The problem with marriage

As the presidential election draws ever closer, the perennial arguments about same-sex marriage are heating up. The Republican candidates are falling over themselves to slander the gay community. Their base is drawn to their bigotry like sharks to chum.

Rick Santorum famously compared same-sex marriage to “man on child, man on dog,” while his rival Mitt Romney has railed against judicial decisions in favor of same-sex marriage.

Even Ron Paul, the hero of the libertarian wing of the GOP, defers to states’ rights and condemns same-sex marriage.

The Democratic candidate is no better. President Barack Obama maintains an ironic commitment to the separate-but-equal policy of civil unions.

This is not surprising to those of us who remember Obama’s treacherous move to preserve the Defense of Marriage Act.

But what the candidates fail to realize is that homosexuals are the true defenders of marriage. To understand why, we must look more closely at what marriage really is.

The hackneyed ideal of marriage is two people deeply in love who wish to publicly commit themselves to one another.

This is the lie presented to us by romance novels, Hollywood films and pundits left and right.

But we all know this to be a farce. Love and commitment are absent in many marriages.

In reality, marriage is a collection of social and economic privileges designed to regulate us as sexual citizens.

Marriage gives sexual couples special access to a plethora of legal privileges including tax breaks, shared health care, joint housing, child custody rights, hospital visitation rights and next-of-kin status.

Socially, married couples are seen as mature adults deserving of respect. This social privilege ideologically justifies the material privileges that married couples garner.

Initially, this might appear unproblematic. Why shouldn’t we reward couples, gay or straight, for making an effort to form long-term relationships?

But privileging sexual couples excludes and harms many irregular social formations. Asexual persons, singles, polyamorous groupings, parent-child dyads, cohabiting siblings, close roommates and life-long platonic friends are all denied basic human rights and vital economic benefits because they fail to live in monogamous sexual unions.

The wider queer community should embrace this heterogeneous collection of social arrangements.

Instead, the homosexual movement has eschewed solidarity in favor of assimilation to the heteronormative regime of sexual monogamy.

Marriage is a cruel tool used to reward conformity and punish diversity. It ought to be destroyed, not protected.

If the Republicans would only look past their bigotry, they would realize that the advocates of same-sex marriage are their truest allies.

It is the crusaders for same-sex marriage who testify before legislatures and on television about the nature of true love and the rights to which it entitles them. But same-sex couples don’t deserve marriage, just as straight couples don’t deserve marriage.

Instead, we all deserve the rights reserved for married couples.
The alternative is to grind the fluid beauty of human relationships into the dirt.

­— atcrane@indiana.edu