Editor’s Note: Paula Ettelbrick, who died last year at age 56, was an attorney who spent most of her professional career advocating for GLBT rights, serving as the head of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (1988–93), New York’s Empire State Pride Agenda (1994–99), and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (2003–09).
This article, which appeared in the Fall 1997 issue, reminds us that once there was a time when not everyone in the GLBT movement was on board with the idea that same-sex marriage should be at the top of our agenda. Ettelbrick opposed this objective on feminist grounds, and it’s interesting to note that her main argument against same-sex marriage is that it will only strengthen a bad institution—the exact antithesis of the conservative claim that letting gay people get married will fatally harm the institution of marriage itself.
THERE WAS ONCE a certain species of monkey that had long been observed by anthropologists to display a distinctive mating pattern, in which the male would mate with a steady number of females, who in turn would live together and collectively care for the offspring and each other, while making themselves available for mating with the male. This pattern led researchers to dub this family formation a “harem”—a group of female animals led by and mated to one male. And this categorization remained unchallenged for many years. Eventually, a female anthropologist observed the same behavior among these primates, and her conclusion differed greatly from that of her predecessors. To the contrary, she found the pattern to be more akin to a lesbian family—two or more females raising children together with a sole male whose singular purpose is to assist with procreation.
Like the female anthropologist, people in the lesbian and gay community have the opportunity to use our life experiences to reconfigure the cultural view of family and the sexual hierarchy that is enforced through familial relationships. Or we can choose to leave in place much of what is troubling about family and sexual roles, and set our sights on lower, and much less revolutionizing, goals. I believe that the battle for legal marriage is too narrow and too limited for our own community’s interests, and that in pursuing it as our primary political objective we will rob ourselves of an important opportunity to challenge hetero-centric sexual and family hierarchies.
Before exploring this critique, it is important to clarify something that’s often misunderstood. This is a critique of legal marriage, the elevation of marriage to the only family structure worth fighting for, and the retrenchment of our political vision of family that’s apparent in current discussions in our community. It is not a critique of weddings as such, namely the public ritual by which couples express their love and commitment before friends and family. The confusion over these terms has led more than one guilt-stricken lesbian feminist to feel it necessary to defend her decision to engage in a wedding ceremony or to privately exchange rings with her loved one. Wedding rituals are created by churches or self-determined by couples and their families. Legal marriage is defined and regulated by the State.
Two main arguments form the basis of my critique. First, marriage entrenches sexual hierarchies, which in turn obliterate individual sexual expression. Second, marriage reinforces a single form of family relationship that excludes many of our own families.
Marriage and Sexual Hierarchy
Despite dramatic changes in sexual mores occasioned by the women’s and lesbian/gay movements, marriage is still a most vigilant enforcer of a profound inequality in sexual activities according to the marital status of the participants. The notion that the only sex that’s legal and moral is marital sex still prevails in law and in society. Laws are still on the books covering adultery, fornication, cohabitation, and so on; while a social stigma is still applied to people—especially women—who are viewed as sexually promiscuous or who have the misfortune to get pregnant outside of marriage. Though this simplistic moral distinction might edge gay marital sex into the sphere of social acceptability, it will make it all the more evident that lesbians and gay men who choose not to marry are in fact sexual outlaws.
While marriage might bring sex acts within its protective orb, it will not render lesbian and gay sexuality more acceptable. Straight sexuality is barely valued to begin with; its importance lies mostly in its role in procreation and as a system of keeping gender roles intact. In this respect, the belief that gay sexuality will acquire social acceptability through marriage is ludicrous. Our culture’s dysfunctional approach to sexuality will not be lifted because of a change in a state’s marriage laws.
Despite the claims of a few within the gay community who are in the marriage promotion business, many in the community—many women and/or people of color, for example—are highly skeptical of marriage and its proponents’ claims that we can achieve equality through marriage. The skeptics know first hand the power wielded by white men who have used marriage to establish ownership over women and children, to promote rules of sexual morality to which all but they must adhere, and to revoke or extend full citizenship rights, according to their whim.
The history of marriage as an instrument of power is not behind us. Recent laws forcing under-age women to marry the adult men who impregnate them, state legislatures passing laws that require a husband’s consent to a woman’s decision to have an abortion, laws promoting contract marriage and other strict rules around divorce—these are some recent instances of the use of marriage to regulate the lives of women. Additionally, the fanning of social stigma directed against poor and/or immigrant mothers with no husband to support them has prompted a sweeping retrenchment of one of the most important pieces of social policy this century—the commitment to provide financial assistance to the poor. All it took were some well-placed, persistent attacks on unmarried women of color with children to spawn this national backlash against welfare.
It is white gay men who seem to be most vociferous in promoting the same-sex marriage philosophy. While pandering to the public’s obsession with marriage and a return to the past, these activists ignore the history of women’s experience with marriage and misappropriate the history of the struggle against miscegenation laws. They applaud the Supreme Court ruling that struck down the prohibition on marriage between whites and people of color, but they fail to translate the Court’s explicit rationale—that of dismantling white supremacy—into a theory of dismantling male supremacy within heterosexual marriage. Their rationale for legal marriage sounds more like a Promise Keepers rally than a gay pride march. It is a method for practicing safer sex, a safe haven for gay male sexuality, an emblem of respectability in bourgeois society.
