March 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From the Editor's Desk

In addition to resisting war, I strive to resist heteropatriarchy. I don't usually throw clunky terms like heteropatriarchy around in polite company, but sometimes it becomes necessary. As the debate swirling around same-sex marriage becomes more heated, this is one of those times.

I define heteropatriarchy as a system of control in which straight men arrogate economic, social, political, and cultural power to themselves, and derogate and demonize everything they associate with femininity within themselves, within other men, and within women, in order to justify and maintain this power. Central to this conception of masculinity is the steely ideal of the soldier: tough, unfeeling, strong, violent, deadly. If we are serious about ending militarism and male violence, and if we want to create cultures of peace, I believe untying the Gordian knot of heteropatriarchy is essential.

All men in this society are conditioned to live up to a nightmare vision of militarized masculinity. When I worked in a middle school as a conflict intervention coordinator, I often reflected back on my own middle school experiences. I remember the constant fear that I would be called a "fag," and my constant efforts to prove, despite my diminutive size at the time, that I wasn't that. Unfortunately, little has changed. Boys still call other boys, "girl," "sissy," "wuss," and "fag," to goad them into conforming to traditional gender roles, to push each other into committing acts of violence, to participate in dominance rituals such as sexually harassing girls or bullying other boys, and in general to prove their manhood by taking dangerous risks. These terms have power because they are associated with the despised powerlessness of women, gays, and traditional femininity within our culture. The vehemence of the opposition to gay marriage can't be understood without an analysis of the intersections between heterosexism and patriarchy, and that's why I used the term heteropatriarchy above.

Because of my opposition to heteropatriarchy, I am a marriage resister of long standing. However, the effort to win same-sex marriage rights is also about redefining masculinity and femininity, power and control, in our society. Implicitly, gay marriage, by putting same-sex relationships and families on an equal legal footing with straight ones, is a challenge to heteropatriarchal definitions of family, culture, and society. Opponents of same-sex marriage seem sometimes to address these issues more directly than supporters.

In this issue, we include two articles about the same-sex marriage struggle, one featuring excerpts of speeches from the floor of the MA legislature, the other arguing that people in mixed-sex relationships have a responsibility to boycott marriage until marriage is no longer an institution of discriminatory exclusion.

This issue of Peacework also presents two very different stories about the unfolding crisis in Haiti. If nonviolence is about seeking complex truths, I hope that the two analyses of recent events in Haiti provided here, though contrasting, each give us insight into the dynamics of Haitian society. Meanwhile, as we put this issue together, for the fifth time in less than a hundred years, US marines have invaded Haiti.

A few miles away, on another island in the Caribbean, the crackdown on dissidents in Cuba continues. Peacework has long advocated an end to US military intervention against Cuba, of course, and pulling the US base out of Guantanamo Bay is becoming increasingly urgent. This month, Nat Hentoff's article instead focuses on the tribulations of nonviolent free speech advocates in Cuba's jails, with a focus on the surprising debate over the responsibility of US librarians to speak up for their jailed Cuban counterparts. Luc Davidson Schuster's piece crosses the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to explore the degree to which the Zapatistas, in Chiapas, Mexico, despite their military iconography, are conducting fascinating nonviolent social experiments.

The social experiment known as the World Social Forum continues to yield copious data, and we include two voices from the Mumbai Social Forum, one from Oupa Lehulere, an observant participant, the other from Arundhati Roy's extraordinary keynote address.

Roy challenges us to wage real struggles, and Kathy Kelly and Kathleen McQuillen explore the ramifications of civil disobedience and struggles for the free speech rights of anti-war advocates, here in the US. The articles on Kerry and Kady present an interesting contrast; Kerry as a conflicted erstwhile warrior/anti-warrior (whose failure of courage and casual bigotry on the same-sex marriage issue is touched on elsewhere in this issue); Kady as an exuberantly intrepid lesbian-feminist-pacifist urging us all to use the strength, beauty, and power of feminist nonviolence to create a better world.

Sometimes, when the weighty issues of the world seem too much, and we've allowed ourselves to cry about them, we also need to laugh. Our back cover article offers readers a challenge: how many weapons of math instruction can you count amidst the satire?

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