BEYOND GAY MARRIAGE: Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim

... The net effect of the neoliberal economic policies imposed in recent decades has been to push economic and social responsibility away from employers and government and onto private households. The stress on households is intensifying, as people try to do more with less. Care for children and the elderly, for the ill and disabled, has been shifted toward unpaid women at home or to low-paid, privately employed female domestic workers. In this context, household stability becomes a life-and-death issue. On whom do we depend when we can't take care of ourselves? If Social Security shrinks or disappears and your company sheds your pension fund, what happens to you when you can no longer work? In more and more cases, the sole remaining resource is the cooperative, mutually supporting household or kinship network.

But if marriage is the symbolic and legal anchor for households and kinship networks, and marriage is increasingly unstable, how reliable will that source of support be? In the context of these questions, the big flap over marriage in this election begins to make a different kind of sense. If voters are not particularly homophobic, but they are overwhelmingly insecure, then the call to "preserve" marriage might have produced a referendum vote on the desire for household security, with the damage to gay equality caught up in its wake.

Indeed, the campaigns against same-sex marriage spewed rhetoric about the importance of "preserving" marriage, often steering away from overtly anti-gay fearmongering. For example, the Alliance for Marriage's Matt Daniels, who spearheaded the push for the Federal Marriage Amendment, has insisted that the marriage agenda is "not organized around homosexuality. Its mission is to see that more kids are raised in a home with a married mother and father." Daniels contends that "no one in the alliance believes that saving the legal status of marriage as between man and woman will alone be sufficient to stem the tide of family disintegration," but he believes that "if we lose that legal status, we lose the policy tool we need to pursue our broader agenda." What constitutes that "broader agenda" was made clear by another marriage movement leader, Bryce Christensen of Southern Utah University, when he said, "If those initiatives are part of a broader effort to reaffirm lifetime fidelity in marriage, they're worthwhile. If they're isolated--if we don't address cohabitation and casual divorce and deliberate childlessness--then I think they're futile and will be brushed aside."

Capitalizing on their clean sweep of November's marriage amendments, pro-marriage forces have taken Daniels and Christensen to heart. Pointing to high divorce rates in red states, social conservatives have revitalized efforts to repeal no-fault divorce and enact covenant marriage laws in Georgia, Arkansas and other Southern states. While firmly rooted in fundamentalist Christianity, pro-marriage leaders also court more secular voters. For example, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee--who recently remarried his wife in a covenant marriage ceremony before a stadium packed with thousands--touts the financial gains to the state that result from pro-marriage policies. "If you start adding up the various costs--the costs of child-support enforcement, additional costs in human services, how many kids will go onto food stamps--it all adds up," he said. ...

...For gay activists, and indeed for all progressive activists, it would be far more productive to stress support for household diversity--both cultural and economic support, recognition and resources for a changing population as it actually lives--than to focus solely on gay marriage. By treating marriage as one form of household recognition among others, progressives can generate a broad vision of social justice that resonates on many fronts. If we connect this democratization of household recognition with advocacy of material support for caretaking, as well as for good jobs and adequate benefits (like universal healthcare), then what we all have in common will come into sharper relief.

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posted by Eve at 12:36 PM | Link |

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