MRAs, and manosphere dudes in general, tend to have some strange notions about marriage, many of them believing it to be little more than an elaborate scam, perpetrated by women, to rob men of their money and freedom and even their precious bodily fluids.
Given that they generally see marriage as a tool that women use to pry money from men, MRAs tend to be simply baffled by the very idea of gay marriage, and lesbian marriage in particular – why would any woman want to marry another woman instead of a man whom she could exploit?
Now the right-wing Center for Marriage Policy has put forth a case against gay marriage that’s even more bizarrely conspiracy minded than any MRA screed on the evils of straight marriage.
In a recent post on the Center for Marriage Policy website, the group’s president, David R. Usher, argues that proponents of gay marriage like the National Organization for Women are using the issue as a Trojan horse to promote a new kind of evil he calls “feminist marriage.”
Forget the adjectives “same sex” and “gay” as prepends to marriage. These are victim-based marketing ploys invented by NOW to send us off into a heated debate about homosexuality and equal rights – distracting us from seeing their real goal of establishing “feminist marriage.”
Feminists … intend to convert marriage into a feminist-controlled government enterprise and subordinate the rest of America to fund it.
So what exactly is the strange beast he calls “feminist marriage’?
Feminist marriage is a three-way contract between two women and government. Most women will have children, and few women can afford or will go to the extreme of using artificial insemination to achieve pregnancy. Government is the automatic third party collecting “child support” entitlements for children born in these marriages.
Even non-lesbian ladies will want to get on this gravy train:
Feminist marriage will be far more attractive to women than heterosexual marriage. Sexual orientation does not matter when two women marry and become “married room-mates.” They can still have as many boyfriends as they want and capture the richest ones for baby-daddies by “forgetting” to use their invisible forms of birth control. On average, a feminist marriage will have at least four income sources, two of them tax-free, plus backup welfare entitlements.
Meanwhile, those in traditional man-lady marriages will pay through the nose:
Those in traditional marriages will pay taxes that will be used to support feminist marriages where child support or welfare cannot be recouped, as occurs in our existing welfare state. Traditional marriages have only two income sources, neither of them entitled or tax-free. Over time, many women will prefer “feminist marriage” because of the very substantial economic and sexual liberation advantages. Heterosexual marriage will be heavily burdened by costly marriage penalties, and be comparatively unattractive to women.
But what about dudes who marry each other? Tough luck, fellas!
Marriages between two men are destined to be the “marital underclass.” In most cases, these men will become unconsenting “fathers.” Women in feminist marriages will not mention they are not using birth control. Men in male-male marriages will be forced to pay child support to women in feminist marriages and become economically enslaved to these women.
Apparently, most of the dudes who marry other dudes will not actually be gay.
Most men in these marriages will still have regular sexual encounters with women. Some men in these “marriages” will want to have children. These men will have even more illegitimate children with women in (or contemplating) feminist marriages, most often without informed reproductive consent. Over time, reproductive fraud will become the norm in the United States.
In addition to being so very very evil, feminist marriage is apparently very very complicated.
Women will no doubt enjoy the financial benefits of these new arrangements. But all of us – even the ladies married to other ladies — will pay in the long run when “feminist marriage” ushers in a sort of economic fempocalypse:
Feminist marriage will demolish men’s drive to be successful, motivated workers. It will also further weaken the American job market and harm women’s employment opportunities. Our “Competitiveness Gap” with marriage-based Asian economies will expand as men’s productivity and educational attainment continues to decline, while increasing social problems, violence, and higher taxes stimulate businesses to remove jobs overseas.
Oh, hypothetical women using hypothetical girl-on-girl marriage to extort hypothetical money from hypothetical men, why must you be so hypothetically evil?
Even though the Center for Marriage Policy is little more than a cheerleader for traditional hetero marriage, I wouldn’t be surprised to see marriage-hating MRAs taking up this argument as their own. Politics makes strange bedfellows. As does “feminist marriage,” at least in the fevered imagination of David Usher.
A little-known side effect of receiving child support is that you have to raise a child to adulthood while fulfilling all its needs for food, diapering, bathing, clothing, education, medical care, and so forth.
Minor complication, really.
Wow…I don’t think “welfare” works the way he thinks it does.
Holly – No, school lunch programs, head start, and probably midnight basketball actually cover all of that. The welfare moms pocket the extra money.
