Beyond Marriage
Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and economically privileged above all others. While we honor those for whom marriage is the most meaningful personal – for some, also a deeply spiritual – choice, we believe that many other kinds of kinship relationship, households, and families must also be accorded recognition.
As a single by choice, I feel fully respected by such a statement, unlike some of the pro-marriage arguments, which seem to suggest that somehow marriage is the only valid form of relating. This includes, sadly, some of the claims in the Center for Inquiry’s position paper on same-sex marriage, such as the suggestion that marriage is the best way for “promoting stable relationships.” This is denying that there are many stable relationships outside of marriage! As Polikoff argues, marriage is the wrong policy for many, possibly all, societal problems. For example, marriage does not get children out of poverty. Education does. Also, many feminists still think marriage is ultimately a patriarchal institution, especially given its history. We should not be forced to marry simply to obtain certain rights and benefits, such as the right to visit a friend in the hospital or to ensure that our estate goes to a person who was important in our lives or to get health care coverage. Marriage is the wrong solution.
Right-wing strategists do not merely oppose same-sex marriage as a stand-alone issue. The entire legal framework of civil rights for all people is under assault by the Right, coded not only in terms of sexuality, but also in terms of race, gender, class, and citizenship status. The Right’s anti-LGBT position is only a small part of a much broader conservative agenda of coercive, patriarchal marriage promotion that plays out in any number of civic arenas in a variety of ways – all of which disproportionately impact poor, immigrant, and people-of-color communities. The purpose is not only to enforce narrow, heterosexist definitions of marriage and coerce conformity, but also to slash to the bone governmental funding for a wide array of family programs, including childcare, healthcare and reproductive services, and nutrition, and transfer responsibility for financial survival to families themselves.
Slowly but surely, the Wrong is dismantling benefits that LGBT activists hope to secure through same-sex marriage. Another reason, why marriage is the wrong solution.
So many of us long for communities in which there is systemic affirmation, valuing, and nurturing of difference, and in which conformity to a narrow and restricting vision is never demanded as the price of admission to caring civil society. Our vision is the creation of communities in which we are encouraged to explore the widest range of non-exploitive, non-abusive possibilities in love, gender, desire and sex – and in the creation of new forms of constructed families without fear that this searching will potentially forfeit for us our right to be honored and valued within our communities and in the wider world.
Oh, this is just beautiful! An emphasis on the nuclear family, and matrimania in particular, has undermined communities because the relationship to one person has been elevated above all other relationships. By moving beyond marriage, we can counteract this dangerous trend and build inclusive communities.
The Principles at the Heart of Our Vision
We, the undersigned, suggest that strategies rooted in the following principles are urgently needed:
- Recognition and respect for our chosen relationships, in their many forms
- Legal recognition for a wide range of relationships, households, and families, and for the children in all of those households and families, including same-sex marriage, domestic partner benefits, second-parent adoptions, and others
- The means to care for one another and those we love
- The separation of benefits and recognition from marital status, citizenship status, and the requirement that “legitimate” relationships be conjugal
- Separation of church and state in all matters, including regulation and recognition of relationships, households, and families
- Access for all to vital government support programs, including but not limited to: affordable and adequate health care, affordable housing, a secure and enhanced Social Security system, genuine disaster recovery assistance, welfare for the poor
- Freedom from a narrow definition of our sexual lives and gender choices, identities, and expression
- Recognition of interdependence as a civic principle and practical affirmation of the importance of joining with others who also face opposition to their household and family compositions, including old people, immigrant communities, single parents, battered women, prisoners and former prisoners, people with disabilities, and poor people
- We must ensure that our strategies do not help create or strengthen the legal framework for gutting domestic partnerships (LGBT and heterosexual) for those who prefer this or another option to marriage, reciprocal beneficiary agreements, and more. Our movement strategies must never secure privilege for some while at the same time foreclosing options for many. Our strategies should expand the current terms of debate, not reinforce them.
I have modified the last two points slightly to broaden them beyond the specific LGBT focus of the Statement, which is intended for “LGBT and allied activists.” I think they apply just as much to organizations such as the Center for Inquiry, for example, which gives some lip-service to other forms of relationship (p. 27-8), the bulk of its Position Paper excludes non-marital relationships.
It is clear that moving beyond marriage does not undermine the right to marriage for same-sex and different-sex couples. Instead it calls for a disentangling of that right from the legal benefits that come with marriage that are often not addressing the underlying societal issues.
At a time when the conservative movement is generating an agenda of fear, retrenchment, and opposition to the very idea of a caring society, we need to claim the deepest possibilities for interdependent social relationships and human expression. We must dare to dream the world that we need, the world that has room for us all, even as we also do the painstaking work of crafting the practical strategies that will address the realities of our daily lives. […] Now, more than ever, is the time to continue to find new ways of defending all our families, and to fight to make same-sex marriage just one option on a menu of choices that people have about the way they construct their lives.
This is such an encouraging vision! Too bad it seems to get lost in the way too loud pro-marriage rhetoric that sees marriage as the panacea it is not.
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I think you are arguing, essentially: The “problem of unwed mothers among blacks and Hispanics” is the problem and the solution is for them to get married. That not only defines the problem incorrectly (it’s poverty) and – possibly as a consequence – prescribes the wrong solution. And poverty is a societal problem in so far as society might want to support less advantaged people. I realize that’s sometimes a rather novel concept in the U.S. but, to me at least, it’s one of the essential functions of society: to provide safety nets.
Linking poverty with the absence of marriage is a tactic used by the (Religious) Wrong. And that this myth has pervaded our public discourse, as indicative by your arguments and Obama’s speech, is another example of their influence. Yet, it is not supported by evidence. The Economic Policy Institute found: “An educational upgrading strategy would have more of a poverty-reducing impact than one focused on changing family structure.” The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found:
Of course, educating kids (or adults) better costs money (we seem to prefer spending that money on prisoners: $22,650 per inmate vs. $8,984 per pupil). Marriage is a cheaper “solution” because it shifts society’s burden onto the individual. Yet, all the dollars we’re spending on pushing marriage as a “solution” do not show results. As Nancy Polikoff puts it more eloquently (77):
And those “elites” you refer to distinguish themselves from the masses by better education… So does Obama – maybe that’s why he’s not AWOL. Claiming that marriage or more father involvement will solve any of these problems is, frankly, misguided.
[I’m moving this comment from your earlier commentary on marriage]
I think your response illustrates the divide between elites and the masses, particularly masses of color. For those with the benefits of superior nature and nurture then the freedom to do as one wishes can be exercised properly. I remember the Murphy Brown brouhaha. But Murphy Brown and all those single moms in Sweden and Germany and other western countries can expect that their environments won’t undermine the well being of the children. In the US we have an increasingly serious societal problem of unwed mothers among blacks and Hispanics.
It’s also worth drawing the distinction between matrimony and setting up a dual parent household. They are not the same. Being pro family is not the same as pro marriage.
Did you read any news articles on the father’s day sermon that Obama gave today in the black church, reminiscent of the Bill Cosby pronouncements? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/us/politics/15cnd-obama.html?hp . When I made my previous comment I had not seen this report.
While I support the Cosby/Obama argument I remain very pessimistic that even if some deadbeat fathers were shamed back into helping to raise–support–their kids we’d achieve solutions to what you call societal problems. Would that the pathology that pervades hip hop culture could be reversed. More education, more resources, just won’t do it.