The heart of the NY Times editorial, Why I Now Support Gay Marriage , is, for me, the sentences, “And as I talked to gays and lesbians and heard their stories of pain, discrimination and love, my platitudes about civil unions began to ring hollow. I have struggled to find the solution that best serves the common good.”
I’ve heard many folks in California look at the recent Prop 8 decision and say that it just defines the word marriage as “opposite marriage” and that California domestic partnerships offer the same rights. Actually, the State Supreme Court, in the In re Marriage Cases ruling in May 2008, recognizes that there are actually nine legal differences. Those are:
9 Legal Differences
- Residency requirement for domestic partners
- Minors can marry
- Different filing procedures; marriage requires solemnization
- No confidential domestic partnership
- Terminating marriage requires a judge’s ruling
- Terminating a marriage requires residency
- Domestic partners ineligible for CalPERSlong-term care insurance program
- Property tax exemption for spouse of deceased veteran
- Putative spouse doctrine is not putative domestic partner doctrine
You can read about these rights in two summaries here [PDF] and here. I’m thankful to Joe Decker for pointing these and many other issues out as he has tracked the California issues since before the Prop 8 vote.
There is something else though, and that’s the power of the very word marriage. There are the civil and legal privileges associated with the condition it represents; the social privilege, uncodified and “invisible,” is incredibly powerful. Right after the Prop 8 decision, someone proposed that she would no longer recognize heterosexual marriages – a form of social, not civil, disobedience, if you will. To listen to the reactions expressed against simply refusing to refer to someone’s spouse as spouse, husband, or wife reveals the depth of power and privilege we tie to those terms beyond the legal ramifications. Joe Decker writes specifically and angrily about some of the effects of heterosexual privilege, and Tenacious Snail has written wide ranging stories that address the impact of heterosexual privilege on the rest of us. For the transgender community, the legal situation with respect to the legally inconsistent definitions of what is a “man” and “woman” makes laws that define marriage to be between a man and woman eye-rollingly impossible. (First several comments at this link begin to address the issues.)
I’ve my own encounters with the heterosexual privilege of marriage and how my possession of that privilege has shifted with Christine’s gender transformation. For those who may not know us that well, Christine’s transgendered, and we’ve been married for seventeen years. Like another Quaker couple, grappling with what to do in the face of the injustice of the current state of affairs, Christine and i thought some moments about divorce. I know of heterosexual couples who refuse the marriage privilege in order to stand in solidarity with same sex couples (although they will still be accorded some of the social benefits of heterosexual privilege despite not marrying). The thought of surrendering the power of that word “marriage” in light of Christine’s vulnerabilities, surrendering the ways in which i can protect (or imagine i can protect) her when i am her spouse, was too hard to bear for very long.
I want other couples to have these protections, this power, if they choose. Marriage may not be the right way of living for many individuals and for some couples, and i respect the desire of many to not enter into marriage. I’m proud that there are many Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly Meetings in the Religious Society of Friends that carry the testimony of equality to the point of supporting all couples who wish to enter into marriage.
I don’t know what i can do to help change things in California and the United States: at the least, i can share my understanding of how important justice for same sex couples is.
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