Culhane: Why gay marriage matters to those who won't marry
Here’s a question: Is the right to marry important if we’re not going to use it?
Setting aside Larry Kramer’s mistimed grumpiness, gays and lesbians and our straight allies were literally or figuratively dancing for joy last week when the first same-sex weddings were performed.
In a typically eloquent and undeniably moving piece for Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan joined in the celebration. Shutting people out of marriage, he wrote, takes a toll on our developing sense of self:
“At the very moment you become aware of sex and emotion, you simultaneously know that for you, there is no future coupling, no future family, no future home. In the future, I would be suddenly exiled from what I knew: my family, my friends, every household on television, every end to every romantic movie I’d ever seen. My grandmother crystallized it in classic and slightly cruel English fashion: ‘You’re not the marrying kind,’ she said.
I had an eerily similar conversation with my grandmother, so I get it. But was the younger Andrew Sullivan that he’s calling up in this essay really concerned about the legal right to marry?
The most direct answer to that question has to be “no.” State approval isn’t required in order for us to couple, or to create a family and a home. And presumably the film and literature worlds aren’t blocked from creating, say, Brokeback Mountain or Tales of the City by the state’s refusal to recognize gay couples as such. Kids – even those like me, who end up in law school – don’t really focus on the legal question, anway.
What he sensed – what most of us sensed, accurately – was his coming exclusion from the social norms around home and family. There were very few models to whom we might have aspired, and only an underground and hard-to-find literature presented views of healthy gay men and women. (Is the homosexuality on view in a book like Forster’s “Maurice” a healthy depiction? Discuss.)
Yet there were some gay and lesbian couples, of course, as Sullivan acknowledges toward the end of the piece, referring to long-term, committed couples who were “effectively married.”
So why didn’t those couples serve as an alternative model? I can think of a couple of reasons. First, they weren’t that visible. There were far fewer of them, yes, but I really mean they were invisible. They were “friends” or “roommates” – not spouses, partners, or (in the gay community) “lovers.” This vocabulary of obfuscation was a coerced bargain between the mainstream and the “homosexual” community (to use the nicest term current when Sullivan and I were growing up).
A second and related point is that these couples weren’t conventional. Sullivan is (always was?) an assimilationist, so it’s not surprising that these conventions would have had deep resonance for him, but I’d bet that most kids – wherever in the radical queer to Father-Knows-Best-simulacrum spectrum they ended up as adults – felt the same way. I did, anyway, and I’m much more critical of marriage than Sullivan.
Now, of course, the country is lousy (in a good way) with models of gayness, in all shapes and sizes, in reality and in an ocean of written and visual fiction. (Sometimes comically: I recall listening to a side-splitting review of an LGBT film festival a few years ago where the critic was ridiculing the check-every-box approach to the films chosen.) So – setting aside for a moment the benefits issue – why does Sullivan need marriage now? More to the point, why would a kid growing up today need legal marriage in order to imagine a family-centered future?
We might as well ask why the many LGBT people who have no intention of marrying, ever, were celebrating right along with those who raced to obtain marriage licenses last Sunday.
Because rights matter, whether or not we choose to exercise them. Although comparisons to the issue of interracial marriage are dangerous because of the very different histories of oppression the two groups have faced, here’s one that I think works: Loving v. Virginia, which declared unconstitutional state laws that banned interracial marriage was important not only because of the comparatively few couples it benefited, but because it recognized that the ban was motivated by racism. In the Court’s words: “The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.”
That’s right. Similarly, the arguments against marriage equality have by now been revealed as nothing more than a sometimes inarticulate desire to keep same-sex couples out and thereby affirm (weirdly) the superiority of opposite-sex ones. And this brings us back to Sullivan’s essay.
No, the boy he describes so vividly wasn’t thinking about the right to marry, at least not in those terms. But the denial of that right helped to create the social environment he describes, at the same time that it was a product of that environment. Rights matter, almost as much for those who choose not to exercise them as for those who do.
John Culhane is a law professor, a blogger, and a contributor to Slate Magazine. (His “slatest” piece discusses a point of similarity between the actions of the NFL and Big Tobacco.)
