I agree that there are a plethora of issues which should take precedence over the legalization of gay marriage. Additionally, bringing up gay rights during election time only deters more conservative/religious voters from evaluating far more important social problems. Indeed, there is a problem with the "privileges" that come along with marriage as everyone, married or single, should have the same protections and rights. However, I don't think that it is realistic to expect that we will ever get rid of the institution of marriage. I do think that we need to look at family units in a different way. Yes, many queers, like myself, wish to be able to marry our partners because of the so called "privileges." I've heard of the horrors that other gay couples have experienced in regards to property rights, hospital visitation, and issues surrounding adoption. This is an important human and civil rights issue. If we can't be granted the basic right to have a family and thus be accepted and respected in our communities, then we are merely second class citizens. I'd love to see a day when people mind their own business when it comes to other people's personal/sexual lives, however that may never be with such an integration of church and state as well as the fact that there will always be bigots in the world. So for now I will relish each small step we make towards being considered "just like everyone else."

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Yup. The gay marriage red flag is used to distract us from the disaster that the neocon agenda has become.

We absolutely do need to focus on oppression issues across the board.

Yes, there are as many views of marriage as there are keyboards to discuss them.

None of this is profound. What is fundamental is the codification of equality for all men and women with equal protection under the law. None of the ancillary issues raised in this article supersedes it, or even enters into it.

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You want the legal privileges of married people without being married?

Do you want the legal privileges of married people taken away?

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I don't get, after two readings, why anyone who supports gay rights would be unhappy about this decision. There are lots of things it doesn't solve, including global warming and the Burmese junta. But hey, I'll take good news where I find it.

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So the article wants universal healthcare. And allowing homosexuals to marry doesn't help that. But the article seems to suggest that hospital visitation rights should be extended. That seems nuts to me. I can imagine some idiot trying to sell me a burial plot or a home alarm system when I'm in a hospital bed. Why not restrict that to family?

The article unnecessarily insults people who do value marriage with that 1950s Ward and June sort of slam.

There are plenty of problems with marriage, and there are many reasons that gay people might want to avoid it. But this article doesn't seem to address any good ones. Besides, no one is forcing anyone to get married.

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Hear! Hear! Glad to know the anti-assimilationist movement is still alive and well. I've always felt that queer people should celebrate their essential differences and thumb their noses at hetero conventions, including marriage. Why try to emulate an institution that is bankrupt? At least half of all marriages end in divorce -- is that something we should fight for? Straight people can't do anything creative but breed; it takes a fairy to make something pretty. I'm in favor of civil unions if the laws enabling them also vest in queer people all of the rights enjoyed by straights, but I think gay marriage is fawning and unbecoming.

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I always used to wonder why conservatives called liberals gloomy, unhappy people. Then Alternet created the Comment feature and I understood why.

There are a lot of other issues besides Gay Marriage that are distracting us from the "more important issues" you and the rest of us are concerned about. If you don't want to get married, then don't. If you want to snub your nose at convention, you certainly don't have to be "queer" to do that.

But can't us liberals be happy when something good happens for others, even if it isn't 100% what we want? Maybe it's not what you want, but obviously this is an issue that a lot of people care deeply about. Bless the people who are walking that path and carry on walking down yours.

