Marriage Note

Andrew Sullivan has a very good comment on how including gay couples will affect civil marriage -- it won't:

Think of the diversity of lived experience that now exists within this civil institution in America. . . . Are people really saying that a lesbian couple of several decades or a newly married couple like me and Aaron fall outside the cultural range of these experiences? Civil marriage is already so broad in its inclusion of social types and practices that including gay couples will make virtually no difference at all. And this is the genius of civil marriage: it's a unifying, not balkanizing, civic institution. To argue that including gay couples destroys the institution is absurd.

He's absolutely right, of course, and it's a stance that I've taken all along: including same-sex couples in marriage isn't going to change anything -- except a 5,000-year-old "definition" that Pat Robertson made up twenty years ago.

Sullivan links to this post by scott H. Payne that I think gets to the core of the issue (finally! I'm happy to see someone recognizing the dualistic nature of this struggle):

Of course, the struggle for marriage equality isn’t an either or affair: it is a struggle for both legal and social equality in the respect afforded same-sex couples. By my lights, Freddie gives the cultural challenges short shrift by focusing exclusively on the legal battles. Certainly I would argue that the first step in achieving some kind of all-around equality lies in securing legal equality of same-sex marriages, but I can’t imagine that anyone who has experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation would suggest that being recognized in law will eradicate the day-to-day symptoms of inequality they encounter.

Payne's post is part of a series at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen that looks interesting. There's a couple of navigation links at the end of the post, starting with Freddie DeBoer's "Same-Sex Marriage and Nomenclature" and going on to E. D. Kain's "Western Civilization and Same-Sex Marriage". I'll try to follow up on these later.