Originally published in the Windy City Times on March 12, 1998.
IT IS LIKE WAITING FOR THE OTHER SHOE to drop. At some point in the near future, either the Hawaii Supreme Court or some other court is almost surely going to rule that the state must recognize same-sex marriages.
The effect is going to be remarkable.
For one thing, conservative religious and political groups are going to go absolutely berserk. You cannot imagine how much you are going to hear about how the United States has turned into Sodom, how Satan has seized control of the country, how that makes the second coming of Christ imminent, and how all this proves that the world is going to end at the turn of the Millennium.
Evangelical Protestants, the Catholic hierarchy, and their conservative political allies are going to put almost irresistible pressure on state legislatures to bar recognition of gay marriages performed in other states. Roughly half the states (26) have already enacted such prohibitions, but pressure will now mount in the other states since the issue will no longer be merely theoretical. Few of our state advocacy groups have the resources to resist this pressure, so we will probably lose in more than half those states.
But put aside the legal and political issues. How is gay marriage going to affect us? The two most important results will be how it affects heterosexuals' view of us and how it affects our view of ourselves.
For one thing, it is going to feel very strange. For the first time in your life you are going to actually be able to consider marrying someone you love, with all the attendant duties, obligations, and considerable cultural freight that the institution of marriage brings with it. We have had no practice in thinking about that even as a possibility.
Gays and lesbians who are already coupled will have to think through whether their commitment to each other extends as far as the more complicated and difficult-to-disentangle structure of marriage.
Some couples will hasten to marry immediately, eager to take advantage of the new opportunity and sure that their commitment to each other can optimally be expressed within the legal and cultural structure of marriage. Very likely you know at least one gay couple who is making plans to fly to Hawaii to marry within a month of the decision. Even if they live in a state that bars gay marriage they will do it to "make it legal" as much as possible.
Other couples may choose to marry hoping that legal structure will solidify an unstable or uncertain relationship. But many of those will find, as heterosexual couples have found for centuries, that marriage is not a panacea, that it does not improve the other person (in fact, often the opposite), and that you get out of marriage just about what you put into it.
Yet other couples may feel that their relationship is fine the way it is and decide not to marry. But that in itself will look like a statement about the relationship since they are not taking the newly available further step. That is, relationships that previously looked and felt fully "committed" now if not legalized may seem "not fully committed," even "keeping our options open" without any inherent change in the relationship. Family and friends will wonder if the couple really is committed -- even if the couple really is. That may be disconcerting for some couples.
Those who are single will likely begin to notice mild, subtle encouragement by friends, relatives and other gay couples to "settle down," "tie the knot" and so forth, when marriage becomes available, just as single heterosexuals feel those pressures. On the whole they are harmless and well-meaning. Every culture or society, after all, tends to develop favored forms of behavior, certain ways they expect most people to behave, forms that are believed to conduce to the social benefit.
No doubt, partnerships stabilize gay people's lives somewhat and gay marriage probably will solidify gay partnerships somewhat more, even for those that are not monogamous-perhaps especially those that are not monogamous. The legal bond may help them over rough spots in the relationship and guarantee a kind of rootedness no matter their occasional deviations. So there is a kind of tacit rationale for the social pressures, although it is prudent to remember that such pressures usually aim at social stability and predictability rather than individual happiness.
It will certainly be easy enough to resist that mild pressure. But even so, for single gays, the fact that you will be able to marry will now linger in the back of your mind when you go home with someone for sex, when you go on a date, when you start "seeing" someone. The fact that you could actually marry this person means you will be asking yourself if you really would want to, and that may subtly encourage many of us to take our casual relationships with other gays a little more seriously. That realization will take a while to develop, though, as gays learn to think and talk about marriage and the role they want it to play in their lives.
In any case, however, I suspect that our new ability to marry, even if in just a few states, will inevitably encourage most heterosexual people to take us, our lives, and our partnerships more seriously. If the law stipulates that our partnerships are the legal equivalent of theirs, that will be considerable encouragement for them to begin thinking of us and our lives as equal to them and their lives. Far more than non-discrimination laws, that is pretty much exactly what our long-sought goal of social equality consists of.
But there is more to it than that. Many heterosexuals have in the back of their minds, and some are still brought up to believe, the notion that a marriage certificate basically says, "Sex is OK now." So when gay men start getting marriage certificates, people are going to see the law as asserting not only the equality of our relationships, but an equal status and dignity for our sexual behavior. And that, for many people will be a remarkable and startling thought.
Religious conservatives, of course, will loathe it, because they have known all along that the bottom line of their hostility to gays is our sexual behavior. They feel that if you cannot maintain that homosexual acts are wrong, then you cannot claim that anything at all is wrong, "everything is permitted," and moral chaos will reign. That is why gay marriage upsets them so, why they will fight it with every resource they have.
They are wrong, of course, but we must win to show them that.