The Limits of Marriage Equality
What is marriage equality for, anyway?
Is it for gays and lesbians to gain access to the many benefits of marriage?
Is it for us to be recognized as full and equal citizens, with the benefits best seen as a welcome “side effect”?
Maybe it can stand for something much broader – equality not as an excuse for the complacency that assimilation too-often creates, but as the impetus for broader engagement on the most fundamental issues of social and political justice.
Huh? Let me be less abstract.
Begin by imagining a time, likely in the not-too-terribly-distant future, when full marriage equality is achieved. This achievement will be vital and inspiring, because it will represent a crucial step in the recognition of our citizenship and – equally – our common humanity. Nothing that I’m about to add should be read as detracting from the importance of that step. Unless and until our relationships are accorded the full respect that only legal recognition can create, we’ll remain outlaws in many senses of that freighted word.
Was marriage (of all things!) the right place to stand? I think so, but at this point, it doesn’t matter. This is where we are standing, so we have to win. It’s that simple. We can’t allow our fellow citizens, often by simple majority vote, to deprive us of rights that under any reasonable legal analysis are fundamental. I won’t even bother discussing civil unions here, because their inability to deliver equality is too apparent for further discussion. (But in case you want such discussion, here’s what the New Jersey and Vermont commissions studying civil unions had to say; here, too, are the views of the California and Connecticut Supreme Courts.)
But marriage equality should do more than legally empower us: It should inspire us to look more broadly at issues of basic fairness, justice, and consistency. As Nancy Polikoff, a law professor at American University has pointed out in her excellent book “Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage,” sometimes marriage-lite alternatives such as domestic partnership have not only enabled the forging of broader coalitions, but have also created greater access to simple fairness in the process. For example, why shouldn’t any two adult household members be able to gain health benefits from the employer of one of them, if such benefits are afforded to married couples? Domestic partnerships can permit same- or opposite-sex couples who can’t or won’t marry (and why should they have to?) to achieve parity with married couples in specific areas where tying benefits to marriage is questionable, at best.
This recognition, in turn, invites broader questions, not only about the connection between marriage and benefits, but about the broader distributional choices involved in shoveling cash and prizes towards married couples while we ignore many deep social inequalities. To be pointed: Is it obviously more important to provide spousal social security death benefits that are not at all means-tested than it is to make a greater national commitment to the still-invisible victims of Hurricane Katrina? Are the tax benefits to joint filers of greater importance than a national commitment to health care? If so, make the case – let’s not just continue to assume that marriage should be as thoroughly subsidized as it is.
I hope that, once the marriage battle has been won, we can use our new confidence and freshly minted, full-class citizenship, to take up the battle for equality – not “just” marriage equality.
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