Facebook’s decision to include “civil union” and “domestic partnership” as relationship statuses is not an unmixed blessing. Marriage Equality’s Mollie McKay is right enough that “. . . it’s important to be able to recognize and describe the legal status of same sex couples.” Facebook is the virtual New York: If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. . .
But all this does is clarify for the world that, when it comes to being homosexual, It’s Complicated. Facebook used to offer same sex couples the legally accurate but obviously wrong option of saying they were “single,” or the vague but helpful “in a relationship.” Five of the other options (“engaged,” “married,” “separated,” “widowed” and “divorced”) locate people on the spectrum of the ordinary marriage spectrum. The two others, “in an open relationship” and “it’s complicated” acknowledge the varieties of human experience.
So adding civil unions and domestic partnerships clarifies some new legal options and lets same-sex couples identify themselves more precisely. But the cost of that precision is an additional level of social clutter. Prior to the creation of domestic partnership as a legal category in 1985, and Vermont’s civil unions in 2000, no same-sex couples would have referred to themselves in such legalistic terms. They would have said they had a committed relationship, and would almost certainly have married one another if the law allowed. And on the other side of the scale, it is unlikely at best that any significant number of committed heterosexual couples (i.e. the ones who wouldn’t call their relationship “open”) would have dreamed of formalizing their relationship in any way other than a marriage.
Domestic partnerships and civil unions are way-station categories, created only because the vacuum in the middle of gay lives was so obvious and oppressive, at first only to same-sex couples, but increasingly to heterosexuals who could see the glaring injustice. While the law can not prohibit same-sex couples from loving one another and forming commitments, it can nevertheless enforce a blasé cruelty by simply ignoring the relationships entirely, treating them as a legal irrelevancy.
It is that blasé cruelty that makes Maggie Gallagher and so many others irksome. But it is exactly because of social speedbumps like Gallagher that we have to further complicate the world before we can resimplify it in a more inclusive way.
Domestic partnerships and civil unions, at least when they provide comprehensive state benefits and responsibilities identical to those of married heterosexual couples, are not as egregiously offensive as some argue; they lie somewhere between deeming our relationships 3/5 of a real relationship and full equality, neither as bad as the former nor achieving the latter. We are clearly making progress on full marriage equality, but there we have to expect some political defeats in the years ahead.
That is the compromised ground we will be working from for the next generation. Facebook has made it clear that ground is solid if confounding. Let’s just hope we can stick with two additional relationship categories for awhile, before we wind the world back to just having one for everybody.
2 Comments for “It’s Complicated”
posted by Throbert McGee on
[ting-a-ling-a-ling!]
David, that was the Clue Phone calling for you — it was from Every Black Person In America, and the message was “Get your lazy gay asses off our coattails and find a new analogy, you motherf*ckin’ homo-honkeys.”
P.S. Also, I think there’s a message on the machine from The Jews, too.
posted by BobN on
As both Jews and “homos”, many of them “honkies”, dragged those very same coattails through the streets together, I suggest that David not take the call.
And bravo to Throbert who feels he’s in a position to speak for every black person in America.