IMO, those who won’t marry may at least want that option or that choice to be there for them should they later change their mind and decide to go for it. And also, they may want that choice to be there for their friends, loved ones, gay family members for their gay co-workers or gay neighbors they are on friendly terms with. Marriage available to all adults regardless of sexual orientation allows them access to vital rights, obligations, protections, etc on the state level where legal.
That scenario may vastly improve once the federal level of DOMA is repealed and tossed into “history’s discard bin”.
Next job for the LGBT communities of the USA once DADT is dead and buried (as of September 20, 2011 thereabouts, is to continue to attack the federal DOMA and keep up pressure until it’s repealed. The first sign of its probable future end came when President Obama and US Atty. General Holder decided on DOMA’s unconstitutionality and therefore they would no longer initiate attempts to defend DOMA. They are bound to continue to apply that DOMA law until its repeal, but they have decided to not defend DOMA from legal challenges.
Some deportations of foreigners married to same-sex American spouses in US states that have legalized same-sex marriage have already been canceled due to at least in part to the Obama’s administration’s declaration of DOMA as unconstitutional and due to it’s refusal to defend DOMA from challengs aimed at its repeal. At least legal precedent dealing with these types of immigration deportation hearings
has now been established and I imagine that until DOMA is actually repealed that immigration attorneys defending their future and current clients from deportation may now have this kind of legal precedent as another one of their “tools” in their legal “tool sets” to fend off the deportation of at least those foreigners legally married to their same-sex spouses in one of the 6 US states plus DC that legalized marriage equality.
I read that at least 2 such deportation cases of gay foreigners married to Americans have been successfully resolved with the deportations canceled.
Meanwhile, more and more openly GLBT Americans need to run for Congress. Four of them in the US Congress, Barney Frank, Tammy Baldwin, Jared Polis, and David Cicciline… great but not enough considering the number of anti-gays like Bachmann, etc. who are in Congress.
When I was 13 and found out I could get married one day, my self esteem and my activism side began to pick up steam. When I was outed 2 weeks into my freshman year by another teen female. I didn’t decide to lie, I would rather tell the truth and in the words of one of my mothers stand on a cafeteria table with my mega-phone and simply tell them all that I was gay, no I’m not from Noho, that’s the lesbian Mecca. I’d much rather go to Province Town and dance with the Cher impersonators.lol I even came out again when I went to Westover Job corps and guess what? Even people who had to choose between juvie/jail/jobcorps could accept me. People from all walks of life be they white/European/Russian, Native American,Haitian, Jamaican, African, Virgin Islands, Puerto rican people between the ages of 16-25 with some haterz here and there were cool with the adopted by lesbians, sometimes make up wearing, tae kwon do yielding italian flamer that was I, was cool with everybody else. I became the force known as Skippy the homo hippie.lol Thank you all for not just tolerating but actually accepting me for who I am chatty MrFr and all. I know we’ve all laughed together at some point in my life.
Freedom and equality are all about choice. You don’t have to choose to be married, but gay Americans should have the option just like every heterosexual American citizen.
Our sexual orientation is part of our humanity. Our laws must respect us AS gay or they deny us that basic human dignity that is enshrined in our founding documents.
Another excellent column, John.
>So why didn’t those couples serve as an alternative model?
They did–if you could find/see them. But that’s not the point.
“Alternative” minus “choice” equals a jail cell. It’s in that codified denial of choice that causes so much confusion and pain. I can relate to both your and Sullivan’s description of what it was liking growing up in this environment. (I’m 50.) All I’ll add to it is that there was a mind-churning mix of “I’m the same” and “I’m different” messing up my head. It took a lot of experience, thought, reading, talking, and more to get clear on what was different, what was the same, and what that all had to do with equal participation under the law, ya know? (One trick I use to get clearer on any kind of prejudice is that, if I apply the criticism to straight, white males, does it no longer make sense? If yes, it’s b*llsh*t and doesn’t apply to us, either.)
Now, we can choose. We can choose a traditional path, the one chosen by most of our family. Or we can choose an alternative path. The mental-health/self-esteem boost comes from the choice.
The choice not to marry is not a choice unless one’s right to marry is recognized.
Thank you, John. Good analysis. Having a right does not imply that one is required to exercise it. Having the choice to make, is an important part of the right.
