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I get deeply uncomfortable when Google does something like this. In general I think it is easy to judge someone half a world away and it is very hard to get th

I get deeply uncomfortable when Google does something like this. In general I think it is easy to judge someone half a world away and it is very hard to get things right when looking across cultural barriers. I am going to give my perspective here as an American living in Indonesia and married to a Chinese-Indonesian. One of the key issues that nobody looks at when they talk about this is very distinctly a collective lifestyle choice: retirement living and who retirees live with. This is undoubtedly a collective lifestyle choice, and societies tend to fall in one of two groups: retire with the kids (the international norm) or retire with the spouse. This has tremendous implications for views on reproduction and hence sexuality. Not only is childlessness not a viable personal choice in retire-with-the-children cultures but same-sex couples can never have equality in such cultures. Even if you revert the controversial laws in Russia, they would be replaced with very binding social pressures that are not easily resisted. Part of the reason is that as soon as the norm is that people retire with the kids, and as soon as this expectation is set, then parents get (and find ways to make actionable) a legitimate interest in who their children marry. This means that parents effectively have something nearly like a veto power over childrens' spousal choices but that veto can be overridden by "accidental" pregnancy. This fact effectively dooms the notion of equal rights for same-sex couples in such cultures, and in the end one is, I think, forced either to recognize an equivalent to social security payments as a human right or concede that actual access to same-sex marriage is not one. Russia is in the retire-with-the-kids category, and as a result they have a strong interest in maintaining a sort of traditional family structure that has all but disappeared in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, etc, namely the multi-generation household. On the other hand, for cultures where the primary human contact in retirement is the spouse, then it is deeply unfair to deny people the choice of that relationship for whatever reason they want to spend that time with someone of the same sex (and the reason really is unimportant at that point). As an American living in another retire-with-the-kids culture, I will say that such systems work and work out well for everyone, but that isn't a reason to perpetuate gross unfairness in the US. So I stand in the awkward place of saying that most Western countries probably should look at legalizing same-sex marriage, but that a gay rights movement really would be deeply socially disruptive in a really bad way in much of the world (including Russia). Like it or not, if we ever succeeded in remaking the world in the American image, we'd destroy the planet. If you don't believe me, look at per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

chris_wot 13y ago
I'm not a person who usually weighs into these sort of debates, but I want to address something with you. Your entire post is based on the premise that each culture's practices are all valid within the culture that they are practised within. This is demonstrably false. The fact that Russians support each other via a traditional heterosexual family unit does not in any way mean that someone who is gay should be discriminated against. The whole premise of your argument is that gays cannot retire with children, so they will be a burden upon the state. That's absurd. What about those who are childless? Or remain single all their lives? Or lose a spouse early and never have children? Seems to me that such systems do not "work and work out well for everyone".
- osipov 13y ago
  Your premise that Western culture's social norms are absolute and universal is far more dangerous than OP's idea of having each culture define its own practices. The West has a genocidal history of bringing "civilization" to other cultures that resulted in their decimation. I fear that colonial imperialism justified by "white man's burden" is being replaced with "human rights imperialism" where the Western dogma of human rights justifies invasion or manipulation of countries out of favor with the West. Case in point http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6f3rHZV5JQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6f3rHZV5JQ discussion of US State Dept. Ambassador to Ukraine on how to install US chosen puppets in Ukraine.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    Your premise that Western culture's social norms are absolute and universal is far more dangerous than OP's idea of having each culture define its own practices. Yeah, I'm not.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I think the fundamental problem is that "human rights" don't really have a solid epistemology behind them, i.e. there is no real theory that allows one to objectively argue whether or not something is a human right. This means, effectively, that they become avenues to convert the world to one way of life. The problem though is that solutions to social problems aren't free and what sorts of solutions the US can afford (and at what long-term cost!) are very different than what could be afforded in a place like Indonesia. When I came to Indonesia it took me a long time to understand how things work here, and how much my preconceptions of what was socially good or bad got in the way. For example, police corruption is a functional part of society and it is politically constrained by prosecution. The police may be corrupt routinely in predictable ways that people accept, value, and work into the social order, but if they step out of line and accept bribes that go against the public interest, it's jail time. Similarly contraception is not widely available to the unmarried. This is a part of the support for a retire-with-the-kids culture. If the unmarried are having sex, they are probably trying for a parental-veto-overriding pregnancy. Instead of universal human rights, I think most rights are transversal, and apply to a subset of all cultures based on understandable and objective criteria. Abortion as a right is relative to careerism and an economy that cannot handle the realities of family (i.e. Western Capitalism). Same-sex marriage is dependent on independent retirement. So forth. As for an epistemological basis I would go back to Cicero's statement that there are functional requirements for people to live together in cities. Those functional requirements o course can be met many different ways, but certain patterns have implications, which pose additional social imperatives. So by the function for civil living together and the functioning of society are how rights are to be known and tested and that's the epistemological basis I would give. I would also add that the CAP Theorem as applied to human communications implies a social imperative to individual and local autonomy.

