Over the past decade, US attitudes toward same-sex marriage have changed dramatically. A 2004 poll conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that 31 percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage, while 60 percent were opposed. In contrast, a 2012 Pew poll showed that 48 percent of respondents favored legal recognition of lesbian and gay marriages, and 43 percent opposed it. These same numbers are reflected in other national polls taken in 2012. A CBS News poll conducted shortly after the November 2012 elections found that 51 percent of respondents said same-sex marriage should be legal, 41 percent were opposed, and 8 percent were undecided or had no opinion. Despite this general shift in favor of same-sex marriage, the issue remains deeply polarizing. With the 2013 Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex married couples access to federal benefits, we have seen polling numbers show even more acceptance of marriage equality.
People’s opinions about marriage tell us a great deal about what we, as individuals and as a society, value morally, culturally, and materially. Marriage is also a deeply personal matter. It does not mean the same thing to all people. Not everyone wants to get married. Moreover, being married does not even mean the same thing, day to day, year to year, for any two people. Some people’s marriages end in divorce. Other marriages flourish. Others may fluctuate among periods of happiness, boredom, certainty, unhappiness, rediscovered bliss, and ambivalence. This is true for heterosexual as well as gay and lesbian married couples. No doubt, similar experiences occur in the many other ways people make intimate and abiding commitments.
Marriage, as a social institution in the United States, has changed over the centuries. We have seen this dramatically over the past four decades. The term “traditional marriage” can’t possibly encompass all the ways marriage exists in our culture, let alone all the intimate, everyday ways people experience it.
Nonetheless, one of the most persistent and rhetorically persuasive arguments against legal recognition of same-sex marriage is that it harms “traditional marriage” and the “traditional family.” In October 2012, former senator and former Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum addressed a fund-raiser for the Family Policy Institute of Washington, a group opposed to same-sex marriage. He spoke in favor of repealing a recently passed law legalizing same-sex marriage in the state of Washington. Senator Santorum decried the “normalization” of gay marriage and homosexuality; unless we win this fight, he warned, “not only will the family disintegrate—it is disintegrating.” The majority of voters in Washington State ignored Santorum’s warnings, and voted to affirm marriage equality.
Senator Santorum’s language was extreme, but his views are shared by many people, and not only by conservatives. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman and bans any federal recognition of same-sex marriage, was passed with large bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in 1996. In 2011, the administration of Democratic president Barack Obama announced its desire to repeal DOMA. Nevertheless, the idea that marriage equality imperils “traditional marriage” feels true to many people. This is evident in the name of the law: the Defense of Marriage Act. And the hard reality is that one out of four Americans remains opposed to same-sex marriage.
What do people think they are defending when they defend “traditional marriage”? Are they, like Santorum, worried about its disintegration? Ironically, Santorum is right about one thing: disintegration is already underway. Well before gay marriage became a political demand, or a legal reality, marriage and the family were in the midst of seismic upheavals. Divorce rates have been skyrocketing, single-parent households are increasing, blended families of all sorts are now the norm, and the stay-at-home mom is a dwindling reality for many children. The movement for same-sex marriage did not cause these changes. In many ways, it is a product of these same cultural forces—especially feminism—that have remade gender roles and allowed women to enter the paid work force. Many women entered the paid workforce out of desire, but many did so because they—and their families—had no other option. Economic forces, such as declining real wages and the erosion of job security for so many workers, pose real threats to “traditional families.”
Many people are deeply uncomfortable with these changes and irrationally blame them on LGBT people in general and same-sex marriage in particular. LGBT people thus become scapegoats for a wider set of social transformations. We see this not just in debates over same-sex marriage, but in moral panics about endangered children and predatory homosexuals (see myth 8, “LGBT Parents Are Bad for Children”).
Extreme opposition to same-sex marriage often is framed in apocalyptic terms, as if two brides or two grooms will end civilization as we know it. Such worries are logically absurd, but fear is not about logic.
Can same-sex marriage somehow cause the end of civilization, and even the human race? There is no evidence for this worry. Heterosexuals who choose to will still get married and have children. Some will have children without getting married. The ability to marry a same-sex partner will not lure wavering or curious heterosexuals to “go gay”—with disastrous consequences for the repopulation of the human species. Homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice that people opt into or out of depending on what is trending. In US states where same-sex marriage has been legalized, there has been a decrease in neither heterosexual marriage rates nor in birth rates.
