ALTERNATIVES TO MARRIAGE: Maggie v. Dale

I see the deep difference between you and me Dale is that you think gay marriage (or marriage equivalents) would have little effect on marriage and a large effect on gays and lesbians, while I think the marriage effects would be large (for unisex marriage certainly, and I am uncertain of the long-term effect of going down the path of creating quasi-marital institutions) while the benefits to gay and lesbians individuals would be minimal.

I am not averse to helping people find concrete solutions to actual problems. I really do not believe that attaching benefits to couple relationships is likely to distribute these solutions very widely in the gay community. A young man called up while Andrew and I were debating on the Diane Rehm show this week. He said something like (I am quoting from memory): "I am a gay man. Gay marriage is the darling of the gay intelligentsia, it has nothing to do with giving me things I want or need."

Just one man's voice, of course. But the spokespeople for gays and lesbians on this issue are not elected after all, or at least not by gay people. How widely shared is this belief that marriage and quasi-marital benefits are what gays and lesbians really need right now? I wish HRC would bother to spend the money to do a nationally representative poll gays and lesbians to find out.

But from what I can figure out from other evidence, the demand for either marriage, or marriage benefits, as a personal matter, is really not widespread in the gay community. Which means attaching benefits to civil unions is not going to be a good way of distributing them widely where they are needed (as when a gay man's partner is denied entrance to an ICU, or when a doctor ignores a gay man's right to designate his best buddy as his medical decisionmaker in favor of blood kin.)

What is this evidence? This is a long post and I am afraid my computer will freeze and I will lose it. Be back in a second with the evidence that marital benefits are not going to help that many gays and lesbians.
posted by maggie at 3:34 PM VOTE

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