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Attempting to illustrate the cultural differences between the social meaning of marriage and state-sanctioned hybrid forms like domestic partnership or civil union, plaintiffs’ expert witness Dr Meyer describes how children always talk about growing up and ‘getting married.’
And, of course, he’s right. Marriage is a central part of life, it has huge social meaning from early childhood. What child is ever going to say, "I want to be civil unioned and live happily ever after!"? And society thus displays its low esteem of gay and lesbian people by denying them access to its highest private form, marriage.
Society institutionalizes its homophobia by denying gay and lesbians access to its most privileged intimate contract.
Society undervalues and diminishes Gay and Lesbian people by saying we cannot enter into its highest personal intimate form, so children who grow up saying they want to marry and subsequently realize they are gay or lesbian must also give up this dream. (MA, ME, VT, NH, CT, IA children currently excepted.)
And we make coming-out all the more difficult, because not only do we ask young people to risk losing their family and friends, we also ask them to give up a cherished childhood dream, and memory. Society, by denying gays and lesbians marriage, says to young people as they come out, "Not only might your schoolmates mock you and your family reject you, but forget about all those dreams of living happily ever after. That’s not for you people."
Coming out is incredibly stressful for young people. Why must society, at this very difficult time, also make kids give up the ideal of being pair-bonded with someone they love, someone with whom they can make a life together, someone with whom they can form society’s highest intimate pair bond?
It’s not fair, it’s wrong and a further insult to add to the difficulty of being gay and lesbian in our society.
If America really wants to PROTECT ALL OUR CHILDREN, we must make coming out a safe and welcoming process for all. We must not add the further stigma of withdrawing from gay and lesbian young people the cherished childhood dream of ‘getting married’ by substituting dry lawyers’ office forms that are more like wills and estate planning than the celebration and joyfulness allowed straight couples.
26 Comments
> (MA, ME, VT, NH, CT, IA children currently excepted.)
Oooh, sadly no, not Maine children, thanks to Question 1. Did you repress that memory?
This marriage fetishism runs the risk of diminishing the circumstances of those who do not prefer or can’t obtain marriage.
Everyone should get equal access to all state sanctioned institutions, marriage included, and everyone’s choices must be equivalently valued.
This notion that one form of relationship, marriage, is “higher” in value than another form is to my mind, misplaced.
It is the form through which federal recognition of all sorts of benefits has been channeled, but I’m not sure that its function in that regard elevates it to this magical level.
The problem here is that marriage is still commonly thought of as a religious institution (with a few teeeensy-weensy civil aspects) rather than as a ceremony which is at its essential core a civil action. You don’t need a preacher to be married, but you do need a courthouse to issue you a marriage certificate, at which point a judge can do the job.
That’s the whole thrust of the Catholic/Mormon push against gay marriage: They’re trying to frame marriage as a religious institution, not a civil one, so they can claim their religious freedom is under attack (and that they’ll be forced to marry gay men and lesbians in their churches, when in fact a non-trivial number of GLBTs are unchurched anyway).
The Metropolitan Community Church has been performing gay marriage ceremonies for years. Furthermore, because of the separation of church and state in the U.S., no church can be forced to perform gay wedding ceremonies. So, the whole religion freedom argument is a canard.
Church marriage and legal marriage are two different things. Church marriage is not legally binding. You don’t have to belong to a church to get a legal marriage. The fight for gay marriage has always been about legal marriage.
I’ve been surprised that so much testimony has been about the social meaning of marriage and has reinforced the idea that married people are somehow better than unmarried people. I’m hoping that sooner or later the testimony turns toward the issue of access to civil rights.
I don’t think they’re saying married people are better than unmarried people. I think they’re saying married people are better *off* because of the way that society has *given* so many benefits to married people. The unfairness is exactly in the lack of access to a civil right on which the state has placed *so much emphasis* that people accessing that right can be said to be better off than people not accessing it. It’s not marriage itself that confers the advantage; it’s all of the rights, benefits and responsibilities that the state and society have wrapped up into the bundle of marriage rights. That seems to be what the experts have been getting at.