Of course, there is also the truism: Most single people meet their (future) spouse, right after they stop looking.
Thank you, John. Good analysis. An essential part of a right is, the right to make the choice.
Of course, most people seem to meet their (future) spouse, right after they stop looking.
If heteros can take marriage for granted. We should be able to as well.
Marriage, for all intents and purposes, is an economic and, therefore, a class issue. It signifies institutional and economic legitimacy–which is what those who claim to be morally opposed to same-sex marriage are really afraid of. When I came out in my late teens, I was lead to believe I would be sacrificing my middle-class privileges in order to be “true” to myself. That was nearly 25 years ago, when ACT-UP politics shaped our consciousness and there were no visible mainstream role-models who demonstrated that you could “have your cake and eat it, too.” Involvement in political radicalism often has more to do with personality type than anything else. Not every lgbt person feels comfortable with the “queer” (equals odd or different) label. Some prefer to fight much quieter (but no less noble) battles for lgbt rights, and legalized same-sex marriage is attractive to these types of people.
Getting married is a right, not compulsory.
Regardless of our opinions on marriage itself, it is a tragedy that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on assimilationist campaigns, losing campaigns, for marriage equality while LGBTQ centers, youth organizations, health organizations, trans organizations, etc. have been and continue to crumble due to lack of funds.
Good analysis, but I think there’s one underlying idea that needs to be expressed: public recognition is the whole point of marriage in the sense that it marks a new status for the married couple in the community. The legal aspects — the rights and privileges — are a reflection of that, and in the case of gays, that has a strong resonance: if gay couples are married in the eyes of the community as represented by the law, then gays in general are more fully integrated into society, whether they choose to marry or not, because they now share those expectations that their straight counterparts have always held: they are have the same range of options for their lives.
Finally someone, though incorrectly, tackles this.
Look. I’m glad that if some gays and lesbians want to marry they can do some in some places. If it’s granted all over the planet, that’s great for those that want to be married.
But there are some lesbians and maybe some gay males, i don’t dare speak for gay males i don’t even understand the language, some of us do not need marriage to be happy. It’s true!!!
I never wanted to marry and I never plan on marrying. I’ve also been with the same person for 9 years. We don’t want to marry.
If you want to, that’s fine, but I don’t need a song and dance and a piece of paper and a pat on the back by any straights to be in super love with someone and to be with them for the rest of my life.
Others know we are together without having to sell each other into marriage slavery. Does anyone not recall that marriage is a mockery of human rights? Or that up until the 80s you could rape your wife and not go to jail?
You can be happy with giving in and being as much like straights as you like, but some of us don’t need to spend countless dollars on a wedding or rings, just to show others how much we love each other.
Not to mention all the money spent on trying to get it legal for gays/lesbians to marry. When there are clearer larger fish to fry.
I am not interested in being another make- believe straight. The reason I support marriage equality in 2011 is that marriage is not some trivial sunshiny party thing with a piece of paper attached like Leeanne who totally misses the important points of marriage is trying to tell me.
It is a legal procedure if you will with legal document backed by 1,000+ rights and obligations etc. Marriage is backed by the local state and in the case of gay people one day hopefully by the US government after the federal DOMA is repealed in say 2015 to pick a hypothetical year for possible repeal to occur by and is designed to make smoother the life of a couple giving their relationship official, legal as well as social status, all through the different levels of society, to making going to doctors, hospitals, medical decision making as a couple something that cannot be lawfully interfered with. To burial and dealing with funeral homes. To putting birth families and society on notice that this is a legally recognized couple, do not mess with them when it comes to financial, tax and legal matters, burial time, leaving home and hearth and possessions to the surviving spouses in case of death of one the spouses, and much more.
You are a bright and discerning woman Leeanne, surprised you missed all of that when you dismissed marriage equality as some trivial straight thing. Obviously, Leeanne, you have made it clear that it’s not for you, but thousands of other gay couples may want it for themselves. It’s not cute and trivial. It’s serious and it’s a legal procedure. It’s not to be entered into lightly and ill-advisedly without thought on some whim. It may or may not have tax-implications and other legally binding things to consider and consulting an atty who is knowledgeable about the ramifications of marrying or not as far as gay couples go might be a good idea if contemplating marrying your partner.