Wunna These Days, Alice . . .

The course of true love is never smooth. Even so, English divorce law has not yet achieved the enlightenment of its American counterpart - no-fault divorce is not yet accommodated in British jurisprudence. Which naturally opens up all sorts of theatrical potential.

Under current law, divorces are granted only under one of five categories, including adultery and abandonment. About half of the cases fall within a broad category, unreasonable behavior, in which one party must accuse the other of acting in such a way that living together becomes intolerable.

". . . ta da moon!"

As a story in the New York Times has it, this requirement is often occasion either for a very public airing of petty marital grievances or some creative fictionalizing. To get divorced, many couples in court exchange tales against one another that are often unrelated in content, preposterous, petty. Vanessa Lloyd Platt, a London divorce lawyer, has compiled a list of some of the odder accusations of fault she and her colleagues have encountered in divorce petitions, to wit:

• The husband who accused his wife of spitefully tampering with the TV antenna and throwing away his cold cuts. She said he usurped her control of the washing machine and failed to appreciate her revulsion for “intensely farmed meat.” ( . . . because the meat was "intensely farmed," or because it contained lips and snouts?)

 "I know it's pink, but it's not that slimey!"

• The woman who sued for divorce because her husband insisted she dress in a Klingon costume and speak to him in Klingon. (Frankly, madam, I don't see a problem here.)

 "Sorry, no annual sex."

• The man who declared that his wife had maliciously and repeatedly served him his least favorite dish, tuna casserole. (Divorce seems preferable to being brought up for attempted mercury poisoning.)

"I'm not catering to your whims - it's either tuna casserole or pink slime."

• The woman who said her husband had not spoken to her for 15 years, communicating only by Post-it note. (Frequently seen eating together in restaurants.)
• The man whose wife “would without justification flirt with any builder or tradesman, inappropriately touching them and declaring that she could not stop herself.” ("He was hung like a window sash!")
• The respondent who insisted that "his pet tarantula, Timmy, sleep in a glass case next to the matrimonial bed,” even though his wife requested “that Timmy sleep elsewhere.” 

(Timmy, out of his glass case)

There were complaints about husbands with atrocious body odor, and others who changed the channels too fast. “The respondent husband repeatedly took charge of the remote television controller, endlessly flicking through channels and failing to stop at any channel requested by the petitioner."

Three Queers in a Tub

The GOP is having its difficulties with sassy youngsters, who won't stop asking about equal marital rights. First it was Michelle Bachmann explaining tendentiously to some Iowa high schoolers that everyone already has equal rights - just so long as they marry outside of their gender and within their species. The other day Rick Santorum walked into the same revolving door in New Hampshire with some college kids and emerged swinging, if one can use that word in the same sentence with "Santorum."

"Are we saying everyone should have the right to marry? So anyone can marry anyone else?" Santorum asked the insurgent crowd by way of countering the question. "So anybody can marry several people?" (Yes, yes, and why not?) There is always something disingenuous when an adult perpetrates an evident fallacy, particularly one hoary with age and overemployment. In this instance, Santorum offered his justifiably unruly audience a "straw man," the fallacy of exchanging whatever argument is currently on the table (equal marriage rights for everyone) for one speciously similar (three men! Oh gawd!). He then mistakenly presumed that the surrogate argument is so preposterous as not to require demolition. Like most common fallacies of informal logic, it introduces irrelevant matter into the conversation. It is of a piece with that other straw man offering, his famous "man on dog" comment (2003).

"Roll over."

Santorum, the press assumed, was likening gay marriages to polygamous ones, even though he did specifically ask one young interlocutor, "Well, what about three men?" He was understandably booed for this baldfaced evasion. Faced with a roomful of hostile youth, one wonders whether in an unchristian moment the candidate may have reconsidered, however briefly, his stand on abortion.

Constitutional

Even so he raises an interesting point. Why shouldn't anyone be permitted to marry several people, indeed? Or just foregatherings of any sexes in any numbers within a single matrimonial bond? The problem isn't an ethical one: marriage, whatever its current religious and cultural baggage, is at bottom (if I may use that phrase on the same page with "Santorum") an economic institution. The rules and the mythical status we attach to it are as purely conventional as the good manners we observe while eating. There are in nature as many ways to marry as there are to eat your lunch.

 "Nuclear" family 

No, it seems to me that as a culture, the Judaeo-Christian West just made a sheep-like dash for the simplest solution to getting the laundry and the cooking done. But it didn't have to work out this way - polygynous and polyandrous societies have been all the rage for milennia and they seem to work pretty well. Not to mention that such intricate arrangements may present a pretty serious obstacle to divorce, which would in the circumstance amount to expulsion from your accustomed part of town.

The advantages of such an arrangement are clear - everyone gets regular meals, everyone wears clean clothes, at least one adult knows what the kids are up to, and with a little bit of judicious scheduling, everyone gets regularly serviced. At the same time, the emotional baggage is lightened by being spread thin, sentiment never degenerates into the rank sentimentality of "hearts beating as one." It sounds like a no-nonsense, workable agreement.  It sounds like a "win-win" . . . or "win-win-win."

Jesus Loved Me (Update: Spit or swallow?)

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'The Absolute Simplicity of This'

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind . . . . Orr would be crazy to fly more missions . . . . If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this  . . . and let out a respectful whistle."

                                                                            

                                                                          - Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"

  

Michelle Bachmann, explaining civil rights to a group of Iowa high schoolers last week, insisted that gay people "can get married, but they abide by the same law as everyone else. They can marry a man if they're a woman. Or they can marry a woman if they're a man." I, in my turn, was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this and let out a respectful whistle of my own. I'd bet my entire collection of Regis Philbin memorabilia that Michelle Bachmann has never read Catch-22. She just pulled that poser out of her . . . umm, purse.

