Allowing Four Lawyers to Marry

         The truly serious issue on marriage in the US and elsewhere isn't on gay marriage as such but the issues implied in Justice Samuel Alioto's asking if four lawyers could marry. 

         The core system on marriage for the last few millennia centers on a sexually reproducing heterosexual couple. And this makes excellent sense if "The world must be peopled!" Over those millennia, society and then the State came to reward heterosexual marriage out of "pronatalist" policy: "People are the riches of a nation," and the idea was to increase the number of people.

         Okay, but what about nowadays, when the world's been peopled and then some, with seven billion of us and counting, and a strain on the environment and on resources? If we want to be less "natalist," we want to encourage arrangements that are not sexually reproductive at all, or less so, but which might allow raising adopted children — plus providing companionship and economic advantage.

         Soooo ... Mr. Alioto perhaps spoke better than he knew. We need to look at alternatives to reproducing couples and we need to rethink the incentives given to people to form reproducing couples and then reproduce. Such rethinking, and then acting, could include shifting tax burdens away from the childless and more toward those overly enthusiastic about reproduction, celebrating Childless People's Day once a year (or twice, to balance out Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day), toning down the praise of families and family values, noting that the nuclear family sucks for raising kids — putting too much burden upon one couple — and moving toward the old extended family.

         I'm not sure I'd like to see four lawyers raising a puppy, let alone children, but we do need to start talking about allowing such relationships the privileges and advantages of married folk.

         And with that we can start our serious arguments over marriage: the mostly economic ones that will seriously question who gets what, just how much, and for how long and for how many offspring.

Gay Marriage: The Thin Edge of the Camel's Nose Heading Down the Slippery Slope

[Justice Samuel Alito] went on to ask why, if

marriage were a fundamental right, four people —

“let’s say they’re all consenting adults,

highly educated. They’re all lawyers” —

could be denied the right to marry and form a single union.

 — Jeffrey Rosen, Yahoo News

            We should take seriously what Amy Davidson has called "Justice Alito's Polygamy Perplex" and the possibility that the legalization of gay marriage in the USA and elsewhere will be what's facetiously called the thin edge of the camel's nose heading down the slippery slope … in this case a slope leading to a reexamination of not only marriage under the law but also new thinking about family formation.

            Good God, I hope so! I hope we slide down that slope with literally "all deliberate speed" — in the old sense, before that line became a sick joke with resistance to desegregation.

            Jeffrey Rosen tells us that "[…] Justice Kennedy has insisted that laws disadvantaging gays and lesbians violate their dignity and their constitutional rights to liberty and equality," and Justice Kennedy is correct. What I'm interested in, though, includes the disadvantaging of gays by their not being able to take advantage of the crasser advantages of marriage.

            I'm an unmarried/never-married guy with some background in history and ecology, and I understand that marriage has long functioned and functioned well for what is known as "natalism" or "pronatalism," the encouragement of the production and raising of children for the security of the State (see Exodus 1.8 f.) and prosperity of society: "People are the riches of a nation." But some time after Earth's human population hit three billion, pronatalist theory became pretty problematic ecologically, and military engagements throwing mass armies at one another haven't worked out that well from, say, the Napoleonic Wars through the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-89. And with a current human population of over seven billion and rising rapidly, with a significant number of countries with nuclear weapons for serious warfare, with climate change offering significant challenges and nonrenewable resources increasingly not renewed — let's say that nowadays natalism as public policy is a bad idea.

            So non-reproductive unions can be in themselves a good idea.

            Non-reproductive marriages where the couple adopts are an even better idea.

            It could also be a good idea to have reproductive and family-raising units of more than two consenting adults.

            The nuclear family has been a pretty popular way to manage marriage and child-rearing, but it has hardly been the only way; and the sort of rigorously nuclear family that's the dominant ideal in America nowadays — Mom, Dad, kid(s) — is a relatively new invention. Until recently, many children grew up in households, with a grandparent or two around (if they lived that long), and in the house or fairly close by, there were relatives, friends, and often a servant or, for the rich, a staff.

