The Questions I mentioned in Intro.

[Smokey]

Hi,
As some of you may know I am very new and have some basic grasps of things. There are a few nagging questions.. :grin:
The most sensitive topic of mine are the stances on
1.Gay Marriage and LGBT Equality... I have searched this forum and the US Communist Party Website and found they are for Equality but I was wondering about the Gay Marriage aspect. :confused:

hope i dont step on any toe's I am still investigating but lean in the most towards the big picture.
Thank you
-Andrew

[Blake's Baby]

Why?

1 - what ostensibly communist organsation (RevLeft isn't a communist organisation, by the way) could possibly have any objection to consensual sex?
2 - what ostensibly communist organsation supports 'marriage laws' in any form?

It's just not our business inquiring if people are gay or straight or other. Good luck to everyone is what I say.

[RedWorker]

The U.S. "Communist" Party is not a very good reference to look at.

We Communists are against the institutional recognition of marriage, which ought to have nothing to do with the state, though most also support legalizing gay marriage under the present situation, as do I.

[The Idler]

As someone new to scene, you should probably understand, the old Comintern-aligned 'official' Communist parties (most are simply called 'Communist Party') don't represent what most communists understand as communism (in many ways). There is not a single 'Communist party' in each country, there are usually many parties with the name 'Communist'. On revleft in particular, I don't know if there are any revleft users from 'official' Communist parties.

[Smokey]

Okay, Thank you. This is a learning experience lol. Its going to take alot of time for me to totally grasp this. Thank you though :-)

[Broosk]

As far as I know, most communists are supportive of LGBT rights. Lenin legalized homosexuality in the Russian SSR.

[Quail]

Many communists don't believe in marriage as an institution, and find an equality based on queer people better fitting in to a heteronormative society (i.e. one which promotes heterosexuality as the norm) unsatisfactory. We are for the liberation of all people, obviously including queer people, so we aim to create a society in which there is no such thing as a "normal" relationship. Marriage as it exists today promotes a certain kind of relationship (i.e. long-term monogamous, in many cases heterosexual) as being better and more valid than others.

[contracycle]

Opposition to homosexuality, gay marriage, etc, are based on religious ideas. Now, the reason those religious ideas is that the formalise the methods by which property is inherited down the generations.

Now of course, that's not quite how people experience things. Religious believers think they have a divine morality, but even non-believers might accept that alleged morality in general terms. So they act on this as a matter of "values" or some such.

But from the perspective of a Marxist argument that seeks to abolish property outright, the whole question is simply irrelevant. Without property, there is no need to control inheritance, and without concerns about inheritance there is no reason to be concerned about who sleeps with who. There is no need to formalise marriage, no need to impose monogamy, not even a particular need to determine who children "belong" to.

In this sense, even if there were such a thing as an anti-gay Marxist, the direction of Marxist politics makes the whole issue go away.

[Quail]

Opposition to homosexuality is often rooted in sexism, which is not necessarily religious. Religious institutions may use sexism as a way of controlling people but sexism and homophobia are certainly not limited to the religious.