...California is a no-fault state, meaning the dissolution of our marriage didn’t require a showing of wrongdoing by either person. Thank. God. Because I did some serious wrongdoing. There were addiction issues (mine) and excessive career demands (his). I got lost for a while. There are an endless amount of bad choices to be made if one wants to focus their attention away from a divorce. I drank. I started smoking again. I became a crappy friend. These choices caused a shit-ton of wreckage that I now have to work through as well. So don’t do that. Look at the divorce as an opportunity to grow, not an excuse to go backwards.

The legality of splitting up is absolutely overwhelming. California is a community property state, meaning all the crap you acquire during your marriage is equally owned. So there’s the potentially nail-biting adventure of dividing up furniture, plates, art, and everything else. We didn’t have this problem. Neither of us cared much for stuff.

Jill Filipovic wrote an opinion column for The Guardian yesterday, arguing against the practice of women taking their husbands' names when they get married. It ended up linked on Jezebel and found its way to my Facebook feed where one particular statistic caught my eye. Filipovic claimed that 50% of Americans think a women should be legally required to take her husband's name.

First, some quick clarification of my biases here. Although I write under a hyphenate, I never have legally changed my name. I've never had a desire to do so. In my private life, I'm just Maggie Koerth and always will be. That said, I personally take issue with the implication at the center of Filipovic's article — that women shouldn't change their names and that to do so makes you a bad feminist. For me, this is one of those personal decisions where I'm like, whatever. Make your own choice. Just because I don't get it doesn't mean you're wrong.

But just like I take objection to being all judgey about personal choices, I also take objection to legally mandating personal choices, and I was kind of blown away by the idea that 50% of my fellow Americans think my last name should be illegal.

So I looked into that statistic. And then I got really annoyed.

First off, Filipovic doesn't cite a source for that stat. Some of her other numbers — specifically, that 10% of Americans think that keeping your name means you aren't dedicated to your marriage — are cited, with a link to an Atlantic Wire article that links to a Livescience piece about a survey of a couple hundred students at a small Midwestern college. That study, itself, wasn't actually meant to tell you what the American public thinks as a whole. It was meant to compare changing attitudes between 1990 and 2006 in a place that was specifically chosen because it was likely to be fairly conservative. It was specifically meant to contrast with previous research that had overly focused on the choices and attitudes of upper-income East Coasters. In other words, the data doesn't say what Filipovic says it does.

The 50% statistic comes from a 2011 paper, published in the journal Gender & Society. The whole PDF is online, if you want to read it.

In that survey, 22.3% of respondents strongly agreed with the question, "In the past, some states legally required a woman to change her name to her husband’s name. Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree that this was a good idea?" Another 27.6% somewhat agreed. And that adds up to 49.9%.

But it doesn't tell the full story.

First off, this was a survey of a little more than 800 people, almost half of whom were from Indiana. They were randomly chosen — so that's better than, say, a survey of college students — but it's still a far cry from saying, "This is what half of all Americans believe."

Second, there's a difference between "strongly agree" and "somewhat agree". Just like there's a difference between "somewhat disagree" and "strongly disagree". If you've ever taken a survey where those were your only choices, you know that it's often difficult to fit your actual beliefs into the boxes. Although the authors did ask follow-up questions, the paper doesn't discuss them in this particular context, so it's hard to say exactly what the people answering "somewhat agree" actually meant to say. There is some evidence in the paper, though, that what was really being expressed here was a belief in the rightness of families sharing an identity. On another question, "It's okay for a man to take his wife's name when he marries," a full 53.5% either agreed or strongly agreed. (Although some of those people seemed to agree with the idea in a way that suggested they found it unlikely to actually happen.) And the authors of the paper even ended up connecting both these responses to strong "collectivist" or "individualist" ideas about marriage and family.

Finally, while there were certainly people surveyed who thought women should change their names because of religious ideology or what many of us would probably consider outdated notions of who in the relationship "belongs" to whom, what respondents thought about name changes didn't necessarily reflect what they thought about female equality. Sixty-seven percent of these people disagreed with the idea of strict "man as breadwinner, woman in the home" gender roles. Eighty-two percent thought that working mothers could have just as good of a relationship with their children as stay-at-home moms. And 80% disagreed with the idea that it was more important for a woman to support her husband's career and goals than her own.

Oh, and it's also worth noting that the answers on name-change questions split much more obviously along cultural lines — race, education level, income, where you live in the country — than did the answers to the questions on gender roles, which were much more uniform. Essentially, there's some evidence here that what you think about name changes has more to do with the cultural expectations you live with than it does with what you actually think about women.

All of that kind of serves to undermine, rather than support, Filipovic's position. The survey doesn't tell us what all Americans believe. But it does tell us that it's perfectly possible to feel uncomfortable with the idea of a woman not changing her name upon marriage and still feel pretty comfortable with the idea that women are people. As a feminist, it's that latter idea I actually care about.

So why does this bother me so much?

Here's the thing. I grew up in a fairly conservative and religious culture, listening to Christian radio and hearing all sorts of "outrageous" news about how liberals were oppressing people and trying to take away our ability to choose our own way of life.

As a teenager and young adult, I started looking into those claims more closely and found that the vast majority weren't true. These situations and statistics weren't ever just made up out of whole cloth, but they were deeply misrepresented and contorted in order to support a pre-determined thesis. The closer you looked at what actually happened, what had actually been said, how people surveyed had actually responded, the more the intended sense of outrage and oppression vanished in a puff of logic.

That experience made me a skeptic. It also made me feel pretty damn betrayed and used.

