Okay we gotta talk about marriage for a second.

Let me get this off my chest.

So, as I’m sure you all know, earlier this week President Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law. And, you know, great! That’s definitely a good thing; it’s wonderful that the Defense of Marriage Act has been consigned to the trash bin, and that married queers don’t have to worry about losing their legal protections if the SCOTUS sets Obergefell on fire (even if some states may move forward with banning new same gender marriages, which… would not be great, admittedly).

But.

Can I just say that it is so weird to me that we are at a point where marriage (marriage!!!) has become the de facto LGBTQ+ fight, where if you’re not super jazzed about the RFMA, if you’re not hailing it as the height of social progress, that you’re apparently a nasty old homophobe? Because personally, I think marriage is… not a great institution, and I think we should be skeptical about the actual progress represented by the RFMA, about what road it is leading us down. But as I learned yesterday on Twitter, uh, people do not like it when you say that.

Let me back up for a second so that I can make myself perfectly clear. Weddings? They’re wonderful, I love to go to them, I always cry my eyes out. Finding someone you want to commit to for life and merging your futures together? Nice work if you can get it. Monogamy? I mean sure, if that’s your bag, I support it wholeheartedly!

But marriage — by which I specifically mean the state-sanctioned, legal framework governed by the Respect for Marriage Act — has nothing to do with any of those things. Marriage is a legal framework by which the state regulates whose families do and do not count, who is and is not afforded access to legal rights and protections; it’s also a system through which the state coerces people to stay in their relationships (as you may be aware, divorce is a pretty punitive, ugly process). And it’s that government policing of the family and the home, that offering of benefits for people who conform to government-approved configurations in their personal lifestyles — that’s the thing I have a problem with.

I am not coming up with anything new here, by the way. There’s a long history of queer and feminist thought that takes issue with marriage for a whole host of reasons. Indeed, when Andrew Sullivan wrote a pro-gay marriage essay in a 1989 issue of The New Republic, he specifically framed it as a conservative argument. And he was right! At the end of the day, marriage equality was a process of queer people opting into and expanding the institution of marriage, of confirming the government’s right to police who we do and don’t get to call our family, by seeking the approval of queer couples through inclusion in marriage.

And it didn’t have to be this way. Indeed, Sullivan outlines an alternative future in that linked essay (which you really should read, it’s incredibly enlightening), one where instead of buying into marriage, people destabilize marriage by opting for less constrictive arrangements like domestic partnerships and civil unions. As Sullivan notes, the domestic partnership framework theoretically allows anyone — an elderly person and their caretaker, two straight bros, some really good friends — to flag each other as legally important and give one another access to things like health insurance and hospital visitation rights. For Sullivan, a future where domestic partnership overtakes marriage — where people are bound together by free association rather than buying into the staid institution of marriage — is a nightmare. (Andrew Sullivan, by the way, is a right wing racist. Just so you know who is making this argument.)

Yet here we are, in 2022, with marriage equality a mainstream position and domestic partnerships largely on the downswing (in New York City you can still get one regardless of the gender of the parties, but in many places they were shunted to the side once marriage equality gave everyone access to marriage). And I gotta say, it makes me kind of bummed out. Because marriage is allowed to serve as a stand in for universal healthcare, for better immigration reform, for the many queer fights that aren’t about whether the government deems your relationship worthy of legal recognition. And I just think we all deserve something better.

It is worth noting, by the way, that even as the Respect for Marriage Act confirms the validity of same gender and mixed race partnerships, it specifically calls out non-monogamous relationships (or in the text of the bill “polygamous marriages”) as not recognized by the government. This is in line with what I’m talking about when I say marriage is a tool for the state to determine which families are and aren't valid. Sure, your gay partnership is worthy of recognition, but if you want it to become a triad, you’re out of luck. And to me, the answer isn’t fighting to broaden marriage to include poly people, because no matter how much we expand the definition of marriage, no matter how many new groups we give access to, we’re still kind of circling the real issue, which is that you shouldn’t have to be in a relationship (let alone a legally recognized one!) in order to gain access to healthcare or housing or parental rights or citizenship or any manner of things that are currently bound up in marriage. It’s not just that the state should extend these protections to anyone who is in love: the state should extend these protections to everyone, regardless of their relationship status. We just shouldn’t have to turn to marriage to simply feel safe.

There’s a lot more that I can say here, but I feel like I’m already going a little bit astray from the purpose of this newsletter (although marriage equality is certainly a bi issue, and nonmonogamous bisexuals probably have feelings about that polygamous marriage stuff!). But I just wish we could have more nuanced discussions of marriage, ones that separate all the love! commitment! family! stuff from the cold-eyed process of a bureaucrat deciding whether or not you’re “in love enough,” or in love in the correct way, to be able to extend citizenship to one another. I just wish we could see that it is bad, actually, for politicians to be deciding what our home lives, what our families, should look like, and that we should fight for the freedom to determine those things for ourselves.

But, hey. DOMA — an unconstitutional law that absolutely sucked — is dead, and I’m absolutely happy about that. So for now I’m just going to focus on that part.

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