Marriage etc.
As you’ve undoubtedly heard, California’s Supreme Court has ruled that “Limiting the designation of marriage to a union ‘between a man and a woman’ is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute.” As you undoubtedly know, this pisses a lot of people off. Maybe it pisses you off.
It certainly irks Protect Marriage, a group that hopes to amend California’s constitution to specifically limit the definition of marriage.1 Their proposed amendment:
SECTION 2. Article I, Section 7.5 is added to the California Constitution, to read:
Sec. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
Here’s my proposal: the government needs to get out of the marriage business. Instead, it should recognize a legal partnership, a collective comprised of two consenting adults that the law affords unique abilities (shared ownership, altered taxation, legal status as family, etc.). Such a partnership would carry no romantic relationship or religious meaning. Rather, it would be a legal commitment. Romantically interested adults, widowed sisters who would like to consolidate their finances and legal status, best friends who choose to make a life together—all would be considered equal under the law.
Would you like to be [insert word for religious coupling of two or more people here]? Please do so in the way that your tradition deems appropriate, barring a small number of restrictions (consenting adults only, please). If your organization chooses to discriminate against people in matters that in no way concern the law, cool. But you don’t get to tell anyone who isn’t a voluntary participant in your organization what to do.
A representative from the organization was on NPR today and stated that, in effect, today’s ruling equates discrimination on the basis of sexual preference to discrimination on race or gender, and that this will promote a negative perception of those who are in favor of restricting marriage. OH NO! ↩
This is an interesting take on the marriage issue. There are actually several states out there (I think currently 11?) that have amended their constitutions to expressly recognize marriage between a man and a woman only. (You can check out laws on relationship recognition by state here.) Federal law contains similar language.
Just to clarify, the California Supreme Court actually raised the bar on the level of scrutiny that has traditionally been accorded to discrimination based on sexual preference to the “strict scrutiny” test, a standard that has applied to race in the past, while discrimination based on sexual preference has been accorded the lowest level of review (in gender discrimination cases, an intermediate level of review is applied, so California’s ruling basically ratcheted up the standard by two notches, from the lowest to the highest, a bold, and potentially harmful, move):
Writing for the California high court, Chief Justice Ronald M. George first found that the exclusion of gays from marriage violated their fundamental right to marry, thereby drawing strict scrutiny from the court. This meant that the state would have to produce a compelling reason to bar gays from what the court deemed “the most socially productive and individually fulfilling relationship that one can enjoy in the course of a lifetime.” In a crucial move, Chief Justice George rejected the state’s argument that tradition was such a reason. Allowing tradition to thus entrench itself, he said, would have allowed for laws barring interracial couples. And, as he noted, the California Supreme Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage in 1948, almost two decades before the U.S. Supreme Court did in Loving v. Virginia.
For me, the issue has always boiled down to what marriage “means,” and being somewhat of a romantic, I have always thought, or hoped, that it was the culmination of a natural progression between two people who carried a deep and profound love for one another. But realistically, it means a lot of different things to different people: love, stability, a live-in sex partner, health insurance and other benefits, citizenship, another parent, an arranged marriage, etc. In our culture, its meaning has shifted significantly, even over the past fifty years.
I think that those of us who support same-sex marriage flinch at the accusations thrown around by its dissenters (ironically, many of whom support divorce), who suggest that recognizing such a union will destroy the “sanctity — the institution — of marriage.” Who are they to tell anyone what marriage means or should mean?
Yet, the hypocrite in me finds a little discomfort in the above proposal, along with a conflicted understanding that marriage doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, and even more, that the act of marriage itself is merely a contractual relationship between two individuals, perhaps an antiquated form of recognizing a particular relationship. Many of the relationships suggested above can be legally created (though typically not transferring health coverage).
Is the point that marriage should be a complete free-for-all? (e.g. should I be able to marry my brother, for instance, since he is moving to London through his employer and I’d like to go with him and have health benefits?) I guess I feel a little uncomfortable with the thought of this. For one, because it feels like it belittles what gays have fought so arduously for — a social recognition of their ability to love someone of the same sex, as heterosexuals do.