Gay Marriage
Sidestep on Freedom's Path
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I'm for anything that terrifies Democrats, outrages Republicans, upsets
the applecart. But exultation about the gay marriages cemented in San
Francisco, counties in Oregon and New Mexico and some cities in New York
is misplaced.
Why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what
marriage is all about. Assimilation is not liberation, and the
invocation of "equality" as the great attainment of these gay marriages
should be challenged. Peter Tatchell, the British gay leader, put it
well a couple of years ago: "Equality is a good start, but it is not
sufficient. Equality for queers inevitably means equal rights on
straight terms, since they are the ones who dominate and determine the
existing legal framework. We conform -- albeit equally -- with their
screwed up system. That is not liberation. It is capitulation."
So the good news, as that excellent paper, Ultra Violet (newsletter of
LAGAI - Queer Insurrection) recently put it, is not that 400 gay couples
are now legally married in San Francisco but that 69,201 in the city
(Ultra Violet's number) are still living in sin.
Marriage diverts us from the path of necessary reform. Civil union,
today lawful only in Vermont, is what makes sense as a national cause.
Unmarried couples, straight or gay, need to be able to secure joint
property, make safe wills, be able to have hassle-free hospital visits
and so forth. But issues of hospitals visits or health care should have
nothing to do with marriage, and marriage as a rite should have nothing
to do with legal rights. Separate "marriage" from legal recognition of a
bond, of a kinship.
There's a fork in the road for progressives. One path is sameness,
expanding a troubled institution to same sexers. But that path detours
the real problems of relationships today and their official recognition.
As a generation of feminists and the divorce rate attest, marriage is in
sore trouble, well beyond powers of recuperation offered in Bush's
proposed constitutional amendment which would be a touching souvenir of
a world long gone. Why are prenuptial agreements become common among
people of moderate income? Prenups challenge the one-size-fits-all
straitjacket of marriage, as do other important arrangements devised in
recent years in response to changing anthropological and moral
circumstance: coparent adoptions, adoptions by single people, many
varieties of public and private domestic partnerships, civil unions.
Expand and strengthen the options. Get religion out of the law.
Civil union across the country would help to level a playing field
that's got increasingly uneven across the past generation. In some
corporations gay couples have health benefits that unmarried straight
couples don't. Contrary to endless rants about the "marriage penalty" in
the federal tax code, a larger number of people enjoy a marriage bonus,
as the House Ways and Means Committee determined in 1999.
Unmarried workers may lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars per
year in employee benefits compensation. For example, as the Unmarried
America website points out, "Most states will allow workers to collect
unemployment compensation if they quit a job to move to a new area when
their spouse is relocated by his or her company. But state laws usually
will not give these benefits to a worker who quits to relocate with his
or her domestic partner."
There are so many tricky questions, particularly now that morals and the
surgeon's knife have deepened their own relationship. What happens, when
someone who's had a sex change, who is already receiving domestic
partner benefits at work for his male partner, goes through sex
reassignment surgery and acquires the physical impedimenta of the
opposite sex? Should the couple lose their bennies until they get
legally hitched?
None of this should have anything to do with various rites of marriage
such as a hippy New Age union cemented waist deep in a river with solemn
invocation of the winds and other natural forces, or a white wedding in
a high Episcopal church.
"The pursuit of marriage in the name of equality", says Bill Dobbs,
radical gay organizer, "shows how the gay imagination is shrivelling."
Judith Butler, professor at UC Berkeley, exhibited kindred disquiet in a
quote she gave the New York Times last week. "It's very hard to speak
freely right now, but many gay people are uncomfortable with all this,
because they feel their sense of an alternative movement is dying.
Sexual politics was supposed to be about finding alternatives to
marriage."
As Jim Eigo, a writer and activist whose thinking was very influential
in the early days of ACT UP put it a while back, what's the use of being
queer if you can't be different? "Why are current mainstream gay
organizations working to strike a bargain with straight society that
will make some queers less equal than others? Under its terms, gays who
are willing to mimic heterosexual relations and enter into a
legally-enforced lifetime sexual bond with one other person will be
granted special benefits and status to be withheld from those who refuse
such domestication...Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve
equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this juncture in
history, wouldn't it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to
relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?"
And why marriage to just one person? Why this endless replication of the
Noah's Ark principle?
For me the cheering political lesson is that Mayor Gavin Newsom of San
Francisco felt the hot breath of a challenge from his left (in the form
of his Green opponent Matt Gonzalez) and felt impelled to radical action
to consolidate his victory. That's good, because it shows the value of
independent radical challenges, but that's where my cheers stops. Gay
marriage is a step back in the march towards freedom. Civil unions for
all!
Mike