May 10, 2012
If anyone didn't already know that the legalization of same-sex marriage
is inevitable, President Obama's dramatic announcement that he supports
it should settle the matter. That makes this a good time to appreciate
what those of us who favor the expansion of rights as a general
principle have gained -- and what we've lost.
There was something tragicomic about Obama's May 9 announcement, coming
as it did as a reactive response to Vice President Biden's impulsive
endorsement of same-sex marriage on a Sunday morning talk show. The
White House spent two days waffling before Obama finally went on TV. His
views had "evolved" into favoring same-sex marriage some months back,
the official story goes; he'd been planning to disclose that sometime
before the Democratic Convention, but hadn't yet chosen a date. "I've
been meaning to mention this," the subtext seems to run, "and now that
Veep's shot his mouth off I suppose I might as well do it today."
Whatever else one might say about this, it falls short of the image of
proactive leadership most Obama supporters might have preferred.
What else might one say about Obama's statement? From a secular humanist
standpoint, it's surely welcome. As several pundits have noted, no
expansion of rights championed by a sitting president has ever failed to
become the law of the land. Still, as LGBT-rights activists -- and
other supporters of expanding individual rights -- celebrate, we
shouldn't lose sight of what has been lost. (What follows draws from my
August/September 2009 FI op-ed "Two Cheers for Same-Sex Marriage.")
Fifteen years ago, before the idea that same-sex marriage might be
attainable re-directed LGBT activism, the target toward which most LGBT
activists strove was civil unions. Civil unions had a lot to recommend
them. In time, they would probably confer most or all of the same rights
granted by traditional matrimony in such areas as parental rights,
sickroom visitation, healthcare decision-making, community property, the
right to inherit, and so on. What secular humanists especially liked
about civil unions was that they would be a wholly new instiution,
conceived entirely within the domain of secular law. They'd be free of
matrimony's tangled roots as both a legal and a religious construct, and
they'd be free of matrimony's historical baggage as an institution for
transferring what amounted to ownership of the bride from her father to
her husband. In twenty or twenty-five years, the thinking went, a robust
form of civil union would be legal for same-sex couples across the
land.
What was wrong with that vision? Today, many activists view civil unions
as insufficient, a second-class "gay ghetto" institution that still
separates same-sex couples from more favored opposite-sex couples. But
don't judge so quickly. Let's jump back to fifteen years ago, and
consider what many civil-union supporters (myself included) expected to
happen
next. Once robust civil unions were the law of the land
for same-sex couples, this thinking went, the next step would be legal
activism by opposite-sex couples seeking a way to give
their
unions the protection of law without having to resort to traditional
matrimony with all its negatives. Once that was achieved, civil union
would no longer be a gay-ghetto phenomenon. Most importantly, the
centuries-long monopoly held by traditional matrimony as the only way to
legally authenticate a couple's commitment would have been broken. At
long last there would be a new, wholly secular, historically
unencumbered way for any couple, gay or straight, to seal their shared
commitment.
That's what we've lost.
As I see things, there are two ways to view the now (almost certainly)
inevitable triumph of same-sex marriage. One: It's a welcome expansion
of human rights, following in the footsteps of woman suffrage, the
legalization of interracial marriage, and the civil rights movement. And
it is, in spades. But here comes Two: It's a regrettable triumph for
traditional matrimony, whose oppressive monopoly stands unscathed.
Ironically, cultural conservatives should probably applaud same-sex
marriage. The LGBT movement was the only social reform movement powerful
enough to have shattered matrimony's monopoly, and its abrupt shift
from seeking civil unions to seeking same-sex marriage turned LGBT
activists from matrimony's most threatening enemies into its newest
supporters.
What really happened over the last decade and a half? We've moved to the
threshold of legal same-sex marriage across the country, another
triumph for rights-seeking activism. But traditional matrimony, that
hoary old church-entwined man-buys-woman institution, has ducked a
bullet. And those of us, gay and straight, who wanted most of all to
undermine matrimony's monopoly have been left behind. That's what we've
gained, and what we've lost.
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