How to lose what we've gained

I started writing this post about three weeks ago but was shortly thereafter pretty swamped with stuff and afflicted with a bad case of blogger’s burn, that curious state where you think that if you ever see another blog again you’ll throw your computer out the window. Thankfully, I’m over that and I’ve weaseled my way into some more free time (although the extended edition of The Two Towers may steal it all back) so here’s a new post. It may be either utterly irrelevant or groovily apropos. I’ll blog, you decide.

As you already know, the Massachusetts Supreme Court handed down a decision Tuesday in favour of gay marriage. I haven’t had an opportunity to read the entirety of the decision as of yet, but what I’ve seen so far looks remarkably like victory. It isn’t a total victory—the struggle goes on—but it sure does feel great, doesn’t it?

The President has issued a statement saying that he isn’t going to let any of those damn light-loafered liberals sodomize the sanctity of holy matrimony on his watch, or something to that effect. Other opponents of gay marriage have begun to pick at the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling looking for a loophole or a paragraph written in invisible ink that, when decoded, says, “Just kidding! God hates fags and so do we!” Suffice to say, they haven’t been finding much; the ruling is pretty airtight from what I can tell.

One phrase I have seen tossed about, though, is this one:

Specifically, the interest seems to be in the phrasing “the Commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry” [emphasis added] as opposed to “the Commonwealth may not deny civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.” The difference is enough that some opponents of gay marriage have latched on to this phrase as being a route to denying gays the right to marriage and instead establishing a new social institute of civil unions.

This is, of course, flagrant crap and desperation. On Monday many of these born-again fans of civil unions would have opposed them as vehemently as gay marriage.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen some liberals (too many, and I fear more if things get rough) who have latched on to this sudden shift in their opponents’ position and think that now would be a great time to push through a civil union bill. Such a bill, hypothetically, would appeal to opponents of gay marriage because civil unions are “unions” and not “marriages” and would appeal to gays because they want their relationships and lifestyle legitimized and legally sanctions, and hell, Howard Dean signed a civil union bill so it must be a good idea. It’d be a win-win situation!

This is, of course, flagrant crap and desperation. Civil unions are, as John Isbell nicely put it in the comments to Amp’s post, bullshit. I can think of a few other terms (despicable, immoral, a scam, et al.) but “bullshit” seems to cover it.

I’ve been amazed by the number of people on the left I’ve encountered who support civil unions. Some, I think, support them because they seem like the easiest way to get a theoretical step toward equality. Other liberals, I think, support civil unions because they think that civil unions aren’t any different from marriages, anyway, so why butt heads with the Republican party? The latter are wrong and the former need to realise that a civil union bill, while possibly easier to pass, would not advance the cause of equality any significant degree precisely because of the reasons that the latter group is wrong.

I don’t know where the idea came from that civil unions are equivalent to marriage. I suspect it comes from the way that people tend to define civil unions: “they’re a way by which homosexual couples would have the same legal rights as heterosexual couples.” That sounds reasonable but depending on how the bill is written—and here keep in mind that I am not a legal expert—if civil unions confer unto couples only the rights of marriage written into law then this opens new paths for discrimination. I’m not entirely certain which rights are guaranteed by law to currently married couples but it’s not hard to imagine expressions of prejudice that would be, if I may use the term, market-based. Business could exploit a key difference between civil unions and marriages: the fact that couples entering into a civil union would be issued certificates of civil union instead of certificates of marriage. Unless protections were written into the civil union bill to make it mandatory that these two certificates be considered equal in all situations (an unlikely protection if the bill were to be passed on a national scale) then this difference could be leveraged into a means of discriminating against same-sex couples.

Consider an example or two: a hotel starts offering special discounts on certain rooms to married couples, discount to be applied upon presentation of a marriage certificate; an airline or cruise line has a special deal for honeymooners doing to Hawaii, just bring your marriage certificate with you when you pick up your tickets; etc.

An argument could be made that similar types of discrimination did not occur after the legalization of miscegenation, but I don’t believe that the situations are entirely analogous because interracial couples who married are and were given marriage licenses that were no different from the ones issued to couples of the same race who married. So, if an interracial couple encountered a situation like one of those described above the only basis for the company’s different rates would be the racial make-up of the couple which would qualify as racial discrimination which can be prosecuted under the Constitution. However, no such Constitutional protection exists for non-heterosexuals so discrimination in the way I’ve described is, as I understand it, theoretically possible. I’m sure there’s a lawyer out there ready and willing to split words for a company that wanted to try.

I have to admit, though, that this discrimination-by-marriage-certificate thing sounds a bit too paranoid and dark-side-of-the-fifties to me. The real reason why anyone who is concerned about equality for everyone should oppose civil unions is, thankfully, much simpler than the potential for legal wrangling.

If the goal of enabling gays and lesbians to legally marry is not to legally bind them in long-term relationships nor to grant them certain previously ungranted rights but rather is to signal a greater acceptance of people with different sexual orientations as not being abnormal, substandard freaks but instead as being individuals worthy of respect and fair and equal treatment, then creating a social institution for them that is separate from the institutions established for heterosexuals is counter-productive. By making a different form of union—a separate form of union—especially for the reason on legislative expediency, one would only be sending a message that same-sex relationships are not normal, are not acceptable, and should be segregated from the relationships of so-called normal people. Civil unions would, in effect, reinforce prejudiced perceptions thus not making it any easier, and possibly making it harder in some ways, for non-heterosexual couples to be socially accepted. It’s much easier to dismiss gay marriages as not being “real” or “true” if in a very real, legal sense they’re not.

So both legally and socially, civil unions would not do much more than resurrect the old canard of “separate but equal” and apply it to a new group of people and a different situation.

Here’s hoping that the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision blows civil unions clean off the political landscape..