The New Mexico legislature is set to vote on a domestic partnership bill. As the El Paso Times reports:
The measure allows for domestic partnerships for unmarried couples, including gay couples. ... Supporters say the legislation will provide unmarried couples - regardless of gender - with [some] protections and legal responsibilities given to marriage couples, including rights involving insurance coverage, child support, inheritance and medical decision-making.
This would be a good mid-step advancement for same-sex couples. But why don't opposite-sex couples just get married? And since they can get married, why is it in the common interest to offer them state-provided benefits for "marriage lite"?
As a commenter to my post last week (on French straights abandoning marriage for easily dissolvable civil solidarity pacts) reminds us, Jonathan Rauch summed up the situation nicely in his book Gay Marriage: Why it is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America:
If marriage's self-styled defenders continue along the ABM [anything but marriage] path toward making wedlock just one of many 'partnership choices' (and not necessarily the most attractive), they will look back one day and wonder what they could possibly have been thinking when they undermined marriage in order to save it from homosexuals.
2 Comments for “Another Advance for ‘Marriage Lite’?”
posted by TS on
I’m still very, very unsettled on the question of marriage.
On the one hand:
people should be free to take their lives down any path they like. why should the state reward people for picking a certain path which, while traditional, is clearly not for everyone?
on the other hand:
Marriage is an ancient institution. Perhaps there is more wisdom in the ways of our ancestors, who faced severe limitations on their lifestyles and freedoms we have ever known. Perhaps they knew the real secret to happiness- avoiding a confusing sea of choices.
The very very bad thing about the other hand is that it is in fact very very bad for us. Tradition is so threatened by homosexuality for a reason: it is an invasion of choice and psychological mumbo-jumbo into a very sacred pattern- men like women and women like men, they pair bond and make babies. Really sophisticated traditionalists (who don’t believe ignorant ideas like that we’re just making up our sexual attractions) still find fault with us. To them, we are an embodiment of what they see as the profound fault of modern people. In simpler times, according to them, nobody searched their soul to ask such questions as “Am I really happy in my marriage?” or “Do I really believe what the church says?” or “Since I am aroused by men/women, would I be better off classifying myself as gay/lesbian and living a lifestyle outside the norm?” I might add “Am I traumatized with my experiences in combat?” or “Am I depressed? Do I need therapy?” or “Have factors outside my control harmed my ability to be successful? Do I deserve society’s support?” and countless other questions to that list.
There is a midde course through all this. I am just still trying to see it.
posted by John Dumas on
Ironically, Rauch is now arguing in the New York Times that a circumscribed “civil union” should be made available to same-sex couples. Rights of couples in states with same-sex marriage would be limited. Rauch, writing with Blankenhorn, doesn’t discuss what could be done for couples in states unwilling to provide any recognition to same-sex couples.
Rauch, in joining the ABM crowd, has been blindsided by Blankenhorn. This would represent a retreat in Massachusetts and Connecticut (and California should the court overturn Prop 8) and restrict any state from making same-sex couples fully equal.
I would be happy to see a law, passed in every state, codifying the current liberties all clergy have to refuse to officiate at a wedding. “Sorry, you were born on a Tuesday, and I never marry people who were born on Tuesdays or Thursdays.”
Ironically, if we fight for an ABM alternative, the opponents to same-sex marriage will simply regroup against ABM. They’re only dangling it out there to distract us.