2008
Marriage for Nobody. Civil Unions for Everybody.
Federal and state governments should exit the debate over civil unions and completely strip the label of “marriage” from the law books, replacing it with civil unions for anyone: gay, straight, or brother and sister.
No, there’s no great demand for brothers and sisters to “marry”, but a government-regulated agreement about material and financial custody is a non-romantic practice, anyway. It’s a tool; nothing more. The “sacred” institution of marriage doesn’t belong in an IRS tax book any more than the Bible does.
What if the U.S. government declared Christianity the only “religion”, while classifying other faiths as “spiritual organizations”, granting non-Christian groups the same rights and privileges, but minus the preferred label of “religion”. Imagine the outrage!
Yet, this is the same double standard being practiced when granting “civil unions” to gay couples, while reserving traditional marriage for everyone else. In a civil union, a gay couple may enjoy the same legal protections and tax benefits as a straight couple, but without the symbolic legitimacy.
But when it comes to declarations of eternal love, symbolism is everything to us. Rings, ceremony, public vows; the material and third party ratification of our romantic unions is, for better or worse, deeply important to human beings. So important, in fact, that we’re willing to indulge the absurd notion that our electorate possesses the astonishing power to define our union simply by labeling our union.
We’ve agreed, as a society, to allow two adults to enter into “civil contracts” conjoining their tax, custody and other obligations. There’s certainly value in ensuring that adopted children can count on staying with a surviving, familiar parent in the event of a partner’s death. But no government can define what sort of romantic contract two people can enter into together. The moment we impose a civil due process regarding child, material, or financial custody, we’re no longer talking about their romantic contract. It’s simply a contract, full stop.
The concept of “marriage” should be left where it belongs: in the hearts and minds of individual people, churches and families. If the California courts rule (following the recent successful passage of Proposition 8) that all existing civil unions are null and void, what is the “romantic” impact? How is the love between two people affected? The answer is: it shouldn’t be. Who is the California Supreme Court (or the California voting public, for that matter) to tell me what sort of promises I’m allowed to make to my lover and life partner? If 54% of a voting population decide strawberries taste like crab grass, how does this affect my cup of Yoplait?
Gay rights advocates would argue, rightly, that as a disenfranchised minority it’s meaningful to have societal recognition of their romantic union. Fair enough. Yes, it’s nominally true that “everyone has the right to get married”. At least, anyone has the right to have a priest, justice of the peace, or Cap’n Crunch stand in front of them, their friends and family, etc., and declare them “married”. They also have the right to be declared “turnip!”
I don’t mean to diminish the value or “sanctity” of marriage. The opposite, in fact. The only people who have the ability to define what marriage really means are married people (and their families, churches, or anyone else whose opinion the couple decides to include). And “married people” are all different, with varying convictions about how best to honor their promises to one another.
If we as a culture are still sold on having a legal mechanism by which to combine the material, parental and tax obligations of two adults, then fine. Whether we should re-examine this practice entirely is another discussion. But enforced, exclusive access by heterosexual couples to that mechanism, even if the exclusion occurs solely by means of mere labeling, is segregation. It’s “white” water fountains and “black” water fountains all over again.
This should all be common sense, but unfortunately the “legal widget” of state-sanctioned marriage was created (I’m assuming) to support a ritual sharing the same kind of quasi-religious identity as Christmas trees. The sometimes-religious, sometimes-secular practice of getting married has been historically popular enough to demand a legal support structure.
Especially when the dominant norm was for a male spouse to pay the bills while a female spouse had no autonomous income source, the security of a reliable due process for materially conjoined people was, and still is, nice to have. Not just on Tax Day, but on Divorce Day.
Fast-forward to now, and the traditional (often religious) view of marriage is suddenly at odds with a burgeoning social evolution; the recognition that true, intimate feelings of love between two people are rare and precious, and not to be muddied by inconsequential details like gender. Or race. As Americans, we enjoy a First Amendment right to debate the question of “what marriage means” until the end of time. But as for the legal distinction, it’s time we applied a new precept, similar to the one we employ when it comes to religion: the separation of church and state.
To adopt the same precept as it applies to marriage, the correct course is not to legally recognize gay marriage, but to acknowledge that “marriage” is an inherently non-legal institution, just like spiritual faith, and re-classify the legal infrastructure we depend on (material custody, etc.) as precisely what it is: a plain old, boring, black and white contract… available to any two adults, whoever they are. Again: anything less is segregation, in the ugliest sense of the word.