But marriage will not stop HIV transmission or help us control our raging sexual selves. Marriage is fundamentally a badge of citizenship, a way to create an identity that’s acceptable to our neighbors and families. In the end, however, our badge of citizenship, however well-deserved, would turn on acceptance into the very institution that’s responsible for obliterating sexual expression and autonomy. In the end, the struggle for same-sex marriage gives up on the goal of gaining public acceptance of sexual diversity and of sexuality itself.
Marriage as a Limited Family Form
Aside from political and philosophical concerns that one might have, and the way that same-sex marriage is being promoted by a handful of gay cognoscenti, there are pragmatic arguments against legal marriage as a strategy. For starters, this strategy reinforces marriage as the linchpin in the definition of the family. A better approach for our community would be to expand the definition of family, rather than confine ourselves to marriage. The former approach would open up much broader possibilities for recognition of all lesbian and gay family relationships.
Lesbians and gay men have long challenged normative definitions of the institution of the family. Through our success in creating different kinds of families, we have shown that groups of people can constitute a family without being heterosexual, biologically related, married, or functioning under a male head-of-household. Meanwhile, lesbian and gay custody cases have challenged the heterosexual norm as the only model for parenting. Lesbians raising children conceived by donor insemination present a challenge to the legal and social constructions of parenthood as currently understood. We have confronted and begun to change a marriage-centered family ideology, one that denied us basic economic and social benefits, such as health benefits and bereavement leave. Lesbian couples, both with and without children, have helped to change the expectation that a man must be present in order for them to function as a family.
Thus, when a hospital refuses to admit a gay partner as an immediate family member, we question the claim that a biological mother or brother who has not been heard from in years is better qualified to comfort the sick person or confer with doctors. When employers adopt policies prohibiting unmarried employees from receiving the same health, bereavement and pension benefits as married co-workers, we challenge them as a discriminatory denial of equal pay for equal work. When the law says that one must be married to the biological parent of a child in order to adopt that child, we argue that anyone who is the child’s second parent should be able to adopt regardless of the legal relationship of the parents. When a company offers a family discount applicable to “traditional” families only, we push them to resist reinforcing outmoded family assumptions.
We have not challenged the underlying assumptions of family just to build toward the holy grail of marriage. Rather, our battles to date have been charged by our conviction that it is unjust, irrational, and injurious to privilege marital families over non-marital ones, biological relationships over functional ones, and heterosexual unions over lesbian and gay ones. And we’ve been motivated by a desire to de-couple gender roles from particular family roles, to chip away further at the State’s control of sexual and family relationships, and to challenge the sexist and heterosexist underpinnings of family definitions. All family members committed to caring for one another are entitled to the same legal, social, and economic means of support. Our goal has been to remove the roadblocks that keep many kinds of families, in addition to those of lesbians and gay men, from the privileges and benefits that legally defined family units now enjoy. We have developed rationales for restructuring the family based upon a fair distribution of family benefits and privileges. In the process, we have moved away from family structures that emphasize gendered roles; we have reconfigured the concept of family by replacing normative family roles with functional ones. Actual love, caring, and the execution of commitments are what make a family rather than a marriage license or biological bond.
Current Discussion Lacks Political Vision
The legalistic framework in which the current discussion of marriage is taking place inhibits our ability to engage in the political discussion that we need. Posing the question as being whether the simple “right” to marriage should exist maneuvers the conversation to the obvious position in favor of this narrow proposition. But a broader political discussion is then foreclosed, and the discussion moves to the busy work of spinning legislative strategies. Let me critique this approach on two grounds.
First, legal reform and challenges are tools and strategies; they are not movement goals in themselves. By analogy, the goal of the Civil Rights movement was not to eradicate miscegenation laws, but rather to dismantle white supremacy. Movement activists did not build their movement around the right to marry white people. Miscegenation laws, by their very existence, reinforced racial segregation and white supremacy. The successful legal challenge to these laws was one way to end second-class citizenship. In contrast, achieving the legal right to same-sex marriage has become the goal rather than a means to a more general end, which is to end heterosexual supremacy and oppression. The emphasis on the legal right to marry threatens to trump the discussion about broader political goals and visions to which many of us subscribe, such as ending sex-determined gender and familial roles in general.
Second, setting up a dichotomy that forces people either to “support” or “oppose” gay marriage pre-empts a whole discussion that we should be having about the meaning of marriage. Those who “oppose” the current strategy have been marginalized as a few radical lesbian-feminist leftists—and we know how far those labels get you in the current political climate. Those who might otherwise be interested in joining in the fight to marry are sidelined because of their inability to find a rationale other than the conservative, sex-negative reasons for marriage proffered by those who have had greatest access to a public forum.
Before we go further in shoving marriage to the top of our agenda, we must get back to basics by examining our political goals and the context from which all of us approach this question. Many gay men’s experience with AIDS is sure to inform their views on sex and marriage, but theirs are not the only perspectives worth discussing. If marriage is to become the next major battle, then we desperately need to move beyond the narrow “rights” framework. It is possible to build a rationale for marriage based on feminist principles, upon a desire to challenge heterosexual and male sexual dominance in marriage—as well as in other institutions. We need to develop a rationale that will allow for true choice, including the choice not to marry (without being denied important social and economic privileges). We need to build a rationale that does not require us to submerge our sexuality, and a model of marriage that does not involve relinquishing control of our lives and our sexuality to a heterosexist institution. Only then will the fight for same-sex marriage become a movement that the rest of us can join.
