Dear Friend and Reader,
YESTERDAY, AS THE election results rolled in, Eric wrote that we have a long struggle ahead, a massive clean-up job after close to a decade of President Bush. He’s right, and as hundreds of electoral votes built up momentum in a sweeping and early victory for Senator Barack Obama, votes were counted with slightly less fanfare in Florida, Arizona, Arkansas and California.
Florida, Arizona and California voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman in their constitutions, making same-sex marriage virtually impossible to gain. In Arkansas, they banned fostering or adopting children “outside of a valid marriage.” This was imposed to prevent same-sex couples from adopting or fostering children, though it now affects cohabiting heterosexual couples, single people and anyone else who isn’t married.
In California, the decision was joined with a win for animal rights activists, whose proposition to eliminate battery cages (confining farm animals to a space smaller than two-feet squared) reigned victorious. This means that thousands of California citizens checked “yes” for animal rights and “yes” for revoking human rights.
This topic is a difficult one for me, both because I’m gay and because I devoted a year of my life towards a thesis against the institution of marriage: to condense 100 pages into a couple of sentences, I’ve researched marriage as a culture that extols one group, privileging its behaviors and mores over less traditional, but no less loving, partnerships and families. And within the institution itself comes a set of rules, based on a history of patriarchal order, that divides us into masculine and feminine expectations for work outside the home, household labor, child rearing and, yes, sex.
I think it’s time to move past marriage, to develop a form of partnership that’s inclusive of all the formations that relationships take. We should accept not just same-sex and opposite-sex monogamous partnerships, but those of caregivers and the disabled, of cohabiting friends and siblings, of people who are committed to more than one partner. These relationships exist, they don’t fit and are denigrated by the exclusive definition of marriage and they deserve equal recognition under the law.