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This article is basically BS and some of it doesn't even make sense -. "...hospital visitation rights but not for anyone without a spouse," for example. Such rights are for immediate family for good reasons. How can a queer partner establish his or her self as family without legal recognition - recognition that FORCES potentially unfriendly hospital staff to permit visitation? "...inheritance rights...but what if there is notihng to inherit?" Well duh! Then you inherit nothing. Personally, I worked long and hard years to acquire what I have and I want it to go to my legal partner and my adopted gay sons without challenge or hassle. So 50% of marriages end in divorce - that leaves 50% that DO NOT! My parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and more were all very happily married for, in each case, over 50 years. I have been "married" to my partner for almost 14 wonderful years. The fact is marriage often does work very well. I'm not trying to emulate any "1950s model" - just trying to live happily and securely with the one person I love more than anyone else in the world. That is called marriage and it has been around for a lot longer than the 1950s. I have been an OUT activist ever since Stonewall and have never tried to blend in with the majority - but the desire to love a partner and make a life together is a basic human need that transcends politics and agendas. If Ms. Sycamore rejects such need or has been herself unable to find such a partner, I am sorry for her deprivation but this does not give her the right to unilateral prescription regarding the sort of life those of us who do wish to secure legal union should lead. As for there being more important things to worry about in the present world - yes - there are. That in no way obviates the validity of this cause however. Further, this cause directly and personally affects a large number of queers in very important ways. Perhaps Ms. Sycamore can tell a person who has just been shut out of a hospital emergency room when his or her partner is dying that they really should be more concerned with global warming, but I certainly could not. I know personally of such cases and they are very consequential indeed, for those involved.

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Thanks you for this article. In Connecticut we are going through the same crap. All the resources and the people are being used for marriage. They have the big $ and have convinced everyone that what the middle class and the rich want is what we all want. No other issue matters. Just try to get gays and lesbians out for another cause. This one issue crap really gets me. Our movement has taken a wrong turn. I really don't want to be accepted on any terms straights have set up. They can't nor do they define me. Glad there are pockets who are challenging the entire system of heteronormativity and the gay and lesbians whose gene's have been paled.

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I may be nuts, but I think the legal institution of marriage should be abolished.

Yeah, I'm most likely nuts. C:)

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"In fact, the push for gay marriage has shifted advocacy away from essential services like HIV education, AIDS health care, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, and homeless care -- all crucial needs for far more queers than marriage could ever be."

This is where the gay-marriage victory fails to be an over-all victory. It's not a face off between the good and the perfect either, because the author is pointing out the ways in which the fight for gay-marriage has hurt the prospect of being equal in any substantial sense.

This has been an ideological battle over equal identity at the expense at the political battle for equal lives.

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'It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' - Krishnamurti

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thanks Sycamore! I have been wondering where you guys (anti-assimilationists?) were lately. In the 1970s, I knew lots of gay folks who had no intention ever to get married. You can get around the problem of hospital visitation by preparing a list of allowed visitors beforehand, just the way you prepare a durable power of attorney. The rest comes with civil unions. But, a church service with the blessing of God and everybody? What's the point? Go to a costume outlet, rent a room, hire a caterer and have your own party with the one you love! Get a friend to preside, write your own vows. Nobody can stop you, at least not legally. Why do you want the blessing of a society that rejected you? Why do you want to change the institution or marriage? Why not just leave the institution behind and chart a new course? There is little or no concrete benefits and lots of cost. As soon as you mention gay marriage, the Know-Nothings come out of the woodwork like ants in the new Indiana Jones movie. All of us pay the price just so you can say, "I do"?. This is analogous to all those women who continue to (blindly) support HRC just because she is a woman and "it's a woman's turn". You want to get married because it's your turn? This isn't a teeter-toter we're taking turns on here. This is a real life and death struggle with empire and totalitarianism. What's more important?

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...didn't solve all the problems of racial inequality and injustice, either. So am I just being selfish about being grateful for the opportunity to be happily married to my African American wife, even though I'm white?

Sometimes people just want to marry the one they love. What's so bad about that? Do we have to fix every other problem in society first?

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Perhaps it is because I am a lesbian and not a queer identified gay man but I've never been a part of the frantic sex partnering that goes on within the gay male community.

I've never considered myself either a sexual outlaw nor a gender queer.

My life goals and fantasies are pretty much indistinguishable from those of straight politically aware progressive people. I watch PBS and have Ikea book cases, partnered museum memberships and long for a Prius to replace the Jetta.

And yes my assimilated into our suburban city life partner and I will be journeying to California to get married sans pomp at a courthouse with a friend as witness.

The queer culture of rebellion is mainly young and predominately male. I am like most older lesbians pretty much indistinguishable from my straight peers.

