Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein
Thank you for supporting the right of everybody to get married. While I agree that everybody – including people in the LGBT community – should have this right, I strongly object to the claim that this creates equality for all since the government uses marital status as a way to distribute rights and privileges. This creates a bright red dividing line between the married and the unmarried. In today’s society, this leaves out a large amount of people; people who either by choice or circumstance are living in family arrangements other than marriage, including many singles. Due to the demographic changes over the last few decades, marriage is no longer an appropriate way of deciding who gets governmental support. For example, why should a low income mother be forced to pay for the birth of her daughter if she is unmarried, but the state of Michigan waves this fee if she gets married? She and the father are in a committed relationship whether they are married or not. She needs financial assistance whether she is married or not. Using marital status in instances like this – and there are lots of other examples that the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP) has documented – creates unfairness and unequal treatment. I would be very surprised if you would want to support policies like this. Yet, your support of expanding the 1138 rights & privileges that married folks get to the LGBT community does just that: It continues the unequal treatment of married and unmarried. As your constituent and a member of AtMP’s board, I urge you to support policies that value all families, not just married families.
If I hear anything back, I’ll post it though I expect only to put a bug in some staffer’s head that maybe, maybe we can build on eventually.
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Yeah, I go in posting spurts… I never remember that I can schedule post to spread things out more… 😉
I love the idea of a petition from the AtMP website! I’ll let you know when (if) that happened. In the meantime, you can find out here if your Congressperson has spoken in favor of same-sex marriage.
There are quite a few people in the LGBT community who argue against marriage starting with Paula L. Ettelbrick in the Ettelbrick-Stoddard debate, which might’ve been the first (and only?) public debate on marriage within the LGBT community. There is a statement Beyond Marriage that many such critics have signed. Imo, it’s the religious wrong’s influence and conservative forces within the LGBT community that propelled marriage to The Issue in the LGBT community.
Wow, Rachel — you’ve been a posting Maniac recently! I missed about a week due to an ice-and-snow storm in KY but am just now catching up… Anyway, I love this letter. I wonder if you could get AtMP to post a letter/petition like on its Web site for multiple people to sign? Let us know over at Onely if this happens. We’d love to support this kind of an effort.
Also, the letter’s argument reminds me, too, that many members of the LGBT community do not support same-sex marriage for similar reasons as what you list here: Making marriage legal doesn’t solve the problem of systemic inequality that lies underneath the debate. The whole reason there is a debate is because we can’t “agree” that all people should be treated equally.