unfettered thoughts

i have been following the case for a very long time, and to be honest the only reason the queer lawyer is not making any headroom in the court is frankly she is subpar as a lawyer. i’ll explain further.

Marriage is a social contract. but under capitalism, marriages are for producing labourers for the state. ensuring marriage rights makes queers eligible for being viewed as a family unit, and granting them certain social and economical advantages of being the model family. these advantages are generally things like wider social acceptance, and importantly, having a partner with whom you can have a joint account and share fiscal responsibilities.

regardless of marriages, in a partnership, regardless of gender identity this happens anyway. two people share a house, become emotionally dependent, and share fiscal responsibilities. if one of the partner is abusive and leaves after treating the relationship as transactional, instead of romantic, in a queer set up, there is no reparations for the one who has been left.

but this happens in cis-het relationships also. men leave. almost always the woman is left alone picking up the pieces. if the woman was a housewife without proper financial independence or safety nets, even if they were married, the wife almost always ends up with losing everything. if it is an intercaste marriage and if the upper caste man leaves, you know that the lower caste woman will never even have a lawyer that would be interested in winning the case for her, provided someone picks it up. as we have already seen, dalit lawyers do not even get hired, do you think a dalit woman will get justice if harassed by an upper caste? not really, if it did, casteist crimes would have gone down, and not up.

so the problem isn’t queer marriages, the problem is marriages itself. the current legalities do not support people without power. it ensures people with power can continue to hold on to it. and that has been the problem all along. something the lawyer is too inexperienced to understand, and not the right one to fight for it.

the current legal structure do not allow homemakers to seek reparations for the harm caused bu intimate partner violence. marital rape is not even considered a crime in a lot of cases. it is as if, post marriage, the person with less power and agency in the relationship are relegated to a post of providing free labour for the man, and the law also do not register their agency, bodily autonomy, and human rights.

asking for queer marriage without pointing out the issues is wrong. asking for marriage without asking for a redefinition of the structure of family and their association with internal power structure is asking for trouble. this will only make lives of marginalised queers even more unbearable.

that’s what i think anyway. i have known friends who have been divorced and left for nothing after giving decades of their lives for their men. they can’t get justice. there are legal ways, like a pre-nuptial agreement that any privileged person can use before the marriage to indulge in any kind of debauchery post marriage knowing that a divorce can’t really hurt them. something that was never brought up in the marriage issue.

not everyone is also humane. just like there are pedophile priests, there are also predatory queers. who feast on queers more marginalised than them. there are queers who seek out exclusively newly out queers to groom them. one of my daughters got groomed by a queer person recently who has a very high social capital in the local queer scene. there are also queers who behave like straight people and dilute the queer political cause.

legal marriage had been a cis-het thing. without understanding the pitfalls of it, getting into marriage is only going to bring misery. a lot of queers do not also go through the unlearning process of cis-het behaviours, and internalise the toxicity that they mete out to their intimate partner. more often than not even after being in a queer relationship, and being surrounded by community, this can make the homemaker alienated and lonely. legalising gay marriages won’t solve them.

i want you all to ask this question that what do you think marriage is? what do you think family is? you have seen your parents. do you really wanna live a life like them? are you questioning the internal power structure that each relationship brings, or are you still hung up on the social power structure of age and status? how can we live a life that rejects the notion of free labour and domestic responsibility for the homemakers? you spend most of your life in a home, if you can’t help your partner build a better home for you both, do you even see their sacrifices?

today in therapy i realised in my personal life i haven’t practiced what i preached. that has made me feel not being able to face my moral self. i have never expected myself to be in this side of the road. but now that i am, my path is clear. i need to learn to forgive myself for the mistakes i make, and i need to grapple with the fact that reality may not be what we think it is. but hey, i trust myself. i know i’ll get back on my feet. i know i will learn from my mistakes. and i have to be more open about my feelings and i need to share more with the world not to just affirm my own beliefs, but also see things in a way i was incapable of seeing owing to rose tinted glasses. that’s all.