REVIEW OF WHY MARRIAGE? AND WHY MARRIAGE MATTERS: Liza J. Featherstone

...Chauncey, being a historian rather than an activist, treads more intrepidly into politically sensitive territory. Unlike Wolfson, he discusses disagreements among gays and lesbians over marriage; many lesbians, especially those who came of age in the 1960s and '70s, felt marriage was oppressive to women and did not want to participate in it. Many gay Americans of that generation also spurned marriage as an antiquated bourgeois custom, believing that gay liberation was not only about equality but liberation from conventional strictures. (Several years ago, a New Yorker cartoon featured an urban heterosexual couple expressing sympathy with this view: "So gay people want to get married now. Haven't they suffered enough?")

Chauncey shows us how and why some of these attitudes within the gay community changed and presents moving testimony from couples standing in line to get licenses in Boston and San Francisco, many of whom never realized how much they wanted to get married until the right to do so was within reach.

Chauncey also shows how the institution of marriage has changed over time in ways that have accelerated the push for gay marriage, while also inflaming backlash against it. Interracial marriage is now legal, heterosexual women are no longer expected to give up property rights when they marry, procreation does not define women's destiny and marriage has become a far more voluntary arrangement (since divorce is easier and unmarried cohabitation far more acceptable than in the recent past).

As Chauncey points out, many of the people actively opposing gay marriage are the same ones who have opposed these other changes. Most people now working to stop gay marriage oppose abortion, divorce and sex outside of marriage. They believe, too, in defending traditional gender roles. ...

To Wolfson, "civil unions" relegate gay Americans to second-class citizenship, in part because a civil union is not called a "marriage," and that word has a meaning that everyone in our culture understands. Creating a different set of terminology and rights effectively sets up a kind of Jim Crow of the heart. Wolfson exposes this "compromise" as a morally indefensible one.

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posted by Eve at 9:32 PM | link

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