Is there anything important at stake in the debate over whether to recognize gay relationships as marriages or as civil unions? I asked that question to a group of gay friends not long ago. Out of 10 people, no one could come up with a very good answer. A few said that as long as the law gave gay couples equivalent legal rights the difference between marriages and civil unions was "semantic." The implication was that the difference is trivial. Since increasing numbers of Americans seem to view civil unions as an acceptable compromise between nothing and full-fledged gay marriage, what's the big deal?
Recognizing gay marriage, as Massachusetts now does, means conferring on gay couples all of the rights, benefits, and responsibilities conferred on opposite-sex married couples under state law. Beyond these legal matters, however, recognizing gay marriage offers the promise of something at least as important. That is the social approval and support that come with marriage. Marriage has a long history; it is woven into our cultural fabric. It comes with common expectations and a common language that couples and their families and friends readily recognize.
As practiced in Vermont, civil unions confer on gay couples all of the rights, benefits, and responsibilities conferred on opposite-sex married couples under state law. What civil unions cannot offer is the social approval and support that come with marriage. Civil unions have no history; they are not woven into the fabric of our culture. There are no common expectations or language that come with them. To family and friends, a civil union cannot be asserted; it must be explained. Even after the explanation, a civil union is unlikely to be regarded as the equivalent of a marriage.
This difference between gay marriage and civil unions cannot be dismissed as a merely semantic one. Words are the way we frame and experience our lives. They reflect and reinforce what we think of others and what others think of us. "Gay" and "faggot" may describe the same sexual orientation but they are miles apart in meaning.
While the difference between "marriage" and "civil union" is nowhere near as large as the difference between "gay" and "faggot," it is large enough to matter. How do we know that? Just consider the numbers of good people who bristle at calling our relationships "marriages" but are willing to call them "civil unions," even as they are willing to give us the same legal rights under either.
Obviously, for these people, something very important is communicated by he word marriage that has nothing to do with legal rights and benefits. For the same reason, something very important is denied a gay couple by calling their relationship a "civil union" rather than a "marriage." The culture that denies us the word marriage is a culture that denies us more than a word. It denies us the full measure of respect that accompanies the word and that our relationships are entitled to have.
Consider an analogy. Most of the country once banned interracial marriages. When some states began allowing such marriages, a member of the House of Representatives even proposed amending the Constitution to ban them. As late as 1958, some 94 percent of white Americans still opposed interracial unions. By 1967, when the Supreme Court declared the laws unconstitutional, 16 states still prohibited interracial marriages.
Imagine that someone had proposed the following to interracial couples: "Your relationships have been subjected to terrible discrimination. You deserve all of the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of marriage. We are going to give you these. Your relationships will be identical to marriage under the law, with one exception. We will not call your relationships 'marriages,' as we do the union of same-race couples. Your relationships will be called 'civil unions.' That's the deal: it's civil unions or nothing."
Would interracial couples have taken the deal? I think most would have; it's better than nothing. In fact it's much better than nothing.
But would they have thought, and would their families and friends have thought, that the difference between interracial civil unions and interracial marriages was trivial? The word difference itself would have spoken volumes. It would both reflect continued discrimination and reinforce continued discrimination.
Where equivalent legal standing is otherwise given, the semantic difference between marriage and civil unions could have no purpose except to stigmatize and isolate previously disfavored relationships. The analogy is not perfect, but much the same cold be said about the difference between gay civil unions and gay marriages.
Two qualifications are in order. First, no matter what gay relationships are called, a significant part of the population will not regard them as equal to heterosexual marriages. To that extent, gay marriage will not provide the same degree of social acceptance and support that heterosexual marriages now get. But attitudes are not static. Law has an educative function, and the sooner the law regards gay couples as the full equivalent of married heterosexuals, the sooner people will come to see them as equivalent. Law can help confer legitimacy, just as it can help deny it.
Second, although civil unions have no history and no commonly accepted language or expectations, this too can change. Gay couples in Vermont, and perhaps soon elsewhere, are truly making history with civil unions. The problem is, they are millennia behind marriage.