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The Portland
Mercury
Marriage Makes a Word
of Difference
Why We Can't Call it
Something Else
By Evan Wolfson,
portlandmercury.com on the Web, June 14-20, 2007
"What difference does the word make?"
It's a question often asked of same-sex couples seeking to end their exclusion
from marriage — as if these couples had just dreamed up the idea that somehow
marriage matters. "Why can't you call it something else?"
As Americans debate the freedom to marry, many are getting to a place of
fairness by thinking anew. Others, however, find comfort in way stations,
placeholders, and delays. The compulsion to "compromise" the freedom and
equality of others is so common, so much a typical feature of civil rights
history, that I dedicated an entire chapter of my book, Why Marriage Matters:
America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry, to the question, "Why
Not Use Another Word?"
Words matter, of course. As the Hartford Courant noted, in a recent
editorial urging Connecticut's legislature and high court to move past the 2005
civil union bill to full marriage equality: "Mark Twain famously
illustrated the difference between the right word and the almost right word by
using as an example the difference between 'lightning' and 'lightning bug'....
What's in a word? For those who want to marry and can't, plenty."
Marriage, as it happens, is not "just" a word. It is a status, created by
the law, the very law America pledges equal justice under, to all.
The reason why any other status, call it what you will—civil union, domestic
partnership, or schmarriage—is not adequate or fair is that one of the main
protections that comes with marriage is, indeed, that status of marriage.
When you say, "We're married," everyone knows who you are in relation to the
primary person you're building your life with. That clarity, security, and
dignity—intangible though they may be—are precious and irreplaceable.
Every legislator debating a marriage bill or its alternative, every judge
hearing a case brought by couples and kids excluded from marriage, every
American wrestling with this question of fairness, should ask themselves these
questions: Either civil unions and marriages are the same — in which case
why do we need two lines at the clerk's office? — or they're not the same, in
which case what is the government withholding from these couples and their kids,
and why? Would you swap your marriage for a "civil union"? And if
you say yes, have you checked with your spouse — and your mom?
Not only is there no good reason for the state to create two separate and
unequal statuses and shunt some couples around back; in fact, the new legal
mechanisms of civil union or domestic partnership fall far short of providing
the tangible protections and responsibilities that families need. A recent
New York Times story highlighted the ways in which New Jersey's new civil union
law is failing to deliver needed security for couples and kids; Garden State
Equality, leading the NJ fight for full marriage equality, notes that the law
has more than a 10 percent failure rate.
Why give families inadequate and incomplete piecemeal protections instead of the
full measure? Why withhold what the one nationwide, universally
understood, already existing system of protections and responsibilities would
provide? That unique and established system is called marriage.
A record number of state legislatures this year considered bills to end marriage
discrimination, and a record number, including Oregon, passed measures en route
to marriage equality. Whether such stepping stones are called civil union,
as in New Hampshire and in the bill under consideration now in Illinois, or
broad domestic partnership, as in California or here in Oregon, is not all that
important. Marriage, after all, is a civil union (a legal status triggered
by a civil marriage license), but "civil union" is — deliberately, pointedly —
not marriage, with its unique, full dignity and meaning.
Oregon's term "partnership," rather than the now easily invoked "civil union"
(coined, amazingly enough, just seven years ago, and now already the default
middle ground), perhaps better highlights the incompleteness. But, in
fact, both civil union and domestic partnership are intended both to give and to
withhold. Both provide some protections for same-sex couples and their
children, acknowledged to have parallel needs and dreams, but both deny these
families full protection, security, and equality.
A word, a status, a system—marriage is all this and more. Marriage is a
commitment, an aspiration, a highly significant personal lived experience, a
bundle of personal, social, and spiritual meanings, and, at its best, a
strengthener of couples, children, kin, communities, and country. It makes
no sense to exclude loving couples already doing the work of marriage in their
daily lives from the legal structure intended to reinforce that dedication,
those meanings, and, at its heart, commitment and love.
For much of our nation's history, women were denied the right to be lawyers.
The Supreme Court itself upheld that exclusion, opining that each sex has its
proper sphere and necessary roles, and the "paramount destiny [of women is to]
fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law
of the Creator." Majorities sincerely believed that it was okay to
withhold full participation in life choices, including the freedom to marry,
based on a person's race or sex. By tradition and "definition," lawyers
were men, and that, most believed, is how it had to be.
But when, over the objections of traditionalists, religious leaders, and
pandering politicians, our society eventually moved past such discrimination and
allowed women to practice law, the sky didn't fall, and we didn't need to come
up with a new word for lawyer. The definition of what it means to be a
lawyer didn't change; we only needed to end an unfair exclusion. In the
same way, marriage is not "defined" by who is excluded, and ending same-sex
couples' exclusion will not redefine a word; it will share a precious good.
The right way to end exclusion from marriage is, yes, to end exclusion from
marriage. In Oregon, that means undoing the cruel and un-Oregonian state
constitutional amendment voters were rushed into enacting in 2004 before getting
the full opportunity to meet same-sex couples and hear the personal stories —
stories that prompted the legislature this year to enact partnership and get the
state back on the road to fairness. Discrimination has no place in the
Constitution or the law, no place in Oregon or the rest of America, and no place
in marriage either.
We don't need a new word. We don't need a new status. We need to let
committed same-sex couples share the same rules, same responsibilities, and same
respect. Support the freedom to marry. That's the word. Word
out.
Evan Wolfson is Executive Director of Freedom to Marry, the
gay and non-gay partnership working to end marriage discrimination nationwide,
and author of Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay
People's Right to Marry (Simon & Schuster, 2004). In 2004, Time
magazine named Wolfson one of the "100 most influential people in the world."
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