            Indeed, I'm not that ancient, and I grew up in a functioning neighborhood in Chicago where there were significant adults in my life beyond my parents, and who helped raise me.

            Anthropologists and science fiction writers have documented (anthropologists) or imagined (fiction writers) complex ways for getting children a good deal of adult attention in a manner that offers a range of models somewhat beyond Mom and Dad and without, as in the nuclear option, exhausting Mom and Dad — especially Mom — and often driving them, and the kids, up the wall.

            There are alternatives: "line marriage" is suggested in at least four novels by Robert A. Heinlein, and various forms of threesomes are suggested in novels such as Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. And Ursula K. Le Guin, author of much anthropological science fiction, has a good deal of fun with the anthropologically baroque family life on her planet O, where the people are divided into two pretty much arbitrary "moieties" — halves — and "Marriage […] is a foursome, the sedoretu — a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. You’re expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual relationships." Le Guin concludes her explanation drily with "It’s just as complicated as it sounds, but aren’t most marriages?"

            What Justice Alito sees as a possible reduction to the absurd of the logic of gay marriage might turn out a good idea for variations on the theme of marriage.

            Among other things the debate on gay marriage should encourage consideration of alternatives to the nuclear family, and the debate should combine that consideration of examination of real conflicts on marriage and, well, money. We need to debate vigorously the crasser advantages of marriage in tax breaks for married couples as such and tax deductions for children, even as those children are eligible for public support: for a major example, public schools.

            I'm a former teacher and was raised a Chicago liberal; and I believe with all my heart in well-funded public education such as I got. I support downright generous public funding of schools and childcare and preschools, plus generous tax breaks for the first child and for adopted children. And for the second child for a couple, and maybe a third, in case, as my mother would've said, "In case, God forbid, something bad happens." Beyond that third kid, however, we need to talk.

            In a world of seven billion people, should couples get tax breaks for exceeding a sensible bag limit for children?

            Gay couples not reproducing are moving in the right direction. Gay couples adopting, are doing even better.

            And a reproducing foursome that wants a third biological kid — well that's good, too.

            From the Old Stone Age into the middle of the 20^th century, encouraging families was an excellent idea. It can still be a good idea, but we must expand the definition of family to include various combinations of consenting adults and, sometimes, their kids. And we must get down to wonkish details about tax codes and crass discussions of advantages for families in terms of money.

Three Compliments (Maybe Relevant for Gender & Teaching) [26 Jan. 2013]

     There must have been others — I'm sure people praised me at my retirement party, and I was given a civic award once — but I really only remember three compliments I've received. Two concern the one and only house I've owned, after I had it remodeled, and one has to do with teaching; two have some significance, but I'll start with one that's just kind of fun.

     After my father died and left me a bit of money, the government of the United States made me an offer I found difficult to refuse; they hinted strongly, though Federal tax policy, that I should use that money to buy a house and get a mortgage. I did buy the house but did little work on it for several years.

     Then I fell in love and got kind of engaged, and we evenutally had an argument with the condition of the house in the background but on the immediate occasion of the engagement ring: my fiancée-to-be's mother could have gotten us a knock-out emerald for far less than the cost of a small diamond, and — … well, anyway, she dumped me, with the lady's getting off one really effective parting shot, calling me cheap. I'm not cheap; I am tight. There's a difference. I will spend money; I just try not to waste money.

     So shortly thereafter I contacted an upscale general contractor who condescended to work on my house (he found it an interesting challenge), and I proceeded to move fairly far into debt — eventually selling off much of my record collection — but ending up with an elegant example of value for money, and I showed her.

     After finishing the remodeling, I returned to a practice in my teaching that was at the time encouraged by my university and, I think, a good idea: I had students over for pizza and a film in my collection that supplemented our course work.

