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Same-Sex Marriage: A Victory For Conservatives?

In a historic vote, Canada's House of Commons this evening passed C-38, the bill to legalize same-sex marriage throughout the country. It was in real terms something of an anticlimax, since by this time only two of the country's 10 provinces (Alberta and Prince Edward Island) still lacked such laws. Nevertheless, on the symbolic plane the law (once approved by the Senate and granted the Royal Assent) will carry great weight.

There has been an extraordinary amount of political gamesmanship over the law. Conservative leader Stephen Harper, who just spent several weeks colluding with the Quebec separatist party Bloc Quebecois to bring down the Liberal minority government (coming on May 19 within a single vote, with the Speaker of the House casting a tie-breaker), now saying that any law passed with the aid of the Bloc lacked legitimacy. Harper has promised to bring a repeal bill if the Conservatives win power, though it is not clear how he could erase the same-sex marriage laws in the 8 provinces that already had them without violating (or setting aside) the Canadian Charter of Rights. Harper has previously offered to institute civil unions nationwide for same-sex couples if same-sex marriage is banned.

Meanwhile, within the Liberals, one MP, Joe Commuzi, left the Cabinet rather than vote for same-sex marriage, while MPs Pat O'Brien and David Kilgour left the Liberal Caucus entirely over it. A group of 12 other discontented Liberals reached a compromise with the government. In order to keep them from voting to bring down the government, Prime Minister Paul Martin agreed to amend the Bill to make sure that public officials opposed to homosexuality would not be forced to perform marriage ceremonies. In addition, the government agreed that religious groups could continue to call homosexuality evil without violating hate-crime statutes, and Churches could refuse to rent their halls for same-sex weddings.

The craven nature of the first provision, and the extraordinary irrelevance to the issues at hand of the others, were testimony, if any were needed, to the real issues at stake--hatred of homoexuality. But then, the incoherence of the dissident Liberals' concerns is as nothing before that of Fred Henry, Roman Catholic Bishop of Calgary, Alberta, who insists that same-sex marriage is a crime against children because it robs children of the chance to have a mother and father.

There may at least be something positive to say about all this sophistry. If the Church and the right-wingers are afraid to simply say right out that they hate homosexuality, and feel the need to cover themselves in language of rights, there is perhaps some victory in terms of acceptable social discourse.

There is, moreover, a distinct irony in the solid opposition of the Right, since the fight for same-sex marriage represents in large part the victory of conservative tendencies within the Gay and Lesbian movement. How did same-sex marriage become the most important, or at least the most public issue of concern to Gays and Lesbians? This is a question that is not by any means easy to answer.

The first mass movement among Gays and Lesbians in the United States was catalyzed by the June 1969 riot of patrons at New York's Stonewall Inn against police harassment. During the early 1970s, tens of thousands of people came out of the closet, marched in the street, or raised their voices in print to protest discrimination. Gay and Lesbian marriage was not a central issue at the time, and probably nobody would ever have imagined that it would be one someday. There were individual couples who devised bonding ceremonies, coupling ceremonies, commitment ceremonies, and a few progressive churches offered same-sex unions (the Unitarian Church became in 1984 the first major denomination to offer such ceremonies). There were also occasional attempts to get past anti-Gay marriage laws. For example, in March 1975, the district attorney’s office in Boulder, Colorado ruled that there were no county laws against same-sex marriage, and the county clerk married a half-dozen gay couples before the state attorney general ruled that such marriages illegal.

Nevertheless, the majority of Gay and lesbians viewed marriage at best as unattainable and irrelevant and at worst as reactionary. The sexual revolution was reaching its peak during the early Gay liberation years. The Feminist movement had laid bare the sexist and bourgeois elements of marriage laws, and the escalating rates of divorce caused many commentators to assert that the institution was dying. Gay male commentators such as Edmund White and Dennis Altman celebrated the community’s status as the avant-garde in expanding sexuality beyond monogamy and in inventing or adapting models of companionship to fit new conditions.

We should not underestimate how much these ideas remain influential in Lesbian and Gay community life. Many of the progressive people who established the movement still speak of marriage as exactly the institution that Queers should be trying to dismantle rather than reinforce it. Moreover, as in the case of military service, even among those who support marriage as a matter of principle, many resent how the issue has swallowed up funding and attention over more substantive struggles like civil rights laws. (There still are no federal sttutes against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and three quaqrters of the states lack such protections). They fear, and not unjustifiably, that the marriage activists risk all the movement’s gains and its hard-won ground on a secondary question, one which is just the kind of emotional issue that attracts widespread opposition.