In all seriousness, I think Usher has reached a height of christianist right-wing hateful blather that will be hard to top. It’s just brilliantly bizarre.
Holly, thanks for sending this story along to me!
It only makes sense if you know absolutely nothing about, well, anything–which means, of course, that MRAs will love it.
Actually, while the “stealing whores will do anything to steal” narrative is of course loudest here, there’s a second one, which is that no women are actually heteroromantic. It’s unthinkable that a woman would want to live with a male partner because she loves him.
And it’s super depressing that this guy thinks all women are aromantic–therefore they should be forced into marriage with men.
(Hey… why exactly do these sperm-stealer feminists have to be married? Couldn’t they just be roommates and pull the same scam? It seems like they’d get more money that way, because otherwise a woman will have her wife’s income counted as household income and probably receive fewer benefits.)
i don’t think i understood any of that, and i’m not reading it again. that was like owlslave grade crazy. how does this guy keep an organization together?
He is a right wing Christian. I have yet to understand how any of them make enough money to pay for the vast conspiracy they have.
And it is definitely a conspiracy (that occasionally spills over into the public like with Murdoch’s little issue overseas that I am sure happened here.)
What drugs is this Usher guy on? Fuck, after reading that, I need drugs.
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe they should hire NWOslave; he could crank out a dozen policy papers a day. Though they’d all be about Title IX and 14-year-old girls on the beach.
I want to get feminist married! Any takers? 😀
But I yeah that is not how wellfare and child support work…
Also if it’s a three way with “government” then is it polygamy? o_o
Staying a bigot sounds like a lot of work.
Coming up with these conspiracies probably takes all the spare time the MRA have! So, instead of using free time to socialize, and become more familiar to why individuals chose to be in relationships*, it just seems that this guy and others want to force believe that everyone else’s life revolves around them.
Also, it is fun to hang out and talk to folks, see if they have pets or hobbies that are different from yours, what music do they like blah blah blah
* would you believe that I met the most darling straight woman at the club the other day, who
Stay with me here!
made a mutual decision to have a child with a close friend, a bisexual man, because they both wanted children, but weren’t in relationships
So, this guy, willing had a child with this woman, so they can raise a beautiful child together. WHUT?
They currently live together, with their daughter and have an open relationship
I know, it seems a little “extreme,” but I’m totes not making this up.
It really seems more like a “stealing whores are going to invent new ways of stealing” narrative. Which is baffling, this new system seems like a pain in the ass if all one wants to do is steal some sperm.
And I’m struggling to understand why the (presumably hetero) men decide to marry other (presumably hetero) men, they don’t seem to be getting any benefit. It sort of assumes that the men are amazingly fucking stupid.
@david
lol. actually, know that i think about it this is fairly close to owlslave’s ‘the government owns your marriage contract’ rant, so they’d probably be a good fit for each other.
Wow, as Holly points out, it’s not just that they don’t understand how homosexuality works … they don’t get heterosexuality either.
Holly: Not just women: they seem to think everyone is aromantic unless actively forced into romantic relationships. I mean, the men aren’t pining after the women either; they’re off marrying their friends. It actually gives you a pretty sad idea of this guy’s word: men and women are so different that finances and sex are the only reasons people would get together, so if you remove those they’ll just shack up with people who are like them.
If nothing else it’s an interesting variation on the “women want love, men want sex” model…
I was so hoping you would cover this story. It’s so incredibly bizarre that I wonder if this guy has even the slimmest grasp of the concept that other people have actual thoughts and feelings that aren’t about him.
The don’t seem to understand how anything works: heterosexuals, homosexuals, marriage, taxes, welfare, logic, economics, etc. Hell, they’re not even very solid on how conspiracy theories work; see there should be some type of long term goal that the evil feminists have, but as we can see from their conclusion:
They’re just driving us to financial meltdown at which point the “feminist marriage gravy train” will come to an end. Which, obviously, is not desirable to those evil feminists.
