My new favorite Twitter-er is madgastronomer, who writes about all sorts of interesting things (and in the last few days, has made references to both the Muppets and Dr. Who! Huzzah!). A few days ago, she did an amazing job taking down some privileged, more-radical-than-thou bullshit from Jenn Levya of Fat, Smart, and Pretty.
The conversation started with this tweet from Jenn:
If you’re getting married, I want to know why you aren’t searching for radical alternatives that subvert capitalism and misogyny.
Madgastronomer responded that, for her, marrying another woman is radical–and there’s no alternative that would convey the same protections. She summed up her thoughts in this series of tweets:
I used to be all for abolishing all legal marriage and using contracts instead. And then I did some actual research into the rights and protections granted by legal marriage, and the fact that a huge number of them cannot be granted through any other means, and honestly some of them, like the right to not be forced to testify against a spouse, SHOULD [not] be grantable by contract. And many of these protections serve to protect marginalized people — or can, invoked at the right time.
And as I became more informed, I realized that we would always need something analogous to marriage, something that could be used to put most or all of these protections in place all at once. And then I realized that no matter what you call it on paper, such a thing will continue to be called marriage by most people.