The Gay Label
If it looks like
marriage, that’s what we should call it
By SEAN SAFFORD,
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR, NYTimes on the Web, November 12, 2006
IN the second act of Oscar Wilde’s
“Importance of Being Earnest,” Gwendolen Fairfax, the urbane social climber, and
Cecily Cardew, the apple-cheeked country ingénue, realize they are both engaged
to men they believe to be named Ernest Worthing.
“This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners,” Cecily declares.
“When I see a spade I call it a spade.” To which Gwendolen replies:
“I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our
social spheres have been widely different.”
The decision recently handed down by the New Jersey Supreme Court requires the
New Jersey Legislature to decide whether “gay marriage” is a spade or a slightly
different social implement; similar in most respects, but not exactly the same
thing.
The court ruled that there can be no discernible difference between the rights
and obligations associated with heterosexual and homosexual relationships.
The only question at hand is a semantic one: are the committed partnerships of
gay men and lesbians properly labeled “marriage” or something else?
Whether or not we call committed relationships between same-sex partners
“marriage” may seem beside the point. But labels do matter — as extensive
research on businesses and the economy confirms.
For example, Wall Street gets into trouble when the categories it uses to
describe particular stocks don’t reflect investor expectations. Similarly,
Hollywood studios lose when the labels they put on movies don’t jibe with the
way movie-goers interpret the films.
But Gwendolen was right about one thing. Labels live in the social spheres
of day-to-day interaction, not in dictionaries, laws or regulations.
People will put up with some cognitive distance between their own system of
categorization and the labels officially imposed on things. But when the
labels people carry in their heads differ significantly from the categories
written into the books, something has to give.
The fact is gay people have been hitching up for time immemorial. What has
changed is that more and more of us are doing our hitching up openly and with
the blessing of friends, families, co-workers and neighbors. It is inevitable
that the labels we use to identify our relationships should evolve to reflect
that.
Much of American society is keeping pace. More than half of the Fortune
500 provides health care benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian workers on
par with those of straight employees. In popular culture, themes and
characters once segregated to appeal specifically to the gay and lesbian
“demographic” are now more likely to be woven into a mainstream narrative just
as they are in daily life, as evidenced by recent television programs like
“Project Runway,” “Sex in the City” and “Six Feet Under.”
The wheels of government are inevitably slower. Still, throughout American
history, the labels our government has used to categorize people have changed to
reflect the shifting contours of society. Because just as there are costs
associated with mislabeling things in the world of business, when the categories
we inscribe into law are too narrow they have harmful political, social and
economic consequences.
The most disastrous example, which was written into the United States
Constitution, was the legal definition of an African-American slave as
three-fifths of a person. We are still living with the results of that
error two centuries later.
Being placed in a separate category is insulting, demeaning and humiliating.
But beyond those emotions there are significant social, economic and political
costs to hardening social categories that are otherwise inherently fluid.
So while the love that dare not speak its name has been subjected to countless
euphemisms over the years — special friends, roommates, domestic partnerships,
“Boston marriages” and most recently civil unions — the best label is always the
simplest. And that label, in this case, is plain old “marriage.”
Sean Safford is an assistant professor of organizations and
strategy at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
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