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While the author makes a good point that gay marriage is not the most important thing in the world, even for gay people, the unwritten message seems to be that the author wants to remain polyamorous and doesn't want the availability of gay marriage to make him feel guilty for his sluthood. I have no personal knowledge of the author, I am not a psychoanalyst, and certainly the author said no such thing, but this is the subtext that I detect. Am I alone in this?

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And love this in particular:

"If social change is on the agenda, then the privileges associated with marriage need to be challenged, not embraced."

!

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Someone's always got to keep stirring the pot. We get a much-needed right and it's NEVER GOOD ENOUGH.

Well, honey. I've got news for you. It's f*cking good enough for me. After all, how many years has this been fought for? Huh? Did you help in any way? I sure did.

I will be married in CA even if it's only till November. I've been with my partner now for over 20 years. We own property together - some of which is in CA. We're domestic partners in CA - which is fine, but we wanted more. And I'll take the increment. I'll take my share. I'll take more, but not if it means yanking all the groundwork out from under us and turning all that effort to dust.

Keep stirring. Keep poisoning the pot. Keep making it difficult for those of use who have fought and worked on this issue for a very long time. We've put money into it and we've supported Lambda Legal. In fact, I was there to meet two of the defendants just two days before the CA decision. I was proud of them. I was proud of the work that the lawyers at Lambda Legal did and I was proud that the Republican majority in the Supreme Court recognized what was at stake. This is just the first step.

If you expect a sea-change in the theocratic nation you live in you are sorely mistaken. The religious morons in this country will not allow us precisely what we want as long as they cling to their Bronze Age mythology. Since it's impossible to prevent religious thought in people I will take what I can get and work even harder for the rest as time goes on. It takes work, honey. Lots of it.

I suspect you're too young to understand what historical value this decision represents. You can keep your sour, bitter attitude to yourself, honey. Or you can work for equal rights like we have.

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Why are we making Gay Marriage an issue months from a presidential election again, to remove the closest thing to a Fascist Regime America has ever faced..?

Can't this wait just 8 months after 6,000 years of men marrying women would 8 months be too much to ask..after they way the fascist Republicans used this in 2004 to swing the election can't it wait just 8 more 8 months then as far as I am concerned we can have wholesale Gay polygamy for all I care..

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I don't understand why some gay people want to embrace the mess heterosexuals have made of marriage. With Los-Vegas-drive-by-1-hour-marriages; a 50% divorce rate; I-wanna-marry-a-really-rich-guy-television-shows, surely gay people can devise ,and aspire to, a better model of commitment.

To me, the injustice is not that gay people cannot marry, but that marriage confers privilege. The struggle should be to decouple status-based privilege from the secular domain and return marriage to religion as a sacrament, where participants of a particular faith decide what form it should take.

A simple way to deal with hospital visitation, is to require that hospitals respect medical directives. Then just add a line like this to the directive: 'I want the following people to able to visit me if I become hospitalized: ...' Simple. No marriage mess required.

If you have something worth leaving to a partner, hire a lawyer to write a will. If you can't afford a lawyer, consider this: A friend of mine in Virginia, scribbled on a torn piece of paper the following words when hospitalized, before he died, 'I leave everything to 'name of partner'. Then he had two hospital employees witness the document and the partner got the inheritance. Simple. No marriage mess required.

Gay people have a culture that is more fabulous than the profoundly sick society heterosexuals have created. Assimilation deletes gay culture when we embrace heterosexual norms. Leave marriage to heterosexual people.

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in the fight for equality.

Why does this have to be a "this OR that" type of argument. This is a fabulous step and maybe, just maybe attitudes will be changed and other rights and stuff will come after.

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just asking.

on topic: marriage, lol!

jdfu!

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I'm lesbian and I find this insulting. What is so wrong with wanting a long term monogomous relationship? Why would I want to fall into the stereotype of multiple partners that so many "straight" people seem to think we belong in, or can't help ourselves from.

