Beyond Marriage
I've rambled before about the marriage equality debate. Really, it comes down to--why must anyone be married? Whether it be a bridal registry or Social Security benefits, why is marriage a condition of receiving presents or cash? It's so arbitrary. Well, actually it's not arbitrary, but part of an ideology that values hetero nuclear families over any other kind of caretaking relationship or notion of community.
A few months ago, a group of queer activists and academics issued Beyond Marriage a movement strategy statement that critiqued the mainstream marriage equality movement. While recognizing the material benefits of marriage and the systemic discrimination same-sex couples faced because they were denied the right to marry, the paper made a compelling case for recognizing the many other ways queers and straighty-o's care for each other outside of a marital relationship. It argues that the right-wing attack on the right to marry is part of a strategy to frame marriage as the singular, defining issue for queer communities thus, minimizing opportunities for queers to frame our struggles within a broader rubric of systemic inequities and allow coalition building with other disenfranchised communities.
When that document was released, I thought, "right on," and sent it along to a couple of marriage equality lists. Bad idea. People (most who didn't bother to even read the document) got their panties in such a knot. It was kind of frightening. I don't think I'm all that radical a queer. I mean, I live in a townhouse with my partner, a dog and 2 cats. We drive a four door sedan and I wear my seatbelt all the time. I have 15 kinds of tea in my cupboard. I eat meat and potaters. But that's an aside, read on and tell me if I'm crazy.
Also here's a well-crafted argument along similar lines by Richard Kim's Beyond Marriage article from The Nation. What follows is a bit of the article and an interview he did with Amy Goodman.
In order to counter conservative Republican strategy, one that promises to wreak havoc in elections to come, gay activists and progressives will have to come together to reframe the marriage debate. 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.
An this snippet from an interview he did with Amy Goodman offers some compelling stats.
"AMY GOODMAN: You say Social Security preservation, universal health care, these should be the issues put forward as major issues for the Gay Rights Movement.RICHARD KIM: Absolutely. Amber Hollibaugh who works at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and who has done a lot of work on senior citizens, gay senior citizens, she noted that 70% of gays age alone as they age, meaning marriage is not going to help them to get health care. Marriage isn’t going to help them have retirement benefits. If you look at what's happened to -- in this sort of neoliberal economy in the past 20 years, many of the ways that people support dependency have shrunk. Pensions have shrunk. Forty-five million Americans lack health care. We know all this, right? What that has meant then is that the family has had to pick up a lot of that slack. So, this is another way where the gay marriage question itself opens into a larger conversation about how central marriage is to dependency and how we can reform dependency laws, Social Security, for example, to include families that are not married families.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by household diversity?
RICHARD KIM: What I mean is if you look at marriage over the past 50 years, it's become increasingly optional. It doesn't necessarily regulate child care, for example. 45% of married people have children, 40% of cohabitating couples have children. What has happened is that there's an increasing range of families out there, households, what we sometimes call “odd couple” or “golden girl” situations. Elderly people who live together and cohabitate and really constitute a household. They share resources, they share pension checks. These people, I think, also should be able to hook into the rights that marriage gives, sharing health care rights, sharing joint home ownership rights, things that marriage takes care of in a single swoop. Many other households, the majority
Quoteof households actually in this country, are unmarried households. These households have had to cobble together these rights and benefits. And what we want, what I think the progressive gay movement wants is to use the gay marriage conversation to support equality in law but also to expand and strengthen the resources unmarried couples have to these benefits and rights..."
The full text of the interview is here.