     Anyway, a group of five or six frosh showed up right on time one night, and they walked in led by one lively freshman who looked around and said loudly, "Wow! This isn't what I expected at all. This is nice."

     Pause. Silence.

     Beat, beat (as they say in the script-writing biz).

     And then I rescued the poor schmuck with, "Uh, this wasn't what you expected for the house of the guy you met in Kroger's" — i.e., me — "wearing old jeans, a ratty sweatshirt, and needing a shave?"

     And he said, "Yeah, that's it!" And conversation resumed.

     I treasure that compliment: you can be really sure it was sincere.

     The second compliment on the house came from a woman with a group of colleagues who arrived early at my house re-warming party and had a chance to actually look around. She was a radical feminist, and I was interested in her opinion and remember (more or less) her words.

     She sat down firmly on the sofa, found it comfortable, and said, "I like what you've done. It's definitely a man's space, but one a woman can be comfortable in: masculine, but without the macho bullshit."

     That was a useful formula, and a sign of the times for gender relations.

     The first phase of Second Wave feminism had been integrationist, often with an ideal of androgyny. The next phase featured cultural feminism and some separatism. My colleague was on to a third way, where she could accept me as a man who wanted a masculine space and/but could pull it off "without the macho bullshit."

     Later in the 20^th century — and into the present — we lost something when "macho" became an almost entirely positive word and pretty much a norm; something went wrong when many young Americans no longer spoke much of "macho bullshit" and were losing the term and concept "macho asshole." I liked it that she liked my "space" and that I could pull off masculine without macho bullshit, that I came across as a guy who welcomed women, not some macho asshole.

     The third compliment came in my teaching, but there, too, the setting is significant. I forget what the course was, but I clearly recall that we were in an inappropriate "space": a fairly large, steeply raked lecture hall, designed for lecture and pretty much nothing else.

     (Assumptions about teaching are built into the arrangements of classrooms; some are designed for one-way communication, with discussion difficult to pull off.)

     I had divided the class into groups, who sat together so they could try to do group work — good luck with that! — and the group in question sat in the audience-right corner, in the back, far from the podium.

     They made the long trek to the front of the room, and their required 15-20-minute presentation ran to something like half an hour by my watch — which was about twenty minutes beyond what they had to say and about two minutes short of when I would've stopped them before the class started throwing things at them.

     I was sitting in the audience, about halfway up the stairs, on the aisle. As he passed me going back to his seat, the group leader muttered, "It's harder than it looks."

     That's an important point about teaching.

     There is a lot of complaining about American teachers, much of it justified; but trust my student here, and please accept my word: it is harder than it looks.

     If not exactly an art, teaching is a craft, and, therefore, it takes a bit of talent and a whole lot of practice to do a good job, or even make it to mediocre.

     It can't beat the comment of the freshman on my house, and it's not a sign of the times; but the muttered admission by that student group leader is also a compliment I remember fondly. Indeed, teaching is one hell of a lot harder than it looks.

Zero Tuition: Who pays? Who profits? (1 Feb. 2015)

