First I didn't get it. Marriage for gays. While I've never understood why the idea that two people who love each other getting married to each other would demean two other people getting married to each other, or "the institution of marriage," in my (relative) youth I wondered why anybody cared. I came of age in the early '70s when many people were dismissing marriage as an outdated, archaic, and enslaving institution. Who needed it? Why would anyone want it? I didn't especially mind if other lesbians and gays tried to broaden the definition of who could marry, but I wasn't interested in putting any of my own energy into it, and, truth be told, I wasn't as sympathetic as I should have been.
But aging changes one's perspective. The legal and social support for relationships and the people in those relationships that are incorporated in the institution of marriage, and nowhere else, take on greater importance.
In April, six gay couples are suing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the right to apply for a marriage license. One of the couples lives in Northampton. According to the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), which brought the suit, the benefits of marriage include most of the things we take for granted. Married couples are automatically entitled to visit each other in the hospital, to use family leave provisions to care for an ill partner, to receive a deceased partner's pension or worker's compensation in case of injury, to convey property easily and without taxation, to file joint tax returns, to make decisions about burial, and to make a claim for wrongful death. Marriage also supports a relationship by the expectations it creates of mutual trust, loyalty and assistance, both by the members of the family and by others. According to GLAD, "The law assumes the married couple is bonded emotionally and financially, and provides a framework of protections and obligations for married couples and their children in their interactions with each other, with government agencies and programs, and with other people and institutions." What it's really about, of course, is the actual lives of the people involved. Another thing one learns as one grows older is that none of us stands very well all alone. Social institutions exist at least partly because people have found, over the generations, that we need these structures to help us make commitments, stick to them, work through the hard parts, or recover from the failures to do so, while protecting the weakest among us.
I think most people in this country, if they really thought about it in concrete ways affecting individual lives, especially if they know somebody gay, would want all people to have the opportunity for the support and the legal rights that are incorporated in the institution of marriage. In my experience, most people on an individual level can empathize, and can learn to recognize and accept in people they know and care about things they find really strange or even frightening in the abstract. Maybe I just know especially nice people, but I doubt it.
Is marriage necessary? Wouldn't something else substitute? Maybe, but why invent a whole new set of parallel institutions, so we can fight over every right one at a time? For example, some people are lucky enough to work for employers who offer "domestic partner" benefits to their employees; the Town of Amherst found a way, despite legal challenges by outsiders. But most employers do not, and even those that do are at risk of losing them to one of those law suits. The Acting Governor, Jane Swift, claims to support domestic partnership benefits (although so far she has not attempted to extend such benefits to state employees); but she adds, ". . . I would not go so far as to support same-sex marriage." She and other politicians need to be persuaded.
Saturday, May 5th, is the Pride March in Northampton. Do come. Everyone is welcome.