An Alternative To Same-Sex Marriage? (Updated)

Via Sullivan, this essay on the downside of same-sex marriage by Tom Flynn. He's missing a huge point here, and I think the fault is that -- well, thinking about it, it's just that he wants an alternative to marriage and wanted us -- the gay civil rights movement -- to do the dirty work for him.

Those of us who eagerly awaited a legally robust alternative institution are the losers. The GLBT movement was the only constituency on today’s horizon with the power to force that sort of reform. In all likelihood, no strong and legal alternative to marriage will be achieved during our lifetimes.

There is one aspect of marriage that he doesn't touch on, which is arguably the most important -- after all, civil unions and domestic partnrships can provide all the legal and economic benefits of marriage, even if it becomes more complicated and expensive when children are involved (although that can certainly be built into the law, as well). But "civil unioned" doesn't really have the same resonance as "married," you know?

It's something I've discussed before, but to repeat myself once again, in spite of it's quasi-religious aura (or maybe because of it), marriage as a social institution has one overriding feature that no alternative can provide, at least not for the foreseeable future: instant recognition by the group of the married couple's status. If you say "we're married," people immediately know where you fit into the scheme of things. They can identify you in social-role terms without having to think about it. They know that you are a family, and that you and your spouse are probably not available for certain recreational activities, and that if you have kids you'll probably be showing up at PTA meetings. You are a known member of the community.

Want to try that with a domestic partnership? In Washington state or California, you could come close; in Chicago, it means nothing. (Yes, we do have a domestic partnership registry in Chicago. And it really does mean almost nothing, except that if your employer offers domestic partner benefits, you qualify. And you get to pay the taxes on them.) But people can recognize you as a couple only to the extent that they recognize any other couple cohabiting. You're not "married."

There's a fair amount of history at the beginning of that essay that as far as I can see doesn't pertain, centering on the "traditional" marriage in which a father essentially granted property rights in his daughter to her new owner. The minute you have two guys in Iowa getting married, that goes right out the window. (And I might remind those lesbian feminists who are against marriage to remember that, as well. The point is, as you should have been able to infer from the points I made above about marriage as a social-recognition mechanism, that marriage may be tied up with patriarchy in your mind, but that doesn't mean it is in mine.)

Anyway, I'd be inclined to take this whole thing more seriously if I thought Flynn was serious, but somehow, I think he's just playing.

Update: Ran across this response by Andrew Sullivan to other arguments in a similar vein, by Jonathan Rowe and Robert P. George. (Rowe is also responding to this post by Sullivan.) I haven't read them yet, but I'll come back to this when I've had a chance. In the meantime, read Sullivan's piece -- he underscores some of my arguments above about the social-recognition function of marriage, and makes a couple of new points.