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"Gay marriage is a step back in the march towards freedom."

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Counterpunch
Weekend Edition
March 20 / 21, 2004

Civil Unions for All!
Gay Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
By: Alexander Cockburn

I'm for anything that terrifies Democrats, outrages Republicans, upsets the applecart. But exultation about the gay marriages cemented in San Francisco, counties in Oregon and New Mexico and some cities in New York is misplaced.

Why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about. Assimilation is not liberation, and the invocation of "equality" as the great attainment of these gay marriages should be challenged. Peter Tatchell, the British gay leader, put it well a couple of years ago: "Equality is a good start, but it is not sufficient. Equality for queers inevitably means equal rights on straight terms, since they are the ones who dominate and determine the existing legal framework. We conform -- albeit equally -- with their screwed up system. That is not liberation. It is capitulation."

So the good news, as that excellent paper, Ultra Violet (newsletter of LAGAI--Queer Insurrection) recently put it, is not that 400 gay couples are now legally married in San Francisco but that 69,201 in the city (Ultra Violet's number) are still living in sin.

Marriage diverts us from the path of necessary reform. Civil union, today lawful only in Vermont, is what makes sense as a national cause. Unmarried couples, straight or gay, need to be able to secure joint property, make safe wills, be able to have hassle-free hospital visits and so forth. But issues of hospitals visits or health care should have nothing to do with marriage, and marriage as a rite should have nothing to do with legal rights. Separate "marriage" from legal recognition of a bond, of a kinship.

There's a fork in the road for progressives. One path is sameness, expanding a troubled institution to same sexers. But that path detours the real problems of relationships today and their official recognition. As a generation of feminists and the divorce rate attest, marriage is in sore trouble, well beyond powers of recuperation offered in Bush's proposed constitutional amendment which would be a touching souvenir of a world long gone. Why are prenuptial agreements become common among people of moderate income? Prenups challenge the one-size-fits-all straitjacket of marriage, as do other important arrangements devised in recent years in response to changing anthropological and moral circumstance: coparent adoptions, adoptions by single people, many varieties of public and private domestic partnerships, civil unions. Expand and strengthen the options. Get religion out of the law.

Civil union across the country would help to level a playing field that's got increasingly uneven across the past generation. In some corporations gay couples have health benefits that unmarried straight couples don't. Contrary to endless rants about the "marriage penalty" in the federal tax code, a larger number of people enjoy a marriage bonus, as the House Ways and Means Committee determined in 1999.

Unmarried workers may lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year in employee benefits compensation. For example, as the Unmarried America website points out, "Most states will allow workers to collect unemployment compensation if they quit a job to move to a new area when their spouse is relocated by his or her company. But state laws usually will not give these benefits to a worker who quits to relocate with his or her domestic partner."

There are so many tricky questions, particularly now that morals and the surgeon's knife have deepened their own relationship. What happens, when someone who's had a sex change, who is already receiving domestic partner benefits at work for his male partner, goes through sex reassignment surgery and acquires the physical impedimenta of the opposite sex? Should the couple lose their bennies until they get legally hitched?

None of this should have anything to do with various rites of marriage such as a hippy New Age union cemented waist deep in a river with solemn invocation of the winds and other natural forces, or a white wedding in a high Episcopal church.

"The pursuit of marriage in the name of equality", says Bill Dobbs, radical gay organizer, "shows how the gay imagination is shrivelling." Judith Butler, professor at UC Berkeley, exhibited kindred disquiet in a quote she gave the New York Times last week. "It's very hard to speak freely right now, but many gay people are uncomfortable with all this, because they feel their sense of an alternative movement is dying. Sexual politics was supposed to be about finding alternatives to marriage."

As Jim Eigo, a writer and activist whose thinking was very influential in the early days of ACT UP put it a while back, what's the use of being queer if you can't be different? "Why are current mainstream gay organizations working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make some queers less equal than others? Under its terms, gays who are willing to mimic heterosexual relations and enter into a legally-enforced lifetime sexual bond with one other person will be granted special benefits and status to be withheld from those who refuse such domestication...Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right of kings. At this juncture in history, wouldn't it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?"

And why marriage to just one person? Why this endless replication of the Noah's Ark principle?

