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rfmcdonaldI've been feeling a bit ticked off ever since I read, in the comments of the Head Heeb's Arrival Day announcement, a commenter talk non-chalantly about "frightening [. . .] intermarriage rates." My own background--a Catholic father, a Protestant mother, meeting in the early 1970s, getting married despite the opposition of my father's family and the successful breaking of his brother's relationship with a Protestant fiancé--is at fault, I fear. Dr. Edward MacDonald's 1996 history If You're Stronghearted: Prince Edward Island in the Twentieth Century goes into interesting detail on the depth of the unspoken divisions between Catholics and Protestants on Prince Edward Island. The author's tone when he discusses the speed with which the spectre of communal confrontation was dismissed in the 1970s struck me when I first read the book; but then, I had only to think of the McDonalds' generally hostile reaction.
It's a well-known fact that old-style ethnic nationalists are hostile to Mischlings and métèques. This ilk of person wants purity and fears contamination from the Outside. The ideas that people can enjoy intermediate or multiple statuses statuses, or that they can demonstrates ambivalent relationship with the ethnic ideal, are repellent. Purity, achieved however it can be achieved, is key. Nothing can challenge the circular-logic of tribe and blood, even among nominally liberal people. Take Judith Shulevitz, who, back in May 2000 wrote an article for Slate ("Racism, Schmacism: Opposing Intermarriage"). She professed herself surprised that her article provoked so much hostile commentary that she had to write a followup ("Intermarriage, Inter Alia"). Shulevitz was writing specifically about the situation facing the children of intermarried Jews, but as she acknowledges in her second article her points are relevant to members of almost every religious tradition.
Oddly enough, she doesn't seem to get the point. That blockheadedness is typical of this mindset, though.
I was struck, when I read her first article, by the fatuousness of her third point in her original article, by her argument that "[s]ome forms of ethnic chauvinism bear larger historical burdens than others. It would be nice if we lived in a world in which all formally identical acts of discrimination carried the same social weight. But we don't." If we're going to indulge in the same paradigms of ethnic nationalism that killed tens of millions of people, I may as well admit that neither the Wood family of my mother's father's family nor the Matheson family on my mother's mother's side was involved in the British state's long history of discriminating against and colonizing its subject Catholics. They failed to live up to the malevolent stereotypes projected upon them. My mother did not come to the wedding trying to wipe the last spots of blood off her wedding dress, alas. Certainly bad histories can explain prejudices. Since when have they justified prejudices?
Elsewhere in these articles, she manages to systematically understate the degree to which hostility towards the intermarried and the children of intermarried couples is demoralizing and profoundly prejudicial. The exclusion from family traditions not strictly religious in origin, the difficulty of being allowed to assimilate into new traditions--all of this, she explains away or justifies as something perhaps regrettable but necessary to maintain the integrity of the group. In the case of the McDonald-Wood family, alas, this strategy failed catastrophically. I'll give $C0.01 to the person who guesses which side of the McDonald-Wood family my nuclear household was closest to, and another $C0.01 to the first person who guesses which religion my sister and me were raised in. Not that my family remained at all religious. Doing readings for a sociology class as an undergraduate, I wasn't surprised to discover that the members of intermarried households tend to be not religious at all. Why would you not be, when you experience first-hand the true fact that "God says so" is just another self-serving excuse for the ill-meaning?
If love has only a single redeeming future, it is the remarkable pragmatism that it gives its possessor. I'm on the record as thinking Romeo and Juliet a bit of a silly play, but perhaps the most profound thing Shakespeare succeeded at doing in that play was demonstrating the ability of a Montague to love a Capulet and of a Capulet to be taken by a Montague. I rather expect that the Shulevitzes of late medieval Italy would have condemned the two for violating the sacred barriers of family, instead of religion, or nationality, or race, or gender.
Why should anyone care about this? The last year of Canadian politics has demonstrated like nothing else that the question of marriage, of the constitution of new communities and new sorts of links between communities and individuals, is intensely political. Being able to constitute these new communities, regardless of traditional taboos and the old barriers shows just how much a society has evolved. Besides being artifacts of humans, created for human conveniences, these barriers really exist only when you've got a vested interest in policing the frontiers. But hush! some people don't want you to find this out.
