t’s a strange testament, maybe, to the progress made by advocates of LGBT rights in the last decade: as the movement’s mainstream pours its energies into an ongoing fight for same-sex marriage, longtime gay rights activist Nancy Polikoff has come to find herself in the unfamiliar position of arguing against something with which she has so long identified. As part of Dartmouth’s PRIDE week, Polikoff, an American University law professor, described her stance on the relationship between law, family structure, and the creeping obsolescence of marriage.
Marriage, according to Polikoff, does not deserve its privileged status under the law. Same-sex partnerships, different-sex partnerships, and co-dependent relationships between family members are best suited to assume the legal position now held by marriage. Same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage are not the central issue here.
The problem: an archaic legal definition and system of social benefits surrounding the institution of marriage itself. It’s a position at once intuitive and strikingly forward, an instance in which history runs headlong into the necessity of change.
Polikoff’s logic draws its impetus from social conservatism and, more distantly, from an understanding of what ritualistic and regulatory function was once implicit in marriage. Historically speaking, the social upheaval of the’60s and 70s led some to view marriage as a problem rather than a solution.
On one hand, the change expanded our dialogue regarding nontraditional family structure, bringing the first tentative recognition to both same-sex couples and non-married different-sex couples. Unfortunately, it also produced a social backlash that, as Polikoff noted, quite disingenuously “appropriated the language of social science” in the defense of traditional marriage.
From this conservative reaction came the “marriage movement,” a force that has since infiltrated public debate and worked to characterize any nontraditional family formation as, to quote Polikoff, “social suicide.” Its proponents link the downfall of marriage to myriad social ills by way of questionable social science “research” (nearly all of it since invalidated), and have long constituted a buffer of pseudo legitimacy between the religious right and the political mainstream.
If figures like Polikoff seem almost viscerally disgusted by the mention of marriage, it is easy to understand why. They’ve been on the defensive, for the past several decades, against those who would poison the term by linking it to the most hostile of social agendas.
Arguably, then, “marriage” is too burdened by political and historical context to shoulder the burden placed on it by our modern legal system. Implicit in Polikoff’s rejection of the word is an argument for simply doing away with it—at least in a legal sense.
Yet this claim has so far held little sway with a frustrated LGBT rights movement, one that finds not only the legality but also (perhaps more importantly) the cultural connotation of marriage at the center of its battle for recognition. While civil unions may confer all the legal benefits of marriage, they nonetheless stand in a sort of separate-but-equal limbo relative to traditional marriage. For many in the queer community, marriage promises a deeply resonant form of social and cultural recognition.
Polikoff counters that we’ve been domesticated by the discourse surrounding marriage—manipulated, really, by a wedge issue. Both marriage and civil unions, she argues, have come to represent a form of imposition, one that necessarily discriminates against those who would otherwise choose not to pursue them but must do so out of legal necessity.
The reality of hospital visitation, legal privacy, the payment of work-related and survivor’s benefits, determinations of housing eligibility—a host of practices whose importance flows from human partnership rather than legal recognition—all revolve around a historical deadweight that gives marriage unnecessary practical weight. It’s an embarrassingly archaic legal model.
Perhaps most interestingly, Polikoff envisions the legal replacement of marriage altogether, bypassing both the gay marriage debate and its accompanying culture war, particularly in states that now have constitutional bans on any legal recognition of same-sex couples. Her approach, after all, is inclusive of homosexual relationships but it does not center the argument around them. To the extent that cultural conservatives may find the redefinition of marriage threatening, they will find poor recourse in arguments demonizing homosexuality.
It’s big news that 49 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll, support gay marriage. We might now predict that homosexuality, and by extension gay marriage, will follow the road traveled by miscegeny: once considered mortally taboo and so profoundly base, interracial relationships are now essentially interwoven with our conception of basic rights.
Yet whether a desperately needed redefinition of marriage will follow from the same point of origin remains to be seen. A shift in societal values, however practical, always seems to grind along oh so slowly—especially when it contends not only with internal division but also with a domestic state of affairs that is, ahem, in the toilet.
Sometimes all we can do is cross our fingers.