For me the cheering political lesson is that Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco felt the hot breath of a challenge from his left (in the form of his Green opponent Matt Gonzalez) and felt impelled to radical action to consolidate his victory. That's good, because it shows the value of independent radical challenges, but that's where my cheers stops. Gay marriage is a step back in the march towards freedom. Civil unions for all!

I know that gay marriage has been discussed before, however I think that this article brings up some good points that haven't been discussed before -- or at least, haven't been specifically presented as a basis for abolishing gay marriage (and straight-marriage) from federal law. This is a very Libertarian-esque response to what some are falsely proclaiming as a move forward, in the cases of the San Francisco and New York "illegal marriages."

Without even reading the article, I can state definitively that you are an imbecile. Wait, is that how you spell it?

Just kidding, you strapping buck, you.

In all seriousness, I think the idea that you put forth (i.e., that all marriages be remade into civil unions with regard to legal status and making marriage a simply religious thing) is the key. Unrealistic, perhaps, but certainly better than the three recent gay marriages in NYC that weren't even legal. The whole thing is engineered by the sinister Bush crew to pick a fight for the election.

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Originally posted by Kadath
Just kidding, you strapping buck, you.

:icare::icare::icare::icare::icare:

I don't know about the "strapping buck" thing, :) but I certainly agree.

Give 'em all civil unions and let's be done with this friviolous crap and move on to the more important things like giving Congressional raises and issuing inconsequential congressional resolutions.

edit:

Agree with the article, not the strapping buck thing....aww crap!

I think its funny that a man with the last name Cockburn wrote an article about gays and gay marriage.

IMHO the whole thing should be done in a storefront legal shop in Guadalajara

Wow, I find it hard to believe that no one here is concerned with the idea that their marriage would be "degraded" to a "civil union" if this guy were to have his way.

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Originally posted by seretogis
Wow, I find it hard to believe that no one here is concerned with the idea that their marriage would be "degraded" to a "civil union" if this guy were to have his way.

Maybe we all just had better things to do on a saturday night. :)

I don't get how marriage is tied up in the church. Anyone can go to a courthouse and get married. I'm a $20 reverend in the Universal Life Church and I have performed six weddings in Ohio, Washington, California, and Utah.

So, I fail to understand the original point. Marriage on a federal and state level is *not* a religious institution, it's simply something that entitles you to certain governmental rights.

im not gay, but im not againt it in anyway, but i feel this whole banning gay marriage is wrong. if two people are happy, its their free right to be married. right?

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Originally posted by HarmlessRabbit
Maybe we all just had better things to do on a saturday night. :)

I don't get how marriage is tied up in the church. Anyone can go to a courthouse and get married. I'm a $20 reverend in the Universal Life Church and I have performed six weddings in Ohio, Washington, California, and Utah.

So, I fail to understand the original point. Marriage on a federal and state level is *not* a religious institution, it's simply something that entitles you to certain governmental rights.

I don't get how marriage is tied up in the state. I have no problems with the state declaring my union a "civil union." That doesn't "downgrade" my marriage, which was performed by a pastor, to anything.

If only for the sake of unifying the nation rather than polarizing it, I'd rather that marriage was not a civil institution. That is, the Christian majority is going to continue believing marriage is a religious institution, regardless. So we might as well take it out of the state's pervue.

All I can say is that since the Government can't distinguish between the term "marriage" as being a government term or a religious term...maybe all references to marriage should be abolished from government because of the ties with church and religion. Maybe "civil union" is the proper term.

I'm all for the joining of two people in a union. Once I signed that marriage certificate that meant I was agreeing to be classified as married with the government, now as for as the ceremony...I signed another certificate saying I was married in the catholic church. Unfortunately, many narrow-minded people out there can't understand or even see the difference in the two. The first I spoke of allows me and my wife to share health insurance, make decisions for each other (in the event of being unable to do so), file taxes as a joint couple, and be responsible for each other financially. The latter just means that in the eyes of the church, we are married.

I just wish people out there could understand that our constitution specifically calls for a separation of church and state so that we wouldn't have any official "government" sponsored religion. No matter how many of us are Christians, we need to understand that we cannot use the gov't to force others into the morals and values our beliefs preach.