Today, I'd classify myself as fairly liberal. But it still makes me angry when people misuse, misconstrue, and misrepresent information in order to manipulate me into feeling oppressed and outraged. It still pisses me off when all I have to do is spend 15 minutes reading in order to easily figure out that "those people" are not actually out to get me. And I don't really care whether it's "my side" or "their side" doing it. Either way, it makes me angry.

Half the people I meet in my daily life do not want to take away my right to choose my own last name. (Or, at least, there's no evidence of that here.) Whether or not you change your last name — and whether or not you think married women should change their last name — is not the strongest predictor of what you think about women's equality. (At least, that doesn't seem to be the case according to this survey.)

If Jill Filipovic thinks women should keep their own last names, well, great. I enjoy keeping mine. But she should be able to make that point without trying to scare people and without trying to misrepresent what a name change does and doesn't mean about our personal beliefs.

Image: marriage license, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from sadsnaps's photostream

One has to be able to give the other person mental elbow room. During our winter, when a person settled into the sofa in the salon with a book and started reading, he or she was not interrupted.

Keeping quiet when the person is close enough to practically read one's thoughts, is a matter of self-discipline, fuelled by caring.

The only exception to our silence rule was for boat-related safety issues. The boat, for obvious reasons of survival, always came first.

I've written here before about seed art at the Minnesota State Fair. Every year, Minnesotans glue thousands of tiny seeds to heavy backing material to create some surprisingly elaborate examples of portraiture and political commentary. Oddly, given that this is folk art at a state fair in the Midwest, most of that political commentary is solidly liberal.

I wasn't able to make it to the Minnesota State Fair this year, but Minnesota Public Radio's Nikki Tundel was there. At least four different entries in this year's seed art competition feature marriage equality themes—responses to the coming election when Minnesotans will decide whether or not to enshrine discriminatory marriage laws into our state constitution. It's safe to say: Minnesota's seed artists want you to vote "No".

You can see all the marriage equality seed art at the MPR News Tumblr blog

Kameron Slade is a Queens, New York fifth grader who won his class speaking competition planned to participate in the school-wide contest with a speech about same-sex marriage. The principal of PS 195 prohibited him from giving the speech, which generated predictable (and completely justified) kerfuffle. Now Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott has overriden the principal, and young master Slade will give his speech after all.

Some people are for same-gender marriage, while others are against it. Like President Obama, I believe that all people should have the right to marry whoever they want. Marriage is about love, support, and commitment. So who are we to judge? If we judge people like this, this is a form of prejudice. We must learn to accept all differences.[...]

My mom is very open to me about same-gender marriage. However, some adults may feel uncomfortable and think it’s inappropriate to talk about this to children. I think adults must realize that as children get older, they become aware of these mature issues that are going on in the world. If children read or watch the news, they can learn about things like same-gender marriage, so what’s the point in trying to hide it?

In conclusion, I hope that everyone understands how important it is to respect everyone for who they are. Same-gender marriage is becoming more popular. I believe that same-gender marriage should be accepted worldwide and that parents and teachers should start to discuss these issues without shame to their children.

Fifth-Grader Prohibited From Giving Speech Supporting Marriage Equality (via Reddit) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/16/fifth-grader-barred-from-givin.html/feed 48 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/an-open-letter-to-minnesota-st.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/an-open-letter-to-minnesota-st.html#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:13:51 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=135617 GayHomophobe.com (where it's now been 6 days since the last time a homophobic public figure turned out to be queer), but Minnesota state senator Amy Koch has joined the vaunted ranks of politicians who are deeply concerned about the sanctity of all marriages except their own.]]> It doesn't appear to count toward the tally at GayHomophobe.com (where it's now been 6 days since the last time a homophobic public figure turned out to be queer), but Minnesota state senator Amy Koch has joined the vaunted ranks of politicians who are deeply concerned about the sanctity of all marriages except their own. The married Koch recently resigned as Senate majority leader after word got out that she'd had an "inappropriate relationship" with a male staffer.

Koch is a major force behind the attempt to enshrine special rights for straight people into Minnesota's constitution, so you might have thought she'd treat her own magical straight marriage with the respect it deserves. John Medeiros, co-curator of Minneapolis' Intermedia Arts' Queer Voices reading series, can only conclude that lapse into blatant hypocrisy must, somehow, be the fault of queer people. So, he's written an open letter, apologizing to Senator Koch, on behalf of queer Minnesotans, for forcing her to betray the sanctity of straight marriage.

Dear Ms. Koch,

On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to wholeheartedly apologize for our community's successful efforts to threaten your traditional marriage.  We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an "illicit affair" with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.  And we are doubly remorseful in knowing that many will see this as a form of sexual harassment of a subordinate.

It is now clear to us that if we were not so self-focused and myopic, we would have been able to see that the time you wasted diligently writing legislation that would forever seal the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, could have been more usefully spent reshaping the legal definition of "adultery."

 

Forgive us. As you know, we are not church-going people, so we are unable to fully appreciate that "gay marriage" is incompatible with Christian values, despite the fact that those values carry a biblical tradition of adultery such as yours. We applaud you for keeping that tradition going.

And finally, shame on us for thinking that marriage is a private affair, and that our marriage would have little impact on anyone's family. We now see that marriage is more than that. It is an agreement with society. We should listen to the Minnesota Family Council when it tells us that marriage is about being public, which explains why marriages are public ceremonies. Never did we realize that it is exactly because of this societal agreement that the entire world is looking at you in shame and disappointment instead of minding its own business.

From the bottom of our hearts, we ask that you please accept our apology.

Thank you.
John Medeiros
Minneapolis MN

Thank you, City Pages!/p>]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/an-open-letter-to-minnesota-st.html/feed 38