Marriage is as conservative an institution as they come.
As a person raised Mormon and still surrounded by them, the movement would get a lot further by directly addressing the separation of church and state. Critical thinkers who understand the Constitution know that no civil marriage rights can make a church marry or recognize the marriages of anyone, any more than the Catholic church has to recognize second marriages after a civil divorce or Mormons have to let any heterosexual couple who wants to marry in their temples. They don’t even have to let all Mormons marry in the temple. But I can’t tell you how many people I know who in their gut want to step back and just let whoever wants to marry get married but have been convinced by their church leaders, and in those churches it is pounded into you from birth to follow authority, especially religious authority, that it will open the door for all kinds of interference by the state in church affairs. It’s wrong, but I don’t it addressed much in public.
I think many people do genuinely view marriage as a religious institution, but I think there are ways of addressing that. I think the government should only perform civil unions (regardless of sexual preference) and leave marriages up to the churches, so that way people’s legal rights are respected by being treated equally under the law. I think by giving civil unions to one group of people but marriage to another that it shows discrimination. It reminds me of Brown v Board of Education where you hear all these politicians claim that civil unions are just as good as marriage, but only lets one group get marriage – if civil unions are just as good, then let everyone have them while not offending people’s religious beliefs with marriage.
I also think they should be separated. Call it whatever you want, but make the state legality completely separate from the religious ramifications. Make the legal arrangements available to all and let each religion decide what it wants to do with the religious aspect of it. We have such a knack of separating church and state except where the church wants to be intertwined with the state!
I agree.
My daughter’s response to the ads warning of children being taught about gay marriage in the schools last year was, “Like we don’t already know that there are people who are gay and that they don’t all come from some other planet where nobody wants to get married to the people they love.” The children don’t need protecting from gay people because they already know they are just people. Their parents aren’t trying to protect their children from sin, they are trying to protect themselves from reality. They just don’t want to admit it. But you know they have to know it deep down or they would never put the issue of gay marriage up on ad after ad playing while those precious children who shouldn’t be exposed to the fact that there are gay people out there who want to get marrried are watching tv. You’d have to live in a cave not to know about gay marriage after they put Prop 8 on the ballot while most of them didn’t even think about gays getting married when it was happening in cities all over California but not being fought out on tv.
A friend was devastated when her husband came out and divorced her but still wanted visitation with their children. How was she going to explain this to them? They would think their dad was doing disgusting things with his boyfriend. I told her that at their age (quite young), they would consider their parents having sex with each other at least as disgusting and she should handle it the same as if her ex had a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend. None of that had occurred to her, but it made enough sense to her when spelled out that she took the advice. The kids, it ended up, were able to handle it all just fine. The divorce was traumatic, but the boyfriend was nice to them when they spent weekends with their dad so they were fine with that part of it.
Your daughter is wise. She takes after her mom. :-)
I have tried to raise my kids to be critical thinkers. It often means she disagrees with me, but at least she can cite good reasons for it. It also means, as in cases like this, that I am going to be awfully proud to send her out into the real world as a working, voting member of society in a few years.
Very well written, Paula.
Hey,
Teddy. Message here from Connecticut and many years of experience.
I’m not gay. I lust after pussy. And more.
But I get gays. And I say, go for what you want.
I, too, feel that the most important part of the whole question is to “grant” the same rights to everyone. Marriage is basically a legal contract so any religious part of it is irrelevant. It’s all very nice and it makes a big show so the parents can show off their financial status to society by a grand exhibit of conspicuous consumption, but the religious part is unnecessary.
A good example of that is my son and his wife who several years ago had a small, informal wedding presided over by a friend in the open air somewhere so that he and his wife could travel and live abroad together. Then a year or so later they got “married” at his wife’s home parish in an affair, paid for by her parents, that really, really put on the dog. It had neither legal nor emotional relevance because the couple had been legally married long before and had established a solid relationship long before that.