The example of Massachusetts—the first state to legalize same-sex marriage—is telling. Data show that in the years since same-sex couples could legally marry in Massachusetts, starting in 2004, the state’s marriage rate has remained stable, and its divorce rate has actually gone down.1
In a 2004 essay, “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia: The ‘Conservative Case’ for Same-Sex Marriage Collapses,” conservative commentator Stanley Kurtz made a provocative argument that same-sex marriage spells the end of heterosexual marriage.2 Kurtz argued that same-sex marriage had caused the decline of heterosexual marriage in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, all of which had given marital rights to same-sex couples. The data do not support his argument. Economist M. V. Lee Badgett points out that heterosexual marriage rates in all three countries went up in the years since they first approved registered partnerships for same-sex couples: Denmark, in 1989; Norway, in 1993; and Sweden, in 1994. Same-sex marriage has since been legalized in all three countries, still with no decline in heterosexual marriage.3
Does this mean same-sex marriage is good for “opposite-sex” marriage? Maybe, but maybe not. Just because two phenomena appear in rough succession does not mean one caused the other, especially with so complex and multifactorial an issue as marriage.
Some progressive advocates of marriage equality have suggested that same-sex marriage might change marriage for the better by promoting gender equality between men and women in heterosexual marriages. By modeling egalitarian partnering, same-sex couples may help break down the traditional gender roles that have historically caused social and economic discrepancies between men and women. This could make for happier heterosexual couples.
In this way, same-sex marriage potentially helps expand what is possible for all marriages and does so from within the institution of marriage. Progressive proponents of marriage equality are not mocking marriage, but are recognizing that how two people make an intimate life need not be dictated by past forms of marriage. Marriage always has served multiple purposes, and will continue to do so.
The conservative media blitz over the alleged “end of marriage” simply ignores the many realities of how people make intimate commitments and form families. All societies need, and are obliged to provide, multiple, usually overlapping, structures to support the people who live in them, including those who live together in familial groups. That’s what makes these social supports and living arrangements traditions. The composition of familial groups varies from culture to culture. Because societies change over time, so too must the forms any society relies on to provide stability and security for its members. But this is also why “traditional marriage” has never actually existed; there has never been only one living arrangement that can support human intimacies or families. Humans have imagined and created a wide array of social and familial forms for arranging their lives.
The “traditional” grouping of husband, wife, and children is the arrangement put forth by conservatives as the most statistically common—even though it is not now and likely never was. It is also touted as the best. However, we see so many different familial forms in our lives and in our neighborhoods. These include multiple generations of one family living together and supporting one another economically and emotionally, or best friends raising kids together. And what about an unmarried couple raising children together? These are common to every community. Or think about three unrelated adults, who may or may not be sexually intimate, pledging to look after each other in sickness and health. All of these relationships, along with marriage, are productive and valuable social structures that support and sustain relationships and life.
Opponents of same-sex marriage refuse to recognize the wonderful human ability to build and maintain many forms of family life. For example, the Maine anti-marriage-equality organization Maine4Marriage has stated, “For millennia and across all cultures, traditional man/woman marriage has been the essential foundation of all successful societies.” This is simply not true. The “traditional family”—romantic heterosexual couple with children—is a recent invention. Historians such as Nancy Cott, John D’Emilio, and Estelle Freedman have shown that heterosexual marriage has taken different forms, meant different things in various cultures, and fulfilled very different social functions.
What do advocates of “traditional marriage” mean when they refer to the timeless values of man/woman marriage? Is it the traditional principle of couverture, which we find in English common law (the backbone of colonial and contemporary American law), in which a man and woman became one legal person upon marriage? In practice, this legal and social unity of the couple meant that the woman ceased to exist as a legal identity with her own rights. A husband could sell his wife’s property without her consent, and had the legal ability—even duty—to make all decisions for them both. The tradition of couverture existed well into the nineteenth century in the United States.
Do advocates of “traditional marriage” want to defend the version of marriage in which a man could legally rape his wife? Nineteenth-century feminists in the United States campaigned vigorously to eliminate the spousal exemption for rape. Sadly, it took several generations of activism to force the change. North Carolina became the last state to criminalize marital rape—in 1993.
Perhaps defenders of “traditional marriage” want to go back to a time when states legally—through antimiscegenation laws—forbade interracial heterosexual couples from marrying? Such laws were finally held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia, in 1967.
Marriage is a civil institution organized by the state, and structured by rules and regulations. It establishes a next-of-kin relationship between spouses and puts into place a series of interlocking legal rights and responsibilities. Among them, married couples can: reduce tax liability by filing a joint return; receive special government benefits, such as those given to surviving spouses and dependents under Social Security provisions; inherit from each other even when no will has been made; retain custody of children upon the death of the other parent; refuse to testify against a spouse in a court of law; and easily gain US residency for a foreign-born spouse.