Maybe there are other issues right now that should be in the spotlight, but if you actually look at who brings these issue into view, mostly it's the righties. They need to stir up their base, they talk about gay marriage or abortion.

We could sit and talk about Iraq, China, earthquakes, global warming, healthcare, child abuse, food price increases, gas prices, pollution control, drought....but then someone might actually have to do something. Keeping the gay marriage debate open lets everyone rest on their laurels while shouting at the top of their lungs. So, if we just get this issue off the table by passing it already, because there's no reason not to, we can move on to bigger and better issues.

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My German Shepard, Luke, and I are in a loving, committed relationship. When and where can we be married?

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There's some comment about queer people's "differences" here as an argument in support of this piece. Hang on a minute. We are everywhere, and we are everything, and we do and like everything, so why the hell should we follow one strand of thinking? If gay couples want to get married good on them. If they don't good on them. But don't go telling me what to think or do, that's fascistic behaviour

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When I see an argument where the strongest point is something like this:

"In fact, the push for gay marriage has shifted advocacy away from essential services like HIV education, AIDS health care, drug treatment, domestic violence prevention, and homeless care -- all crucial needs for far more queers than marriage could ever be."

I want to see the proof ... the numbers.

"Just the facts, ma'am", said with love from the carpet-muncher of 24 years.

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I always look to AlterNet for good journalism and I am a bit shocked by this post and its sheer lack of good logic and journalism—‘op-ed’ or not. If I spent all my activist time (and $$) for universal health care am I taking away from other good causes such as helping our with victims of Katrina? No question. But logic denotes that no one person or group can be emotionally, physically or monetarily (no matter how well off) a do-gooder for all causes, so we pick and choose the ones to which we personally feel most bonded. Many of us, including myself and my peers, do a lot to propel many good causes, both queer and non-queer, including those mentioned above. The root here is about personal choice for each individual to spend his or her energies and gifts in the areas that move them the most. Then they divide those choices the best they can amongst those in need. Even if the author does not agree with the above, the issue at the foundation of Gay Marriage is about the basic dignity of being treated not as a second-class citizen, but as one who is a human being worthy of the same rights as their brother or sister, friend or colleague. Nothing more, nothing less. And to make it about something more seems like another unfortunate (and unnecessary) division in our community. All good work is good work. Thoughts are things, so make them good ones and let’s not castigate our most generous for wanting a little respect for themselves as well. To disparage those who give of their time, money and soul for the simple dignity of being seen as an equal to those they encounter on a day-to-day basis, is just destructive. If anything, I see this article as one that wastes the time and energies of our community and divides our most treasured resource—community. It also gives the ‘right-wing sound machine’ another topic to echo over and over again, making unseemly those that are only seeking to correct a very unfortunate wrong in their lives. I am hoping that was not the author’s original intention.

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First off, there are lots of us, and different groups of us can work on different things. The gay marriage fight has been going on at the same time as we won the fight to overturn sodomy laws. The prohibition on HIV+ people from entering the US is on the verge of being overturned. GBLT youth all over this grand country are making huge strides not just in high schools, but in middle schools. Many states have ENDAs, and we'll have a federal ENDA soon. And those are just the GBLT issues. People haven't exactly been idle on the other pressing issues.

And second, speak for yourself. I got married in Portland four years ago for the brief period it was legal, and after my marriage was annulled by the voters of Oregon, I went and did it again in Vancouver. Married life rocks, and in part because married life is what I and my husband have made it.

I appreciate activists who are never satisfied in many ways; it means they'll keep pushing for positive change. But at the same time, take a fucking moment to appreciate when something goes well. If you never show any appreciation for something positive, the majority that you have to persuade will come to believe that since you can't ever feel any happiness when you get what you asked for, why the hell should they bother supporting you?

