Just had an intriguing thought as I was grading a student paper. To what extent does free thinking depend upon a rejection of traditional family. When I look at Islam, I see very few unmarried men. When I think about the great minds of Western society, I see lots of unmarried men: Plato, Epicurus, Augustine, Aquinas, da Vinci, Copernicus, Servetus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Shakespeare, Pascal, Smith, Hume, Franklin, Kant, Schopenhauer, Bentham, Voltaire, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Nietzsche,Wittgenstein, Foucault. (Tom Paine was married twice for short periods but had no children and lived most of his life single)
Hobbes, Hegel and Marx were all married and their philosophies have been interpreted in authoritarian ways. (so has Plato's and he was unmarried)

But, I'm wondering whether the simple act of ruling over a woman in a marriage tends to lead to authoritarian style societies and this tendency is not followed by men who have never had the experience of ruling over a woman and children in a marriage? Or, to put it another way, does a free society depend on a rejection of patriarchal marriage? The West found 'freedom' not by a direct rejection of patriarchy but by accident of the fact that many of it's great thinkers chose to remain single?

The issue could also be framed in another way. Gay people, because of their tendency to live outside of the patriarchal family are a major source of our freedoms.

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