chris_wot 13y ago

I'm not a person who usually weighs into these sort of debates, but I want to address something with you. Your entire post is based on the premise that each culture's practices are all valid within the culture that they are practised within. This is demonstrably false. The fact that Russians support each other via a traditional heterosexual family unit does not in any way mean that someone who is gay should be discriminated against. The whole premise of your argument is that gays cannot retire with children, so they will be a burden upon the state. That's absurd. What about those who are childless? Or remain single all their lives? Or lose a spouse early and never have children? Seems to me that such systems do not "work and work out well for everyone".

osipov 13y ago
Your premise that Western culture's social norms are absolute and universal is far more dangerous than OP's idea of having each culture define its own practices. The West has a genocidal history of bringing "civilization" to other cultures that resulted in their decimation. I fear that colonial imperialism justified by "white man's burden" is being replaced with "human rights imperialism" where the Western dogma of human rights justifies invasion or manipulation of countries out of favor with the West. Case in point http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6f3rHZV5JQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6f3rHZV5JQ discussion of US State Dept. Ambassador to Ukraine on how to install US chosen puppets in Ukraine.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Your premise that Western culture's social norms are absolute and universal is far more dangerous than OP's idea of having each culture define its own practices. Yeah, I'm not.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I think the fundamental problem is that "human rights" don't really have a solid epistemology behind them, i.e. there is no real theory that allows one to objectively argue whether or not something is a human right. This means, effectively, that they become avenues to convert the world to one way of life. The problem though is that solutions to social problems aren't free and what sorts of solutions the US can afford (and at what long-term cost!) are very different than what could be afforded in a place like Indonesia. When I came to Indonesia it took me a long time to understand how things work here, and how much my preconceptions of what was socially good or bad got in the way. For example, police corruption is a functional part of society and it is politically constrained by prosecution. The police may be corrupt routinely in predictable ways that people accept, value, and work into the social order, but if they step out of line and accept bribes that go against the public interest, it's jail time. Similarly contraception is not widely available to the unmarried. This is a part of the support for a retire-with-the-kids culture. If the unmarried are having sex, they are probably trying for a parental-veto-overriding pregnancy. Instead of universal human rights, I think most rights are transversal, and apply to a subset of all cultures based on understandable and objective criteria. Abortion as a right is relative to careerism and an economy that cannot handle the realities of family (i.e. Western Capitalism). Same-sex marriage is dependent on independent retirement. So forth. As for an epistemological basis I would go back to Cicero's statement that there are functional requirements for people to live together in cities. Those functional requirements o course can be met many different ways, but certain patterns have implications, which pose additional social imperatives. So by the function for civil living together and the functioning of society are how rights are to be known and tested and that's the epistemological basis I would give. I would also add that the CAP Theorem as applied to human communications implies a social imperative to individual and local autonomy.