Saving Marriage

Or: My Marriage Hipocracy and the essential importance of marriage equality.

Marriage equality would not only extend fundamental rights to same sex partners, but better the institution for all of those who are already privileged with the option.

Garrison Keillor made all sorts of funny fun of UUs today and it was pretty good. A UU football team that took equal turns being the quarterback and refused to make plans and ran every which way on the field...it was much funnier when Keillor told the story. Anyhow, today at my UU church Rev Olson was recounting stories from the fight for marriage equality over the years and was discussing the question of hypocrisy. For those who have argued against the traditional patriarchy of marriage, the burden of a past and a present of inequalities between husband and wife, how can they fight for an institution that should be torn down, disassembled and dramatically reinvented if not jettisoned? If marriage is rooted in the ownership of women, the control of women, the subservience of women, how can we praise marriage?

Well, some choose to jettison the concept. But legal union makes sense, and is worth fighting for. Marriage needs to be saved from itself. Until we arrive at complete marriage equality, marriage – my marriage – is stained with both patriarchy and discrimination.

I believe these things, but I got married. What hypocrisy. What predictable horseshit. Let me explain why I do not want to jettison marriage as a cultural and legal institution, and why instead it should be saved.

Love and marriage are not the same. You can have one without the other (though marriage tends to go more smoothly with love). Love certainly does not need marriage. Marriage, as legal union, is a singular thing. As people we have emotions and hearts that we can choose to share, and we also have a legal personality that we can choose to share. My decision to marry was a decision to intertwine my legal personality with another, because I wanted to be partners in life – not only love, but the physical material legal part of life that we experience. It was also a decision to engage in a social ritual, an announcement of the decision about legal union, and an important familial social ceremony, which, as a pretend anthropologist, feels important.

In marrying we joined an institution steeped in patriarchy, but, I believe, without essential patriarchical elements. But there is no avoiding the fact that we joined an institution that is unequivocally prejudicial. It appeared to us that refraining from marrying did nothing to further marriage equality. We made a decision to benefit from privilege. I recognize that this is difficult morality. But even if our refraining from marriage would not further the movement for equality, it is absolutely clear that equality of marriage would dramatically improve the value of our marriage. Not our personal relationship in marriage, but the historical institution to which we joined and our feelings about it. The strong hesitation I felt in making the choice to marry, every hesitation about celebrating the choice for legal unity, the sneaky guilt that creeps in, disgust at seeing old patterns, fear of mimicking them – all of these worries cast a shadow on the happiness of having a partner to traverse the day to day, the small and the big, the legal the rational and the emotional and aspirational, with. They are rooted in a history and an immediacy that would be ameliorated (patriarchy) and eradicated (discrimination) with the passage of laws that brought full and complete equality of marriage to all persons desiring to intertwine their legal personhoods.

This is an incredibly selfish perspective – saving marriage so that we privileged heteros get to feel better about benefiting from it. I recognize that sin. But it is also about rectifying the sins of a practical and valuable social institution. Marriage equality would not only extend fundamental rights to same sex partners, but better the institution for all of those who are already privileged with the option.