I agree this is all silly. If marrage is a religious thing, then how is it that 2 atheists can go get married at the courthouse? I assume it started as a religious event, that the government gave special benefits to as to make it more popular and promote families, or something like that. But I think that was a mistake, in my opinion it makes it look like the govt' endorses one religion (ie one that opposes gay marriage) and not another (ie one that does not oppose gay marriage). I wouldn't mind one bit calling my marriage a civil union, won't make the love I feel for my wife mean anything else, or lessen it a single degree.

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Originally posted by TheKak
I agree this is all silly. If marrage is a religious thing, then how is it that 2 atheists can go get married at the courthouse? I assume it started as a religious event, that the government gave special benefits to as to make it more popular and promote families, or something like that. But I think that was a mistake, in my opinion it makes it look like the govt' endorses one religion (ie one that opposes gay marriage) and not another (ie one that does not oppose gay marriage). I wouldn't mind one bit calling my marriage a civil union, won't make the love I feel for my wife mean anything else, or lessen it a single degree.

Pretty much covers it....this administration is extremely christian and they are trying to put the doctrine into place as a means of gonerning the population. I suppose this would be acceptable if we were all christians, but we are not.
Too bad the constitution has lost the wieght it once had.

When my wife and I were "married" we did so without a church and without a state.

We stood up in front of about 100 of our firends and family and each said why we were there and committed ourselves to each other.

I don't believe in God so it would have been hypocitical to take a vow before a god I don't believe in.

I also felt that the state had no business licensing me to be married.

That said, we still felt a ceremony was important as it is a momentous occasion when two people decide to committ themselves to each other. To grow old together and have children...

Legally we are common law. To each other, we are married.

the point of the article is not that marrage is religious or state... it is too close to define, what he wants is a clear definition between a civil union(called a marriage) and a religious union(called a marriage)... i think he has a very good point... im not at all for or against gay marriage... its not my battle, however i do think that non married couples should be able to have the same benifits as married ones wether the couple is hetero, homo or some other crazy sexual thing i havnt even heard of... but once you do that, when is a couple intitled to such a union, and how would one disolve such a thing?

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"Why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about."

Amen! (Ironic choice of word duly noted.)

I've always said that the real problem is that the government is trying to regulate what is essentially a religious institution. The religous aspect and the civil aspects of marriage need to be separated.

And I think it's all fine and good to talk about "capitulation" and assimilation in terms of gays wanting to be part of what is essentially a hetero-defined culture, but people want what they want. It's a bit fascistic to demand that just because someone is a homosexual they must conform to some radical counter-cultural expectation of how they should behave.

All successful "alternative" movements are eventually assimilated by the dominant culture, and in the process they shift and redefine the dominant culture while shedding some of their own more radical elements. Something new shows up to take its place, and the process begins again. It's the old "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" process. You can't expect a small population to singlehandedly redefine cultural norms simply by existing. Cultural change is incremental and demands compromises on both sides. If the path to acceptance of homosexuality is paved with bourgeois nesting instincts, so be it.

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The FBI, pretending to be tecoyah, wrote:
All I can say is that since the Government can't distinguish between the term "marriage" as being a government term or a religious term...maybe all references to marriage should be abolished from government because of the ties with church and religion. Maybe "civil union" is the proper term.

If a person can't distinguish between the legal term "marriage" and being married in their religion, maybe they should get an education. =p~

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Lurkette wrote:
I've always said that the real problem is that the government is trying to regulate what is essentially a religious institution. The religous aspect and the civil aspects of marriage need to be separated.

Marriage is essentially a social institution, a culturally common way of two people allying and becoming almost one legal 'person'.

The religious aspect of marriage is something the government should stay out of, I agree. Possibly they should give the power to legally marry people out to particular people, but what exact religious significance marriage has is something government should make no law about.

However, changing piles and piles of legal mumbo-jumbo, replacing "marriage" with "civil union" in laws, making sure that "civil union" has the same common-law status, and all that, just because some numbnut idiots don't understand they don't have the right to own a word?

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"thesis-antithesis-synthesis"

You forgot Parenthesis, and Paralysis. ;-)

How dare the F.B.I. use my name in vain.......I am innocent I tell you, INNOCENT!

id rather have this "civil union" stuff than marriage
but thats not going to happen right now, so i see gay marriage as a step towards that
it gets everyone equal, on the same level

plus it pisses off the church
so theyll want to take marriage away from the state