In 2005, after a long struggle with Baghdad, the Iraqi Kurds won constitutional recognition of their autonomous region, and the Kurdistan Regional Government has since signed oil contracts with a number of Western oil companies as well as with Turkey. In 2003, the Kurdish peshmerga sided with the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein. After the first Gulf War, the UN sought to establish a safe haven in parts of Kurdistan, and the United States and UK set up a no-fly zone. Iraq: In 1986–89, Saddam Hussein conducted a genocidal campaign in which tens of thousands were murdered and thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed, including by bombing and chemical warfare. The situation is worse in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where the Kurds are a minority people subjected to ethnically targeted violations of human rights. In Iran, though there have been small separatist movements, Kurds are mostly subjected to the same repressive treatment as everyone else (though they also face Persian and Shi’ite chauvinism, and a number of Kurdish political prisoners were recently executed). After World War I, their lands were divided up between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The Kurds, who share ethnic and cultural similarities with Iranians and are mostly Muslim by religion (largely Sunni but with many minorities), have long struggled for self-determination. But the truth is, ideologically and politically these are very, very different systems. right now, yes, the people are facing the Islamic State threat, so it’s very important to have a unified focus. Hen we refer to all Kurdish fighters synonymously, we simply blur the fact that they have very different politics. In 1992 the most sophisticated and statistically rigorous national survey of American sexual behavior asked more than three thousand respondents between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine how many “sex partners”. We are tempted, though, to overestimate its lack of success the moralist’s jeremiad and the gossip’s snicker focus attention on the failure of marriage rather than on more prosaic realities. Marriage, then, to understate the case somewhat, is not wholly effective in regulating sex. Still, even in the most “god-fearing” and “law-abiding” of times, to say nothing of “dissolute” or “decadent” eras, marriage vows have a chancy career. Honoring the dictates of law, religion, and public expectation domesticates sex. These vows are typically part of a religious ceremony, and when civil law prohibits adultery or “fornication,” secular and divine power together generate pressures supporting the marital promises. In exchange, as it were, each assumes the responsibility of providing the other with the satisfactions of sex. One promise a marriage ritual exacts of a couple is the vow of “faithfulness” or exclusivity: no sex outside the marriage. Sex, however, can be channeled or disciplined its potential for creating chaos in relationships and institutions can be, if not eliminated, at least moderated. Terms such as “harassment,” “escapade,” “fling” underline its disorderly possibilities. Sex is a constant threat to the routines that constitute everyday life and that allow people to live, work, and play together, whether in corporations, the military, universities, or country clubs. But whatever the purpose, its attainment depends on the successful control of the sex drive.
For example, marriage has been used to cement alliances between families with common interests-particularly economic ones-and to create alliances between nations. To be sure, marriage is related to the nurturing and socialization of children, but historically that has never been its only purpose. “Traditional morality” means, in the words of California’s “Defense of Marriage Act,” Proposition 22 (which was overwhelmingly approved in 1999), “marriage between a man and a woman.” “Family values” ties marriage to procreation or, as the director of the Institute for American Values maintains, a “biological bond between parents and children.” What the rhetoric obscures is another end of marriage: the regulation of sex. Gay Marriage and the Domestication of Sex Murray Hausknecht ▪ Fall 2003Ĭanada’s decision to permit same sex-marriage and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down anti-sodomy laws have once again filled the air with familiar conservative arguments featuring “traditional morality” and “family values.” It is a rhetoric that allows talk of marriage without explicitly mentioning sex. Gay Marriage and the Domestication of Sex