So what changed then? both lifestyle patterns and the political context. The AIDS epidemic transformed the community by encouraging the formation of long-term, stable relationships particularly by Gay men, to reduce the chance of transmission. Lesbian couples began having children in ever-larger numbers. The development of these relationships also reflected the conservative revival in American culture and the emphasis on “family values” (despite the way the Religious Right used such language as a code for antigay activities!). Ironically, the two Gay-themed books which most often were subjected to censorship in the late 1980s and early 1990s were Leslea Newman’s HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES and Michael Willhoite’s DADDY'S ROOMMATE, both of which were children’s books that featured same-sex parents.

The AIDS epidemic, moreover, came during the Reagan Administration, when social conservatives allied with the Religious Right occupied positions of power and influence. Gays and Lesbians were not immune from this trend (indeed, Terry Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee and lawyer Roy Cohn, who were influential in the conservative revival, were both closeted Gay men who died of AIDS). As thousands of Gay and bisexual men fell sick or died, the government’s inadequate and moralistic response led people who had once rejected political action to engage in government lobbying and interacting with the state on treatment and research issues. In the context of the AIDS epidemic, this also meant that activists concentrated on transforming legal and political structures to obtain legal recognition for gay couples, in order to ensure hospital visitation, survivor rights on apartment leases, and inheritance rights. There were countless horror stories of greedy, ignorant or vengeful families of deceased men challenging wills and claiming jointly or even separately owned houses and possessions of their partners and friends. Meanwhile, in 1983 Sharon Kowalski, a lesbian living with her lover in Minnesota, was seriously injured in an automobile accident, and her estranged family took advantage of her condition to obtain custody and deny her lover access. These cases crystallized for many sexual minorities the dangers they could face and the need for legal protections.

The first step was Domestic Partnerships. While Quebec province granted legal recognition and equal economic benefits for Gay couples as early as 1982, less than a year after Wisconsin became the first U.S. state to enact anti-discrimination laws, those who had bgun to call themselves Queer activists faced a difficult struggle enacting such legislation. Even San Francisco, known as the Gay capital of America, did not offer such legislation until 1991. In the years following, several other large American cities, including New York, followed suit. Domestic partnerships gave couples some useful rights, like survivorships on rent controlled housing. However, it soon became clear that politically speaking this was a dead end, given how limited local and municipal authority went. Domestic partners did not (apart from municipal employees) gain access to joint health care policies, there were no tax advantages, and it was useless in terms of attracting support on the state level. On the contrary, like municipal anti-discrimination ordinances, they could be wiped out by hostile state laws. In 1992 the state of Colorado passed a voter referendum, sponsored by the Religious Right, which banned all laws protecting Gay men and lesbians from discrimination and wiped out any possibility for domestic partnerships. This law was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court and later by the U.S. Supreme Court.

It was around this time that the movement for same-sex marriage rights began. Again, there were a variety of factors that influenced it. First there was the international context. In 1989 Denmark legalized same-sex marriage, and in the following years most of the European Union countries granted some form of equivalent legal status to same-sex couples (such as the PACs in France). Also, after the long and difficult struggles they faced in the state legislatures, many activists felt that they could use the concept of equal protection to oppose discrimination in the courts. However, the most powerful force urging concentration on marrage was that of Gay conservatives such as Bruce Bower and Andrew Sullivan, who began to represent a sizable fraction of the community. (One study found that as many as 25% of open Gays and Lesbians voted for George W. Bush in 2000). The conservatives argued that the way for Gays and Lesbians to achieve acceptance in American society was to demonstrate that they were “normal” by acting like other Americans. Rather than seeking civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, which were difficult to enforce and reinforced the feeling of difference, they insisted that marriage was, (as Sullivan argued in his book VIRTUALLY NORMAL) “ultimately the only reform that matters” since it would represent such “normality.”

In the last 10 years since the Hawaii Supreme Court first ruled on the state's marriage laws, and climaxing with the advent of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts in 2004, the question has come increasingly to the center of U.S. politics and of the Gay and Lesbian movement. Whether it was wise for Gays and Lesbians to focus on marriage is by now a moot question--the issue is there and will not go away. However, that very success in itself is a victory for a faction of Gay and Lesbian communities that is very different (and indeed strongly opposed to) that which fueled the original rise of LGBT movements a generation ago.