It's a well-known fact that old-style ethnic nationalists are hostile to Mischlings and métèques. This ilk of person wants purity and fears contamination from the Outside. The ideas that people can enjoy intermediate or multiple statuses statuses, or that they can demonstrates ambivalent relationship with the ethnic ideal, are repellent. Purity, achieved however it can be achieved, is key. Nothing can challenge the circular-logic of tribe and blood, even among nominally liberal people. Take Judith Shulevitz, who, back in May 2000 wrote an article for Slate ("Racism, Schmacism: Opposing Intermarriage"). She professed herself surprised that her article provoked so much hostile commentary that she had to write a followup ("Intermarriage, Inter Alia"). Shulevitz was writing specifically about the situation facing the children of intermarried Jews, but as she acknowledges in her second article her points are relevant to members of almost every religious tradition.
Given that in all creeds marriage is seen as a holy sacrament between the couple and God, the answer is yes, though some religions worry about marriage outside the faith more than others. [. . .] Culturebox can't answer for every religion in the world--for instance, Indian Hindu policy actually encourages intermarriage, but that's partly an effort to overcome social divisions caused by strict opposition to intercaste marriage--but you get the drift. Trying to prevent intermarriage is an almost constant feature of world religion. So is getting upset about one's co-religionists' disapproval of one's own intermarriage.
Oddly enough, she doesn't seem to get the point. That blockheadedness is typical of this mindset, though.
I was struck, when I read her first article, by the fatuousness of her third point in her original article, by her argument that "[s]ome forms of ethnic chauvinism bear larger historical burdens than others. It would be nice if we lived in a world in which all formally identical acts of discrimination carried the same social weight. But we don't." If we're going to indulge in the same paradigms of ethnic nationalism that killed tens of millions of people, I may as well admit that neither the Wood family of my mother's father's family nor the Matheson family on my mother's mother's side was involved in the British state's long history of discriminating against and colonizing its subject Catholics. They failed to live up to the malevolent stereotypes projected upon them. My mother did not come to the wedding trying to wipe the last spots of blood off her wedding dress, alas. Certainly bad histories can explain prejudices. Since when have they justified prejudices?
Elsewhere in these articles, she manages to systematically understate the degree to which hostility towards the intermarried and the children of intermarried couples is demoralizing and profoundly prejudicial. The exclusion from family traditions not strictly religious in origin, the difficulty of being allowed to assimilate into new traditions--all of this, she explains away or justifies as something perhaps regrettable but necessary to maintain the integrity of the group. In the case of the McDonald-Wood family, alas, this strategy failed catastrophically. I'll give $C0.01 to the person who guesses which side of the McDonald-Wood family my nuclear household was closest to, and another $C0.01 to the first person who guesses which religion my sister and me were raised in. Not that my family remained at all religious. Doing readings for a sociology class as an undergraduate, I wasn't surprised to discover that the members of intermarried households tend to be not religious at all. Why would you not be, when you experience first-hand the true fact that "God says so" is just another self-serving excuse for the ill-meaning?
If love has only a single redeeming future, it is the remarkable pragmatism that it gives its possessor. I'm on the record as thinking Romeo and Juliet a bit of a silly play, but perhaps the most profound thing Shakespeare succeeded at doing in that play was demonstrating the ability of a Montague to love a Capulet and of a Capulet to be taken by a Montague. I rather expect that the Shulevitzes of late medieval Italy would have condemned the two for violating the sacred barriers of family, instead of religion, or nationality, or race, or gender.
Why should anyone care about this? The last year of Canadian politics has demonstrated like nothing else that the question of marriage, of the constitution of new communities and new sorts of links between communities and individuals, is intensely political. Being able to constitute these new communities, regardless of traditional taboos and the old barriers shows just how much a society has evolved. Besides being artifacts of humans, created for human conveniences, these barriers really exist only when you've got a vested interest in policing the frontiers. But hush! some people don't want you to find this out.
