Are Civil Unions a Dead End?

Are civil unions, as a political compromise, harmful to the cause of gay marriage? This is a question likely to confront many gay-rights activists in the coming years as a few states move toward legally recognizing gay relationships.

Just this past fall, Connecticut seemed poised to enact a civil-unions law giving gay couples all of the protections, benefits, and responsibilities of marriage under state law. But in January the state gay-marriage advocacy group, Love Makes a Family, began lobbying legislators to oppose the bill. Now legislators are uncertain whether it can pass. Since a gay-marriage bill has no chance of passing this session, the result is that gay couples may get nothing in the short-term.

On its website and in public statements, the Connecticut group has offered two plausible reasons for its all-or-nothing strategy. The first is that civil unions are not a stepping stone to marriage but a dead end. "Make no mistake, if we fight for civil unions, the marriage conversation will end just as it has in Vermont," says the group's president, Anne Stanback, in a statement posted on the organization's website. Stanback notes that Vermont "is the only place where we have an example of what civil union leads to - and it leads to civil union."

The dead-end argument is troubling. It's true that Vermont has made no progress toward gay marriage since its legislature created civil unions in 2000. Though a gay-marriage bill has been filed, it is going nowhere. Even gay advocates in the state seem content to stand pat.

But Vermont is a special case. The fight over civil unions there was a traumatic and divisive one, manifested in unusually bitter election campaigns, angry letters-to-the-editor, and nasty billboards. That should be no surprise: Vermont did not come to the issue incrementally or democratically. Instead, the state supreme court ordered the legislature to recognize gay unions and to do so quickly. The people had no opportunity to adjust themselves gradually to the idea, or to have their voices truly heard. The resulting wounds are deep, and will take long to heal.

Civil unions adopted legislatively in Connecticut, and elsewhere, would write a different and much better story. They would be adopted by a legislature acting on its own, not under court order. There is no reason to believe a civil-union law would have the politically paralyzing effect it has had in Vermont. Instead, adopting civil unions will add a strong weapon to the arsenal of arguments for gay marriage: "We've got the legal benefits, now why not marriage?"

The path of progress for the legislative recognition of gay relationships has been an incremental one, with no single step being a dead end. That has been true in California, where largely symbolic domestic partnerships first created five years ago have grown gradually into something approaching full marriage. It has also been true in foreign countries taking a legislative path, like Sweden and Norway, which enacted limited legal benefits for same-sex couples before moving to comprehensive registered partnerships. It was true in the Netherlands, which implemented domestic partnerships before moving to full marriage. There is little reason to believe that a democratic conversation about the rights of gay couples, once begun, will end with civil unions.

The second argument against civil unions as an intermediate step to marriage is that civil unions send the unacceptable message that gays are second-class citizens. Civil unions, says Stanback, are "a firm message that we are less deserving of dignity, respect, and rights than other citizens and taxpayers." Marriage, by contrast, "is a universally respected cultural, legal, and social institution," she notes. "Very, very few opposite-sex couples would trade their marriage for something called a civil union."

All of that is true and counsels against being satisfied, in the end, with anything short of marriage. But it is not an argument for an all-or-nothing strategy. While second-class citizenship (civil unions) is worse than first-class citizenship (marriage), it is far preferable to third-class citizenship (nothing), at least if we think that attaining second-class status will actually move us forward in the battle for first-class status.

A related and more serious concern is that creating alternative statuses like civil unions may entrench public attitudes hostile to gay marriage, leading to the feared dead end. In a forthcoming book, University of Minnesota sociology professor Kathleen Hull notes the danger that civil unions might "further normalize the treatment of gays and lesbians as a separate class of citizens." If civil unions could be expected to have this effect, they should be resisted while we wait for marriage.

The risk of entrenching gays' separate status through civil unions or other marriage-lite proposals, preventing all further progress, is real but probably not very large. The experience of California and of other countries, noted above, is against it. Gay couples and their families, having tasted legal legitimacy for the first time, are unlikely to be satisfied for long with anything less than full equality. Heterosexuals, having lived through the nonevent of recognizing gay relationships by something short of marriage, will begin to wonder what the fuss was about.

Compromise is the rule of politics. In what promises to be a decades-long struggle for gay marriage, a struggle still in its infancy, we'd do well to remember that. Civil unions are not where we want to be, but they're a lot better than where we are.

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