[BRIEF NOTE] On Intermarriage
Apr. 27th, 2005 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe reaction from my father's family when he, a Roman Catholic of good indiscriminately Celtic descent, decided to marry my mother, a good Island woman of the 1970s of mainly Scottish ancestry and a communicant in the United Church of Canada, was not one of pleasure. His parents had already broken up another interreligious coupling among their children, and they didn't want to have to deal with another one. But then, Island society in the 1970s was liberalizing quite remarkably thanks to the collapse of the old traditional rural-agrarian lifestyle, and neither of my parents was living in the godforsaken wastes of rural eastern Prince Edward Island any more, so they were married by UPEI's sympathetic Catholic chaplain.
We've not talked about the issue much, and more than thirty years on the aftershocks of that hitherto remarkable decision have dissipated. I have noticed a certain reserve on the part of certain relatives, but that might just be the family culture, and in any case, we have never had any relations with those of my father's relatives who were most unhappy. I'm sure that they wonder why his children weren't raised in the Roman Catholic tradition; if they don't, I'm sure they believe that this is a natural consequence of his committing a sin. I can only imagine how they'd react if I ever decided to come out to them (I won't, because they're irrelevant.
There is still a reluctance, on the parts of certain religious and ethnic and geographical subpopulations, to deal with hybridity, with the establishment of communities and communal bonds stretching across certain categories of identity (ethnicity, religion, race, nationality, orientation). Many of the people who back the survival of these attitudes claim that they're necessary in order to maintain the coherence of their memberships. This may be true, especially if you set the bar high so as to discourage new entrants.
Even so. I can't help but suspect that many of these people--perhaps most of these people--would be, if their genealogies were suitably transformed, the sorts of people who would be the sort of successful bourgeois in Lübeck and Darmstadt at the end of the 1930s who would boast that their ancestries have been certified as being purely Aryan back to the mid-18th century.
And no, the "God says so" argument doesn't exactly work for me. Why should it? Appeals to unreachable authorities on the grounds that they are unreachable authorities are classic tactics of bad debaters.
We've not talked about the issue much, and more than thirty years on the aftershocks of that hitherto remarkable decision have dissipated. I have noticed a certain reserve on the part of certain relatives, but that might just be the family culture, and in any case, we have never had any relations with those of my father's relatives who were most unhappy. I'm sure that they wonder why his children weren't raised in the Roman Catholic tradition; if they don't, I'm sure they believe that this is a natural consequence of his committing a sin. I can only imagine how they'd react if I ever decided to come out to them (I won't, because they're irrelevant.
There is still a reluctance, on the parts of certain religious and ethnic and geographical subpopulations, to deal with hybridity, with the establishment of communities and communal bonds stretching across certain categories of identity (ethnicity, religion, race, nationality, orientation). Many of the people who back the survival of these attitudes claim that they're necessary in order to maintain the coherence of their memberships. This may be true, especially if you set the bar high so as to discourage new entrants.
Even so. I can't help but suspect that many of these people--perhaps most of these people--would be, if their genealogies were suitably transformed, the sorts of people who would be the sort of successful bourgeois in Lübeck and Darmstadt at the end of the 1930s who would boast that their ancestries have been certified as being purely Aryan back to the mid-18th century.
And no, the "God says so" argument doesn't exactly work for me. Why should it? Appeals to unreachable authorities on the grounds that they are unreachable authorities are classic tactics of bad debaters.
