Strange Empirical Alliances

Reacting to Phyllis Schlafly’s latest support of a husband’s right to rape his wife (another example here), the Happy Feminist makes an excellent point: Schlafly has essentially the same conception of marriage as Catharine MacKinnon. The only difference is that Schlafly sees this institution as normatively desirable, which is as serious problem since if this is true MacKinnon’s normative position is clearly right…

…as Matt says in comments, one can read MacKinnon as making an entirely (and largely valid) empirical and historical argument, rather than an argument about the inherent properties of marriage, although her structuralism can be so crude at times that there’s a lot of slippage between the two.