There are also a large number of social benefits granted through marriage. These benefits may include: access to the health-care plans of a spouse, if he or she is lucky enough to have employer-provided health insurance; hospital and prison visitation; family memberships to places such as gyms and museums, as well as family discounts on other purchases; and tenancy succession.
Many of these legal and social privileges can be gained through making individual legal contracts. Same-sex couples and unmarried heterosexual couples (as well as people in other types of relationships) can draw up wills, establish guardianship provisions, and name their partner as health-care proxy. There are, however, no guarantees these contracts will always be respected, especially if the legally recognized family members of an LGB person contest a will or custody arrangement. Such piecemeal contracting is also exhausting, expensive, and often not realistically available to people who cannot afford to hire lawyers. And many of these rights—especially in such areas as immigration and federal income tax—are granted only through marriage.
Civil marriage—and only civil marriage—grants couples more than 1,200 federal and state benefits. It also—whether we agree that this is a good thing or not—gives married people a special, elevated social status. To paraphrase Nancy Cott, there is nothing like marriage, except marriage.4 As a matter of basic fairness and equality, if marriage is the only way to access these benefits, then same-sex couples deserve equal access to the institution of civil marriage.
Of course, no one wants to get married just to receive these material benefits. People usually get married because they fall in love, want to spend their lives together, possibly raise a family. However, we live in a world of economic realities, and these benefits are essential to individuals’ and couples’ well-being. For many people, marriage is the only way to get access to health care and government benefits, such as spousal Social Security, or to secure a legal relationship with their children. Not only does same-sex marriage not harm traditional marriage, but a strong moral and legal argument can be made that the denial of marriage equality harms LGB people. The movement for marriage equality is, in many ways, a testament to the enduring emotional, symbolic, and material value of marriage and family life—and to a profoundly American ideal of fairness.
Do all LGBT people think same-sex marriage is a positive, progressive move into the future? Probably all of them agree that, if civil marriage is available to heterosexuals, it should be available to same-sex couples on equal terms. However, some feminist and LGBT critics of same-sex marriage argue that the way certain public benefits are built into civil marriage impedes making social changes that could benefit everybody. Why, they ask, should access to health care be connected to marital status at all? They worry that the same-sex-marriage movement is settling for too little. It will do nothing for those many people—LGBT and straight—who do not want to marry but who do need health insurance or equal access to citizenship. Nor does civil marriage for same-sex couples reflect the diverse and imaginative ways LGBT people make kinship ties.
If same-sex marriage were available in all fifty states, would all LGB people want to get married? Of course not. Not all heterosexual people want to get married. In recent decades, heterosexuals have been getting married later and later in life, and many prefer to live together outside marriage. In the short time and in the few states that same-sex marriage has been legal, an interesting gendered difference has emerged: lesbian couples are marrying at far greater rates than gay male couples, by a ratio of 2 to 1 in Massachusetts, for example.5 Is this because women are socialized to settle down and men are encouraged to play the field? Or are other factors in play, such as the greater likelihood that lesbian couples have children and, thus, have more need of the kinds of protections legal marriage offers?
Will younger lesbians and gay men want to marry? We have no way of knowing this. However, women and men born in the past thirty years have grown up in a very different world from previous generations. Marriage for them is not the standard that it was in the 1950s or 1960s. They may not have the same romantic notions of marriage that older lesbians and gay men might. For younger gay men and lesbians, then, marriage may simply be one of many options. On the other hand, as beneficiaries of earlier feminist challenges to make marriage more equal, younger gay men and lesbians may find that marriage now fits their political views and intimate desires.
The reality is that marriage remains a powerful cultural ideal, which we are all taught to value. Advocates of same-sex marriage do not advocate destroying marriage, or abandoning it; they embrace it. Will same-sex marriage change how we—as a society—think about marriage? Yes, of course. And that’s more than okay. Will lesbians and gay men now feel the same pressure to marry that heterosexuals long have? This would not be okay. It would be a bittersweet victory for marriage equality if success meant simply replicating social hierarchy by stigmatizing people, gay or straight, who choose not to marry and who instead organize their lives around less legally formalized relationships, or even around more-casual encounters.
Marriage has survived any number of changes over the centuries. Legalizing same-sex marriage will not end the institution. It will not even be the end of the fight for sexual freedom and social equality for all people. Nonetheless, marriage equality has the potential to show an ever-widening straight and LGBT public the multiple ways people can love and be for one another.