Editorial from The Guide	Editorials Archive

Hawaii's Supreme Court is set to rule next summer on gay marriage rights in that state. In the coming year you can be sure to hear more and more calls from gay groups to join in the campaign to legalize same-sex marriages. Some leaders argue that marriage rights are a good organizing issue for two reasons: A) they are, currently, undeniably discriminatory, and B) pursuing marriage rights reassures straight people that we seek the same respectable values they endorse. Careful examination, though, reveals that genuine concerns about fairness and a thoughtful political strategy demand we not join any crusade to further sanctify an institution that has not served us well.

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Given the enormous legal and social privileges accompanying marriage (tax credits, insur ance benefits, legally protected visitation and inheritance rights, membership discounts, unques tioned parental authority), it seems only just that the same benefits available to a woman and a man be open to a man and a man or to a woman and a woman. To dictate the genitals of marriage partners is inherently sexist and homophobic. To then reward those who take part in an institution that arbi trarily excludes others is unfair.

But is the long-term solution to this injustice to allow gay couples to join the exclusive club of official matrimony? Is state-approved marriage an institution we want to strengthen?

Many of the benefits that accrue to married couples remain patently unfair even if gay people were cut in. Health benefits should be granted to people because we as a society are committed to protecting life, not as a reward for acceptable social arrangements. Parental authority should reside with those who take responsibility for children, not those whose life-style is licensed by the state.

Any move to redeem marriage by allowing same-sex couples to participate necessarily leaves out some of our queer brothers and sisters. What about the bisexual person with an ongoing lover of each sex? Or the communal individual who shares love, sex, and a household with a dozen other like-minded spirits? Marriage reworked to include some gay people will still unfairly exclude others.

Historically, marriage offered some protection for economically disenfranchised women and assigned responsibility for children. But with women no longer dependent on men and more and more children being raised in nontraditional families, we should be working to strip marriage of any special legal privileges it conveys.

People, regardless of gender or sexuality, should be free to arrange their social lives as they please. They should be able to draw up whatever contractual obligations they choose for themselves, and register those with the state. And if they want to seek consecration from their chosen religion, that is their right. What people should not have the right to do, though, is use the coercive power of the state to reward their elected life-style at the expense of those who have made equally legitimate, but less socially popular, choices.

Instead of trading away the insight we have gained as gay people in a vain pursuit of straight respectability, we must use the upcoming debates about marriage to bravely assert the truth: the way the state endorses marriage does not need to be reformed- it needs to be abolished. We should be working to remove the state entirely from the business of rewarding those who couple "appropri ately" and punishing those who don't.

Let us chose the living and arrangements we want. Let us legally configure them as we will. Let us celebrate our families as we choose. Let us enjoy our sexuality as we desire. **

Editor's Note: from The Guide, October 1995