SEPARATION OF MARRIAGE AND STATE: Garance Franke-Ruta

Via Daily Kos, I see Juan Cole is proposing that we get rid of the state's role in marriage altogether and replace it with a "civil contract" into which individuals of any gender can enter, leaving "marriage" itself as a purely religious institution ratified only by churches (and, presumably, synagogues and mosques). This strikes me as one of the worst ideas I've heard in a long time and a totally counterproductive approach to the question of the hyper-politicization of the idea of gay marriage. Basically, Cole is proposing to destroy marriage as we know it in order to accommodate gay people's desire to marry. It is incomprehensible to me that such an idea would tame passions on this topic; it can only inflame them.

Basically, what Cole is arguing is that all marriage be abolished and replaced with civil union-like arrangements. Currently, gays in Vermont can enter into a civil union as a state contract and then be married religiously by whatever church, such as the Unitarians, will perform such a ceremony. And in the states where civil unions exist, gays have most of the same the rights as married heterosexuals with regard to each other. Cole is proposing transforming straight marriage into something more like gay marriage in states with civil union laws, where the legal and religious aspects of the contract and institution are disentangled. ...

This is exactly the kind of thing that religious conservatives have long warned gay marriage would lead to and why they are so agitated about stopping any effort to allow it. Proposing to do exactly what conservatives fear most -- abolish marriage as we know it -- in order to accommodate gay people can only make the anti–gay marriage blowback that much stronger.

Further, any arrangement that disentangled marriage from the legal protections that a century and a half of feminist agitating have finally got enshrined into marriage law would likely have an extremely deleterious effect on the rights of women over time. ...

Besides, what if you believe in the institution of marriage as a secular social institution with an abiding moral and historical force? I know plenty of people married in non-religious ceremonies for whom the institution retains its moral and spiritual meaning as the lifelong union of two individuals and the social union of two families and the basic moral framework within which to have a family, even absent any religious imprimatur. Marriage has all kinds of different meanings for different people and in different cultures -- think arranged marriages -- but it is an incredibly radical thing in the Anglo-American legal and historical framework to propose the idea of getting the government out of the straight marriage business altogether and replacing it with a series of genderless contracts.

I know everyone is all agitated about how to solve the dilemma of the Democrats and the backlash against the idea of gay marriage that in 2004 contributed to their failure to gain office, but one word of advice: You're not going to solve anything if you start mucking about with straight marriage. You're just not.

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posted by Eve at 10:24 PM VOTE

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