What should be emphasized in this whole to-do about gays getting married is that it is a legality that allows them to take full part in society and that it confers the same rights and obligations as presently accepted marriages does for heterosexuals.
Maybe what is needed is a change in terminology. The legal part is a marriage and the religious part is a wedding.
Marriage addresses both property and benefit rights.
I’d say that having marriage as a proxy for providing life essential workplace benefits to spouses does a great deal of “harm” to idealized religious marriage because it encourages people to use marriage as a vehicle for access to subsidized benefits for a spouse.
@shira, the testimony spoke to the exalted position of marriage above all other relationship and living forms. It was quite over the top.
It’s all kind of stupid, really. We set up all these “institutions” and declare them sacred and then we can’t make the institution match the changing realities because it’s an institution and it’s sacred. I would rather live with someone than marry them at this point in my life because marriage has its negatives as well as its positives, but at least that is my decision to make and not my neighbor’s.
Teddy I’ve been moved by the testimony of the plantiffs and learned a lot, or been sensitized to matters that had not occurred to me before via the expert testimony. I just hope the case is won and stands up in SCOTUS.
And when that happens, I want a piece of that cake!
bmaz, if you’re here, help me out on this. Turns out some of the material that I found irrelevant, like the benefits of marriage to the economy (expensive weddings, and a broad range of other matters) turn out to be important for reasons that are more subtle legally. Here’s what bmaz typed
So the testimony that is not directly related to the civil rights issue, is relevant for other reasons.
One of the intellectually nice parts of the plaintiff’s case is showing how much marriage in the U.S. has changed over time. Quite unlike the immutal biblical institution the defense claims.
I don’t think most people who feel threatened by an expanded understanding of marriage realize that their idea of the “immutable biblical instituion” is, from a biblical perspective, not at all what they think it is. They have an idealized illusion of marriage, but it’s not based on arranged marriage, marriage for property or political purposes, or polygamy – and certainly does not include bedding down mistresses, servants or other members of the family – which is exactly the portrayal of marriage in the old testament of the bible.
Since those who object to same-sex marriage seem to base all their other “immutable” beliefs on the old testament, I’m assuming they base their fantasies about marriage on this part of the bible too. Makes me wonder if they also believe that adulterous women should be stoned to death.
These folks certainly don’t base many of the statements of their belief on Jesus’s teachings in the new testament despite calling themselves “Christians.”
But the practical reality of testimony like this is that it might play a role in defining how lesbians and gays are required under law to deal with those things which are delegated by marriage, such as child custody, as rights that had to be cobbled together ad hoc get meshed with the legal structures that come with marriage that deal with such matters.
I have a different take on it. I think NO marriage should be the norm. I am not gay, I got married when I was 25 years old, had 3 children. Sounds like the American dream, eh? But my husband was an alcoholic — couldn’t withstand the stress of 3 children under age 5 I guess. So, we separated. That was in 1996. We never got divorced, though. At first, I couldn’t afford it, and when I could, the children were grown, and then, what’s the point? I will never get married again. (And I am with someone else.)
What percentage of marriages end in divorce? And how many are miserable? Added together, this adds up to way over 50%. So — instead of letting MORE marry, I say, let none marry. Marriage is not the bedrock of American society. Trust me — between MY experience and the hundreds of others I have seen, it would be better off for all if there was no marriage.
Little girls should aspire to — and dream of — their professions, not a stupid wedding. That is fluff
I feel the same about marriage after a marriage that wasn’t anything remotely resembling a fairy tale. But there are those who want to be married and those who are very happy being married. I don’t begrudge them that. There are people who want to be test pilots even though I can’t imagine doing something like that. As long as they don’t insist that I get married or insist that gays not get married, it’s all good.
Over here in the UK we have ‘civil partnerships’ and the general consensus is “it’s just a word… it doesn’t matter” to which I answer:
“in that case, would it be OK if all white people were able to get ‘citizenship’ whereas non-whites could only get ‘domestic settlement’… after all, they’re just words”