            It's not a name you'd know, but he's important for the current debate on zero or low tuitions at community colleges, and for reducing tuition and fees at four-year colleges and universities.
            As described in a memoir by the Director of the Bureau of the Budget of the State of Illinois in the Ogilvie administration in the late 1960s, "there was a fellow by the name of David Eisenman who had been at the university [of Illinois]. David worked the tuition issue very hard […,] and our thesis on tuition was that low tuitions are a massive subsidy to middle class and upper middle class families. If you really wanted to assure equal access to educational opportunity, what you should be doing is charging high tuitions and then [use] the Scholarship Commission as a vehicle for providing assistance above tuition and fees to low income families to get their kids in the university system." 
            What State legislatures did, of course — mostly for reasons other than class equity and fiscal fairness — was reduce subsidies to public higher education, eventually drastically, with only small increases in scholarships and grants.
            And so the cost of public higher education was shifted significantly to students and their families, even while the those costs increased and then continued to increase.
            In part, that's fair, especially with four-year institutions: most Americans pay taxes, frequently "regressive taxes" like the sales tax, or often-oppressive ones like property tax; only some people go on to higher education, and the ones who go to the big, prestigious public research universities tend to be well-to-do, and even community college students aren't often the wretched of the Earth.
            In larger part, the high-tuition/high-fees system is unfair and unwise: it's depriving young people chances their elders had for inexpensive higher education — those who received The G.I. Bill, "War babies" and Boomers like me who paid only token tuition — because it's depriving the American Republic of a large body of well-educated citizens, and because it's depriving the American economy of educated people who can help America survive and thrive in what will be increasingly sharp global economic competition.
            The non-solution so far has been mostly student loans, which has been great for bankers but not even good for most others. The banks get nice capitalist profit on the loans, while the risks get socialized: your tax dollars in action guaranteeing (for the banks) at least part of the loans.
            It didn't and doesn't have to be that way.
            Here is another name you probably don't know but should: the Honorable John J. Gilligan, Governor of the State of Ohio 1971-75 and sufficiently an advocate of an alternative that it was sometimes called "the Gilligan Plan." It was more commonly known as "Pay As You Earn," or PAYE, and the idea has been around — and implemented on a very small scale — for nearly half a century.
            The version of PAYE I have pushed is one in which the Federal government advances to any qualified resident enough money to actually afford a college or university education: which can be a substantial sum for married people with families, "nontraditional students" such as we had with veterans under the G.I. bill.
            This sounds expensive, and the original outlay would be very large; PAYE would, however, save money and could turn a modest profit.
            PAYE advances are loans that must be repaid, and repayment can be through a surtax on one's Federal income taxes at a rate set by actuaries so that the basic program breaks even, with former students paying back their loans if they can afford to and as they can afford to, and with a time limit on how long they must pay.
            If you graduate and go on to make a lot of money, you pay back the loan with interest; if you don't make a lot of money — or hardly any at all — then you pay back what you can.
            But you do pay back: A well-funded IRS has shown itself to be very, very effective at getting the sovereign capital "P" People money we're owed. And it makes far more business sense to collect money from people who have been out working for a while and have money than to start dunning immediately recent graduates who are broke.
            The rates can be set so that students can pay full freight for the cost of their educations, but between market forces and government arm-twisting, students should have to pay no more than that. Capital expenses, research, public service (including providing cheap semi-pro sport), top-heavy administrations, and other frills — those can be subsidized by the States and, with luck, in some areas subsidized a good deal less.
            As a former college teacher, the major advantage I see to the plan is that it would attract more full-fledged adults to college campuses and help concentrate the minds of younger students. For sure, it will limit the weirdness of the American State's offering more or less adequate, more or less free education to people's children when those children are children, and then asking parents of legal adults to pay for further educating for their adult offspring, helping to reduce our current over-load of "adult children."
            (My slogan as a teacher: College Is for Grownups, not what a couple of my students called, in two very fine essays, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood," and "College: The Four-Year Vacation.)
            As a very-long-term US resident, I like the idea of reducing subsidies to the well-to-do while helping "to assure equal access to educational opportunity."
            As a taxpayer, I also like the possibility of driving down college costs if colleges have to compete for students who themselves have to pay for their educations, and at the same time having all taxpayers who are paying attention highly conscious that we are putting up money, at least for a while, to support those colleges and universities.
            Many banks will lose a sweet source of income, but right about now a lot of Americans might well say, "Screw the banks"; the money the banks are not lending to students they might put toward carefully-vetted local mortgages and loans to small businesses: that social-responsibilty stuff they may recall from old movies like It's a Wonderful Life.
            So my vote is for "No" to zero tuition, but an emphatic "Yes" to investing in education, but investing with high probability of high return on the investment, starting, crassly, with getting back the money.