WHAT DO THEY WANT TO TALK ABOUT AT U-MD LAW? From Eve

Yesterday I attended a panel discussion at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore. The discussion was put together by Margins: Maryland's Law Journal on Race, Religion, Gender and Class. It focused on the legal issues surrounding SSM--the current state of the law, upcoming court action, and the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. Here are my admittedly scattered and biased impressions:

Karen Czapanskiy, a professor at the law school, described the recent string of court cases in which same-sex couples have tried to get courts to impose SSM. (And, in Hawaii, succeeded, leading the voters to amend the state's constitution.) She pointed out that the most recent cases may show state courts becoming more cautious, unwilling to be trailblazers, and more amenable to anti-SSM arguments. However, most of these cases are still wending their way through the courts.

Peter Sprigg, director of the Family Research Council's Center for Marriage and Family Studies, hammered on the fact that SSM is a form of marriage that has not been seen in history.

He asked what I think is a really good question: If marriage is not in some essential way linked to reproduction and childrearing, why on earth do we let government mess with it? If marriage is about government picking and choosing which intimate relationships it likes and which ones it disses, isn't that kind of... creepy? We explored that theme on this blog--start here and scroll up.

Sprigg cited two studies claiming to show that children raised by same-sex couples were more likely to identify as gay themselves, and girls raised by gay couples were more likely to experiment sexually ("less chaste" is the term he used, which I would take to mean having sex with more people at an earlier age?).

He argued that because male-male couples are less likely to insist on sexual fidelity, SSM would weaken the general understanding that sexual fidelity is part of the marriage ideal. I tend to agree with him on that.

And he argued that sodomy is unhealthy. I don't think the SSM argument needs to go there, frankly.

Joshua Baker, of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy a.k.a. the people who bring you this weblog, discussed the Federal Marriage Amendment. He noted that the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas took a hard line against government involvement in sexual/intimate relations, and again noted that if marriage is the way government picks which intimate relationships it likes, that looks a lot like government involvement in sexual and romantic relations. And so we might want to come up with a more robust understanding of marriage that is not based on getting my romantic life USDA-Approved.

Baker said he didn't think the FMA was currently necessary to protect marriage, but that it could become necessary soon if courts move to impose SSM.

Elizabeth Seaton, senior counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, started off by recounting a conversation she'd had that morning with her young child, who had wanted to know why Seaton was getting agitated about the speech she'd have to give at this panel. I can't recall the exact exchange, but it was something along the lines of, "Well, honey, there are going to be mean people there."

Child: "How are they mean?"

Seaton: "They say they're in favor of families, but they're not really" or maybe "but they're only in favor of some people's families--not ours."

Child: "Well, why don't you just tell them to take off their masks?"

Ohhhkay, everyone who disagrees with you is a bad person. Sigh.

More substantively, Seaton was the only one to discuss religion, noting that the First Amendment meant that no church would be required to perform or approve of same-sex marriages even if they became legal. I assume she was responding to events in, for example, Britain, where an Anglican bishop was briefly threatened with prosecution for hate speech when he said people with homosexual inclinations could change. Still seemed a bit of a non sequitur.

She pointed out (accurately) that it's not like same-sex couples caused opposite-sex couples' problems--the divorce rate, cohabitation, men who abandon their children, etc.

She also listed particular benefits provided by marriage. More on this in a moment.

Finally, Mina Ketchie, a lawyer in Virginia who specializes in (among other things) alternative family law, described the Sharon Bottoms case; pointed out that opposite-sex couples can be major disasters (she told a funny/sad story about a man who tried to get three divorces in three years via her office); and argued that the best interests of children are not dependent on the sex or number of the parents. (I didn't totally follow that part, to be honest--I wasn't sure if she meant that single parenting was as likely to be beneficial as married parenting, and gay couples were as likely to be beneficial as married mom 'n' pop, or if she just meant that it's better to leave a child with his single mother or lesbian mother rather than snatch him away.) Finally, she noted that although homosexual couples can patch together many of the benefits of marriage with contracts, these contracts are often contestable.

From conversations afterward, I gathered that students were strongly affected by the lists of benefits not granted to unmarried partners, and by the comparison to Loving v. Virginia and laws prohibiting interracial marriage. I'd like to focus on the latter question on this blog soon, since it comes up all the time.
posted by Eve at 10:49 AM VOTE

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