Henry Ford famously quipped that "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it's black." Mutatis mutandum, the field of GOP candidates (those still standing at any rate) seem to take the Fordean view as it applies to civil rights, and specifically as those rights apply to marriage. In the same vein, it was once the case that any party of the first part could marry any party of the second part of any race or color, so long as the second party was the same color as the first party. As my neighbor Zeno says, leave it to the activists on the Supreme Court to take away our civil rights.

The old red Ford

In defense of her position the irrepressible candidate from Minnesota unlimbered her command of world history and paleoanthropology, insisting further that, "Marriage, historically, for all human history, has been between a man and a woman." In the addled senator's usage, "history" encompasses only the 5,000 years intervening between the Garden of Eden and about 1964, and thus safely ignores the past decade in which 10 countries have recognized the legality of same-sex marriages, or the past 250 milennia (give or take) in which polygamy and polyandry have been common and established social institutions. 

Marriage (as the Founding Fathers intended)

 

And (as it's further likely Bachmann considers that "history" means "of the Christian West"), it bears notice that (according to a Wikipedia entry) "A same-sex marriage between two men, Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz, in the Galician municipality of Rairiz de Veiga in Spain occurred on April 16, 1061. They were married by a priest at a small chapel." It is not recorded where they spent their honeymoon.

I'm an agnostic when it comes to the institution. I say that being happily married and not intending at all to disparage it. But there are enough marriages being acted out badly in public spaces to provide empirical evidence that it may be a good deal of work and not in every instance a state to be fervently desired. Add to that the multitudinous pitfalls of parenting. 

". . . and I'm adopted!"

Nevertheless I appreciate the principle underlying a growing insistence that all the rights, appurtenances and for-better-or-worses of marriage be equally available to consenting adults in a free and liberally governed nation. Anyone in a rational mind should be moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this.

"Whaddaya say, Norton?"

The Rake's Progress

"Stay, Madam, it appears I importune you overmuch . . . ," I continued, gently - by a sly leg insinuating myself from the parlor into the conservatory - yet bating that withal, not without some heat.

"Whist!" she cried. "Silence, Sir, lest my brother overhear your urgency and, like a very Catamount, spring 'ponst us both."

"Didst mean to say Mountebank, my Dearest?"

"'Tis one or t'other," she murmured, "indeed, it had a '-mount' in it."

"I am of like mind, Madam," said I, "I know the very word you intend," and proceeded to close negotiations. "Fie, Sir, you are but a naughty dog," she whispered from behind a pomegranate tree. 

"Nay," quoth I, gently seizing an interposing limb, "only so far as mutual inclination may warrant and as Madam may permit." She fled to an hibiscus. "These exertions overwarm me," she said.

"Not a bit of it, Madam," I assured her. "They are most salutary, and put a fine flush to your countenance."  She fingered a leaf. "Would that I had my breviary," she sighed.

"Piety is no refuge," quoth I. "Only count love as the best of pieties."

"Love, Sir!" she expostulated. "Would I had my pug by me."

"But a dog provides surety to his Mistress," said I, "only so far as his own interests extend. And in the present case, my interests extend much farther."

She fondled a pineapple, albeit, as I noted, distraitly. "Vexing creature," she murmured. "You - or I, Madam?" I ventured. "The dog," she answered.

"Most emphatically," I said.

* * * * * 

So it chances that Miguel and the maitresse of Chateau de Montaigne are marrying on the east lawn after a scant 13 years of romance, cohabitation and shared financial shenanigans. Wonder is that she should marry me at all, having never herself had any inclination to sample the blandishments of that institution, and knowing me as she does by now. I, on the other hand, have essayed it several times (the last nearly a quarter-century ago) - the first time stunned and nonplussed, the second time reckless of the clear and inevitable disaster awaiting, the last time with a reasonable optimism which, in the event, left me at least with a good friend. Probably as much as I could ever have bargained for, given the paucity of forethought with which I generally entered the lists. 

Hume (Treatise, Bk. III, sec. xii, "Of chastity and modesty") offers an admittedly partial account of marriage as a relation between the sexes based on the "trivial and anatomical observation" that "in order to induce the men to impose on themselves this restraint [of rearing and educating children], and undergo chearfully all the fatigues and expences to which it subjects them, they must believe that the children are their own and that their natural instinct is not directed to a wrong object . . . . 

(Wasn't counting)

"Now if we examine the structure of the human body, we shall find that this security is very difficult to be attain'd on our part; and that since, in the copulation of the sexes, the principle of generation goes from the man to the woman, an error may easily take place on the side of the former, tho' it be utterly impossible with regard to the latter." 

In short, a man can always claim that the kids aren't his, but a woman, never.

 (Wandered over from the neighbors.)

Admittedly only a partial account ("Were a philosopher to examine the matter a priori, he wou'd reason after the following manner.") But a posteriori, as there are plainly no children to enter into the calculation, and we're getting married anyway, the strict economic view fails to account for the palpable joy and excitement surrounding the event - the heartfelt wishes of friends and family, the sense of rectitude and satisfaction prevailing here at the chateau, the anticipation of - well, of more of the same, I suppose.Yep, I've been saving those red Ray-Bans for this day.

So the mail arrives daily, filled with notes of benediction, good wishes, and offers for discount hearing aid batteries (for which, as I've noted before, I have no use). No matter, I never thought I'd consider the prospect again. But what with the anticipation of our friends drinking our health on the lawn, having attained an age at which we can marry free-form, without ceremony, we can remain friends joined by the blessings of friends. The only thing I need to figure out now is where to throw 75 rented champagne glasses when there's no fireplace in the place.