ALTAR EGO: Michael Bronski
 
...But even though winning Goodridge v. Department of Public Health--and defeating various challenges to it so far--has redeemed the American Way of Life for many gay men and lesbians, some queer political activists are raising questions about the limits and long-term worth of same-sex marriage. It's not that these activists don't believe that same-sex couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples. Rather, the vital questions they pose are, "What might we lose, and who might be harmed by same-sex marriage?"

Such questions stem from a longstanding division among queer activists dating back to the '60s. One side has stood firmly for gaining equal rights, while the other, "liberationist" side has celebrated a politics of difference, arguing that gay culture has its own ethos from which straight people could learn a thing or two about justice and love. Not surprisingly, this debate has resurfaced in what many in the gay community are calling "the great divide" over the fight for same-sex marriage.

What's interesting this time around, however, is that alongside the well-worn plea for gay cultural liberation is emerging a critique of gay marriage based on class rather than culture. Indeed, the push to legalize same-sex marriage has been so rushed and emotionally heady--no one, not even the litigators who fought so hard for it, thought we'd win anytime soon--that complicated legal issues with particular implications for the working poor and people of color were quite simply ignored. Couple that with the desire among many gay and lesbian people to be "normal," and the result has been that a lot of thinking has taken place inside the box--and a very small box, at that.

WHAT'S NOW called the great divide over same-sex marriage was anticipated by lesbian legal theorist and activist Paula Ettelbrick in her fall 1989 article "Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?", published in Out/Look: National Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, when she wrote that "marriage defines certain relationships as more valid than all others." These days, a running joke among gay men and lesbians is that, with marriage as an option, parents are hounding them to the altar just as avidly as they do their heterosexual siblings. Ettelbrick went on to say that the creation of this new, "more valid" relationship for gay people "runs contrary to [one of] the primary goals of the gay and lesbian movement: ... the validation of many forms of relationships." In the absence of legal civil marriage, lesbians and gay men gleefully invented their own panoply of romantic and household configurations that worked--at least as well, if not better in many instances, than the traditional mom and dad and kids at home.

But more-recent critics of same-sex marriage are not simply worried that the antic good old days of lesbian communes and gay-male extended families of [censored!--Eve] buddies (which, of course, still exist) will become endangered. In a cogent and important article, "Speak Now: Progressive Considerations on the Advent of Civil Marriage for Same-Sex Couples," just published in the Boston College Law Review, lawyers Kara S. Suffredini and Madeleine V. Findley argue persuasively that while same-sex marriage will provide advantages to some people--those with incomes that are middle class or higher--it could have deleterious effects on other groups. Suffredini and Findley examine a myriad of commonly accepted myths about the benefits of same-sex marriage and discover that, often, they deliver far less than they promise, especially if you are poor.

The most obvious example, perhaps, concerns health care. One of the most compelling arguments same-sex-marriage advocates make is that civil marriage will give partners, and any children involved, access to one partner’s health insurance. Yet as Suffredini and Findley point out, this is true only if one partner has health-care benefits--and most people working low-paying, hourly jobs do not.

But there are more overt economic drawbacks to being poor and getting married, the authors argue, which gay men and lesbians from the lower classes will have to suffer if they wed. For example, the aptly named "marriage penalty," which kicks in when a married couple who both work and earn similar incomes end up paying more in taxes than if they were single, tends to affect same-sex couples more egregiously than different-sex couples. That’s because the tax laws assume the traditional arrangement in which one spouse (usually the husband) will be the primary wage earner and that the ancillary wage earner will make considerably less. In that case, a married couple’s joint tax rate equals out; but when incomes are comparable, as is more often the case with gay and lesbian couples, they end up paying more taxes. ...

A more draconian "marriage penalty"--and one that affects women on the lowest level of the economic scale--results from the Bush administration’s so-called welfare-reform policy, designed to discourage out-of-wedlock births. ...All of this is intended to induce--or coerce--poor women to get married. But for many low-income households, getting hitched may also mean losing the earned-income tax credit that many single mothers depend on, thus putting them in an even more vulnerable economic position. So the idea that marriage helps solve the economic problems of poor women--heterosexual or lesbian--is simply myth.
 
The situation worsens when you consider some of the social-policy changes engendered by same-sex marriage. Over the past 15 years, various private companies and some municipalities have instituted domestic-partnership (DP) programs for gay couples who do not have the right to marry, which granted an array of economic and health-care benefits to the unmarried domestic partners of their employees. This alternative system of benefit sharing was, for the most part, an effort to extend fairness to gay and lesbian people. But since the advent of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, both private and public-sector DP programs in the state have undergone erosion. Because they were instituted out of a sense of fairness to gay men and lesbians, and not to promote viable economic and ethical alternatives to traditional marriage, it makes perfect sense (to some) that they will disappear as legal civil marriage becomes available across the country. The result is that marriage will not be simply a choice for some gay people, but compulsory if the couple needs any of these benefits, even if they are not inclined to marry.
 
But the other reality is that DP programs--where and when they exist--are not only a boon to gay couples who participate in them, but mark a shift toward recognizing alternatives to traditional marriage. Realistically, many, many GLBT relationships, for a wide variety of reasons, do not fit the traditional-marriage template--and yet they need health care and other benefits, too. Many choose to form what Suffredini and Findley call "diverse forms of partnership and households." They cite the example of a lesbian co-parenting couple who wish to include the child’s biological father in their family configuration. But there are many others as well: a gay male couple caring for a former partner of one of its members who is ill from AIDS, say, or a gay or lesbian couple who takes on the care of an aged parent. (Who cares if these examples play into that anti-gay right-wing stereotype--gay or lesbian people who form ethical and sustained romantic relationships with more then two people?) ...

THERE IS NOTHING wrong with fighting for same-sex marriage as long as it is part of a larger package, a larger scheme in which all the myriad issues affecting GLBT families are addressed. ... 

Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom To Marry, and one of the prime movers in the struggle for marriage equality, says that although he has not yet read Suffredini and Findley’s article, he is wary of their arguments: "The denial of marriage harms all gay people but falls harshest on people of lesser means, immigrants, people who are ill, children, and in general people who are vulnerable. They need a safety net, however imperfectly our society accords these things through marriage," he says. "Although I believe marriage should not be the only way that people should access protections--I believe in universal health care--it is an important way that people can access them. Many of these protections--Social Security, immigration regulations, qualifying for public assistance--cannot be replaced by private agreement or with the help of an expensive lawyer, which many people cannot do. Marriage gives that protection with the words 'I do.' It is a choice and an option that the vast majority of people who have it, exercise."
 
Further, Wolfson thinks that, like it or not, no matter how one feels about marriage equality, this is the fight we are having now, and it is essentially about the larger place of gay people in America. ... 

Same-sex-marriage advocates have argued that marriage is nothing more than a personal choice, that what gay people were denied is the "freedom to marry." But marriage--or any legal or social contact [sic, possibly "contract"?--Eve]--never concerns only one or two people. It concerns the entire fabric of the society in which they live. ... The fight should not simply be for same-sex marriage equality, but for reforming marriage laws to make them equitable to meet the needs of all families.
 
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