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The author here makes a HUGE historical-revisionist ASSumption. Namely that marriage was somehow "invented" by Christians, and I'm guessing from the Tanakaest references Jews beforehand. Simple and ACTUAL fact is marriage was conceived first in Kemet (ancient Egypt), which pre-dates even Judiesm by many thousands of years (at LEAST 6000 years older than the Hebrews from known still existing artifacts and archelogical findings). It was that culture, as a hereditary Kemetian my culture and I'm proud to say my ancestors who first conceived marriage. I'm proud because women were equals to men and marriage was NOT ether a form of ownership of wives, nor was it restricted to only hetrosexual couples. My suggestion is do a little research first before ASSuming. Research does NOT mean blindly buying the lies of Christian fundy historical revisionists. It is the rest of us non-Christians who need to defend marriage, REAL marriage, and rescue it from them.
Magister Reverend Setnakt, SoT/SoA
Founder, and co-CEC, Siaion Temple Groups

~Xeper~


VI~Mg~CEC

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Funny that there's an editor's note in two places on this page linking to Greta Christina's more liberal "different take" on this marriage hoopla, but no links drawing folks from Christina's to Mattilda's article.

It's probably an oversight, but one that seems unfair if AlterNet's trying to be "balanced."

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I think we can sum up a lot of people's opinions as "marriage sucks, having the right to marry is no big deal".

Talk about not being able to see the forest because there are all those damn leaves in the way!!

Here's a hint: Just because we CAN get married, doesn't mean we HAVE to. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in marrying another man. But ya know what? Having the CHOICE to do so, it being MY decision and not someone elses, is VERY important to me.

And it should be important to you as well.

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so, the question ultimately is, what are the answers? how do you reconstruct the institution of marriage, and what do you offer for how it should be. anti-marriage is anti-marriage gay or straight. its great to state an opinion, but in order for it all to be worth while, offer some ideas geared towards a solution to further aid in that reconstruction - not just cause more complaints against marriage.
reform how marriage supposedly gives tax breaks - not very true unless kids are involved. if there aren't incentives to being financially tied to someone, legal unions are worthless. religious unions are a completely different topic.

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This is an excellent article, however I think there's a much more important reason to be skeptical and angry about the gay marriage business:

In 2004 John Kerry lost (IMO) because his state in the months before the election legalized gay marriage, and motivated thousands of Republicans to vote against him. This was, I believe, bigger than the Swift Boat bull$#!+

In 2008, the very same thing could happen again. Luckily, neither of the Dem candidates are as strongly tied to CA as Kerry is to MA.

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Was it published because you couldn't find another "con" opinion on this issue that wasn't blatantly homophobic? Pointlessly slamming straight people for being straight is not really any more productive. I plan to marry my partner so that we can spend our lives together, in the same country (we are citizens of two different countries). This is pointless, to the author? Does the author not believe that it's possible for two humans to want to spend their lives together? Or maybe our time as activists would be better spent if we worked on convincing every country in the world to abolish all immigration laws?
I don't buy the implication that no people ever form committed relationships, and I don't think anyone has the right to look down on another person for their choices in the love/sex/dating arena. I'm with the majority of the other commenters on this one, I think.

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Sycamore and those of us who share her perspective are not responsible for dividing the LGBT/Queer community - Part of the point is that "our community" has already been divided, by advocates of gay marriage who don't recognize all the members of this supposed community that won't benefit from gay marriage. It's frustrating to watch so many resources being poured into those campaigns when so many people will still not have adequate health care, when so many people will still be dying trying to cross the border, queer or not, when people supposedly in "our community" will still make derisive comments about those of us who are transgender or not monogamous. Yes, gay marriage is good for a handful of people, but it also reinforces ideas of "normal" relationships and family structures. I will never invest in the fight for gay marriage because it gets at the heart of none of these larger inequalities.

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lemme spell it for you.


I
N
S
U
R
A
N
C
E


if you're not *married* you're invisible to the Law.

period.


...Right to Life decisions?
...Medical consent?
...Need to call your consulate because your traveling partner has disappeared?


FORGET IT if you're NOT MARRIED.




┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄┄
BlueBerry Pick'n
can be found @
ThisCanadian
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"We, two, form a Multitude" ~ Ovid.
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"Silent Freedom is Freedom Silenced"
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