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-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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Monday, November 26, 2007

What IS marriage, anyway?
Posted by Jill | 6:56 AM
The fact that gay marriage isn't at the forefront of this year's presidential campaign is only to the good -- unless you're gay and are no closer to having the same rights as hetero people have when you commit to the person you love than you did a year ago. The lack of focus on gay marriage is keeping wingnut homophobia under wraps, to be sure, but it's also pushed the issue to the back burner, while gay Americans are still being denied spousal rights when it comes to illness, homeownership, adoption, and a host of other things many of us take for granted.

I don't think anyone is advocating forcing churches to perform gay marriages, but if we separate out the church component of marriage from the state component, what we have is in effect a civil union.

When Mr. Brilliant and I married, we had a short secular ceremony done by a Presbyterian minister who was a friend of my parents. We were adamant about a secular ceremony, and he complied only because of the family friendship factor. No church or religious structure sanctions the institution in which we've been living for over 21 years, only the state of New Jersey, where the piece of paper is filed.

Religious traditions may have their reasons for not opening marriage to gays, but the state has none. So why is the state in the marriage business anyway?

Stephanie Coontz writes in the New York Times today:

Using the existence of a marriage license to determine when the state should protect interpersonal relationships is increasingly impractical. Society has already recognized this when it comes to children, who can no longer be denied inheritance rights, parental support or legal standing because their parents are not married.

As Nancy Polikoff, an American University law professor, argues, the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection. A woman married to a man for just nine months gets Social Security survivor’s benefits when he dies. But a woman living for 19 years with a man to whom she isn’t married is left without government support, even if her presence helped him hold down a full-time job and pay Social Security taxes. A newly married wife or husband can take leave from work to care for a spouse, or sue for a partner’s wrongful death. But unmarried couples typically cannot, no matter how long they have pooled their resources and how faithfully they have kept their commitments.

Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists. But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet their care-giving commitments.

Perhaps it’s time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem “licit.” But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.


It seems like a simple solution, doesn't it? So where's the problem?

I've said more than once that the reason we cannot acknowledge differences among groups in this country is because we seem unable to recognize differences without ranking them according to worth -- and traits or characteristics or benefits that white Christian males have always seem to rank higher on the worth scale than those of other groups, because it's white Christian males doing the ranking. This is why it's unlikely that we'll ever see the states getting out of the marriage business -- because if you take marriages like mine -- secular unions without children -- or marriage between gays and lesbians -- and call them civil unions, it won't be regarded by the Guys Who Make the Rules as the same as their Jeebus-sanctioned unions blessed by some guy in a robe. It'll be somehow second- or third-best and everyone will know that it's not the same.

But maybe that's what we need to do in order to show the utter ludicrousness of this unholy partnership (if you'll pardon the expression) that currently exists when state interests collide with belief in a story passed down through generations.

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