I saw this on… Right Wing Watch, I think? Everyone is right, it is very very bizarre. It’s probably the weirdest anti-gay rant I have ever heard. Mostly because nobody in the rant actually seems to be gay or even bi. Here’s some of the wackiness I caught:
1. Nobody is actually gay but gay people are still a threat
2. FEMINIST CONSPIRACY!!! O_O
3. Feminists are all statists
4. The government functions as a husband/man-replacement
5. Feminists just secretly want money from any source they can get
6. Child support = automatic $$$ the government hands you if you are morally suspect
7. (from Holly) Women are not sexual or romantic beings except insofar as they use it to manipulate men
8. (Holly again) No woman would want to marry a man if she had the choice
9. Same sex marriage is the same thing as polyamory (EWW PERVERSIONS)
10. (Holly) SPERM STEALING!!!!!!
11. Women never take their birth control, but men are apparently too stupid to use condoms instead ’cause it’s the slut’s, I mean, woman’s responsibility
11. Child support doesn’t go to the child, it goes to each of as many women are in the relationship
12. (C. Bathrobe) Welfare = also automatic $$$ from the government for anyone morally suspect
13. MY TAX DOLLARS!!!! NOT MY TAX DOLLARS!!! (I am a hard-working American and you are not, neener neener, also I have never received a tax break or benefited from any government social program ever)
14. Being heterosexual is such a huge burden & nobody likes us ):
15. Men are the REAL underclass!
16. Even gay men can be tricked by evil women into sperm-extortion
17. …probably because gay men are sinful sinners who are just perverts and not gay
18. Your so-called “”””””marriage””””””
19. Men are totally clueless about the potential of pregnancy from sex so if a woman gets pregnant, it’s unfair!!!!
20. Child support = SLAVERY
21. Men are too clueless/desperate for child property/PUSSY to seek out IVF, surrogacy, or just draw up a contract with a friend
22. Illegitimacy!! Fornication and bastardy!!!
23. Reproductive fraud = unplanned babies
24. End of the world = damage to capitalism
25. Feminists are all Marxists!!
26. Feminism is trying to end the relevancy of men
27. Morally suspect people automatically cause economic disasters by their very existence/ conflation of moral values with economic values
28. CHINA IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD (but at least they’re more “traditional”!)
If ever I get married (and I’ve been thinking more and more that it’s something I might want in the future) I would want it to be a feminist marriage. Which is to say, I would want me and my husband to come to major decisions together, each having an equal say. I would like to split up paid and unpaid labour equitably, and not view one or the other as “real work”. I would want my partner to be emotionally, not just financially, involved with my children. Chores for the kids would not automatically be divided along gender lines. Discussions of sex would be comfortable and open. When it is time to teach children about sex, I would want both parents to be involved and to teach about it in a positive way.
Marrying other women you’re not in love with to (somehow) extort money from men? I wouldn’t call that feminist marriage.
*coffs modestly*
As a person in what I guess could be described as a feminist partnership (not legal marriage because TEXAS), I suppose noting that one oath we both swore was “no babies no matter what.” We don’t like babies.
So, clearly we are missing out on the gravy train.
Damn feds won’t pay us for our FOUR FOOTED FURRY BABIES (we had seventeen total at one point, 13 cats, 4 dogs, what a bonanza that would have been). UNFAIR TO PET MOMMIES!
Now that I think of it, this really reads more like a pitch for 50’s a sci-fi movie.
The evil alien race from Planet V (short for vagina, obviously), called Feminists are slowly invading the planet. The female ruling class have such raw sexual power that mere men are befuddled and powerless in their presence. Meanwhile, their male underclass is slowly infiltrating our governments to speed up the invasion and ease the placement of these evil Feminist women in sleepy little Everytown, U.S.A. so that they may slowly drain all red blooded American males of their “life force.”
Luckily we have our square chinned hero: Scientist Burt Manstrong and his feisty, but appropriately submissive lab assistant Jenny “Toots” Miller. They alone see the threat posed by these invaders.
Scientist Burt Manstrong’s overpowering masculinity is the only thing standing between us an total annihilation, but will it be euough?
I love this wording:
“Women who are presently welfare beneficiaries will be propelled to marry each other …”
So now the right-wingers are mad at women for not using contraception? Yet they keep trying to outlaw contraception.
I don’t think Mr Usher understands the word average, but presumably he’s assuming the women in these marriages will have say one or two children by different fathers who can be milked for alimony — since it never happens that men share in the costs of raising their child on the one hand, or avoid paying alimony on the other.
(kladle, I was amused to see you’d doubled 11, ordinal numbering should have more elevens.)