’t access the rights and privileges of family is not because “family” is a building block of society (which has little meaning), but because “head of household” is equivalent to “political power?” With that kind of clout at stake, today’s power elite cannot bear a gay head of household any more than it could in the past bear a black one.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in an essay entitled “Between Men,” examines the idiom, “A man’s home is his castle,” to understand the link between “family” and “power” that entered the vernacular with the shift from feudalism to capitalism:

⁵The man who has his home is a different person from the lord who has a castle; and the forms of property implied in the two possessives (his [mortgaged] home/his [inherited] castle) are not only different, but . . . mutually contradictory. The contradiction is assuaged and filled in by transferring the lord’s political and economic control over the environs of his castle to an image of the father’s personal control over the inmates of his house.

Couched in this transfer of meaning is a mandate. We understand the difference between a (mortgaged) house and an (inherited) castle – between a head of household and a head of state – yet our historical links between power and family are so magnetic – so compelling – that we, by a cultural directive, are obliged to forget⁶ the difference. The phrase, “A man’s home is his castle” is a remarkable expression because it urges us to forget. We comply by “filling in” the discrepancies until “head of household” and “head of state” become synonymous, and this has the unfortunate result of making us believe we cannot allow black or gay (or “other”) families to exist. To a large degree, we therefore romanticize “family” by filling in the time gap between the modern head of household and the Roman equivalent, the “pater familias,” who exerted absolute legal power over his family members and made that “father of the family” look much more like a medieval lord than his modern counterpart.

This is what family values means to us: The maintaining of a political framework that conspires to deprive outsiders access to power.⁷ It is ironic that the wistful longing to return to the “good-old days” represented by the expression “family values,” this hording of power supposedly contained in the office of “head of household,” is the result of an almost superstitious overemphasis on the inviolability of the old Roman concept of pater familias – a power in legal fact and in social practice already vacated long ago.⁸

 

Troy Carlyle

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"The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on."

– Julia Alvarez

¹Honestly, the issue can’t really be procreation, because no one has in seriousness tried to suggest more than a small percentage of families would ever be made of same-sex couples. The (very) few conservatives who argue that gay rights would usher an end to procreation (and therefore the end of the human race) have failed to realize they’re suggesting everyone is, in fact, gay, and that it is only the bible, the law, and the resultant social stigma that prevents us all from rushing into same-sex unions.

²Frederick Douglas, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; reprint, New York, 1968), quoted in Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, Mass, Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 665).

³Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 665.

⁴The pater familias had vitae necisque potestas - the "power of life and death" - over his children, his wife (in some cases), and his slaves, all of whom were said to be sub manu, "under his hand". If a child was deformed, under the laws of the Twelve Tables the pater familias was required to have the child put to death by exposure. He had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child has been sold as a slave three times, he is no longer subject to the patria potestas. The pater familias had the power to approve or reject marriages of his sons and daughters; however, an edict of the Emperor Caesar Augustus provided that the pater familias could not withhold that permission lightly. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterfamilias

⁵Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Between Men,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, Mass, Blackwell Publishers, 1998, 706).

⁶The word “forgetting,” as I have used it refers to forgetting in Marx’s sense: “This eternalization or naturalization of historical conditions and historical change [Marx] called ‘a forgetting.’ Its effect, he argued, was to reproduce, at the heart of economic theory, the categories of vulgar, bourgeois common sense. Statements about economic relations thus lost their conditional and premised character, and appeared simply to arise from ‘how things are’ and, by implication, ‘how they must forever be.’” “The Rediscovery of Ideology” By Stuart Hall, in “Literary Theory: An Anthology,” Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Blackwell Publishers, 1998, Malden, Mass, p. 1058).

⁷Nor do we suffer delusions that participation in “family” is not a position of some power. Unlike the position of head of state, however, participation in family (and in the legal structures that determine it) ought to be a right available to all people.

⁸Only a Roman citizen, someone with status civitatis, could enjoy the status of pater familias. There could only be one holder of the office within a household. Even male adult filii remained under the authority of their pater while he still lived, and could not acquire the rights of a pater familias while he was yet alive; at least in legal theory, all their property was acquired on behalf of their father, and he, not they, had ultimate authority to dispose of it. Those who lived in their own households at the time of the pater's death succeeded to the status of pater familias over their respective households (pater familias sui iuris), even if they were only in their teens. Women were always under the control (sub manu) of a pater familias, either their original pater, or the pater of their husband's family once married (which could be her husband or not). Over time, the absolute authority of the pater familias weakened, and rights that theoretically existed were no longer enforced or insisted upon. The power over life and death was abolished, the right of punishment was moderated, and the sale of children was restricted to cases of extreme necessity. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterfamilias