REVIEW OF WHY MARRIAGE? AND WHY MARRIAGE MATTERS: David J. Garrow

...Beginning in the early 1980s, two tidal waves washed over gay America. The AIDS crisis "led to an unprecedented mobilization of gay men" on behalf of those who fell ill and in protest against government disinterest. About the same time, with "the astonishingly rapid appearance of what everyone soon called the lesbian baby boom," gay people emerged as two-parent families. "The mass experience of child-rearing and death," Chauncey writes, magnified both gays' visibility in society and their painful interactions with officials, who seldom treated unmarried partners with the deference accorded legal spouses.

The greater public presence of gay couples led to increased heterosexual support for gay rights but also to a heightened awareness by these couples that they didn't have "the same recognition, protections, or rights that heterosexual couples took for granted." In the early 1970s, a handful of pioneering gay couples unsuccessfully attempted to secure marriage licenses, but aside from the network of gay congregations that made up the Metropolitan Community Church, no other gay organization pursued marriage prior to the mid-1990s.

Even a decade ago, Chauncey notes, advocating gay marriage was a "distinctly minority position in the lesbian and gay movement," notwithstanding widespread support from "lesbians and gay men at the grassroots level." ...

Likewise, they say, opponents' claim that a male-female household is the optimal setting for child-rearing runs counter to consistent research findings that children raised by same-sex couples experience no detectable disadvantages. What's more, Wolfson writes, "there are at least a million kids being raised by gay and lesbian parents in this country" who are indisputably disadvantaged by their families' inability to secure the legal protections and benefits that automatically accrue to heterosexual parents.

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