Marriage Equality, Revisited

Over at The Immanent Frame, there is an interesting post this morning:  Promoting Marriage and Christianity in America.  To read the entire post, click here.  The author, Melanie Heath, "is assistant professor of sociology at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her forthcoming book, One Marriage Under God: Defense of Marriage Actions in Middle America, will be published by New York University Press."

Here are some excerpts:

Following the recent California Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, National Public Radio offered a report on “the coming storm” between two “titanic” legal principles: “equal treatment for same-sex couples” and “the freedom to exercise religious beliefs.” The report gave several examples of this “collision,” which opponents cite as proof that same-sex marriage is a threat to religious liberty. The idea of an impending collision may overstate the intensity of impending legal conflicts, especially since cases of this nature have been fought for several decades following the emergence of laws prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment and education for non-heterosexuals. Still, the current portrayal of this conflict does foreground the complex relationship of marriage, religion, and the state to promote one form of marriage (white, heterosexual, monogamous). It is same-sex marriage’s (and polygamy’s) challenge to this interrelationship that provokes such anxiety among religious conservatives.

Posts by Stephanie Coontz and Tey Meadow and Judith Stacey reveal the multilayered and complex history of marriage and Christianity in Europe and America, and its culmination in what Coontz remarks was an “untraditional” shift by the state to make marriage a privileged status that is attached to a large number of social and economic benefits (and constraints). In this vein, I will turn my attention to the less-known marriage promotion movement in the United States, in order to shed further light on how state and religion work together to define and protect the boundaries of marriage, and what this movement might mean for the future of marriage equality.

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While religious conservatives balk at their loss of religious liberty under an increasingly wide array of antidiscrimination laws in relation to non-heterosexuals, it is significant that government marriage promotion policies combine religion and science to extend the privileged status of marriage to white, middle-class, heterosexual couples. This analysis speaks to the demands that social justice will require of the movement for marriage equality. Even as the battle against “separate but equal” recognition of same-sex couples gains legal footing, those fighting for marriage equality must take into consideration the consequences of the movement on other forms of social inequality. On the one hand, as states move in the direction of Massachusetts and California, it will become more difficult for government, politics, and religion to unite in an effort to promote heterosexual marriage as the superior family form. On the other, as Meadow and Stacey argue in their post, it does not offer justice to those outside the boundary of marriage who are barred from accessing its socioeconomic benefits, whether straight or gay. Thus, there are good reasons to expand the fight for marriage equality to consider the option offered in the California Supreme Court decision, for the state to eliminate the term “marriage” altogether and allow religious and secular communities to offer their own “definition.” This solution will not eliminate legal conflicts over antidiscrimination and religious liberty, but it might provide for a more just world.