Freedom to Marry Week: Day Seven

As my final post for Freedom to Marry Week, I want to share some thoughts on civil unions. Next week, New Jersey becomes the third state (after Vermont and Connecticut) to permit civil unions. Such unions come with all the rights and privileges of marriage. Is there any reason to complain?

Yes—which is not to say we shouldn’t appreciate or take advantage of the significant progress that civil unions represent. My criticism falls under three main points:

• Civil unions are a clear case of “separate but equal,” a status that is unnecessary and leaves the door open to divergence into “separate but unequal” in the future.
• There is no across-the-board understanding of what a civil union is. Although the states that have implemented it so far make it equal to marriage in all respects but name, there is nothing to stop another state from defining it more like a domestic partnership, with some marriage-like rights but not all. Until every government clerk, emergency-room nurse, health-club assistant, and all the other people who help us in our daily lives know exactly what a civil union is, and how to handle out-of-state relationships, there is risk of confusion. I don’t want to be arguing the finer points of law when my partner is lying in the trauma ward.
• “Marriage” is the term our children will hear in school and from their friends to mean the committed relationship of two adults. There is a history and weight behind the term that “civil union” just doesn’t have. As I explained in Thursday’s post on marriage equality, no child deserves to be told her or his parents aren’t worthy of the same rights and protections as others. Some argue, of course, that a fundamental part of that history is the definition of marriage as “one man-one woman.” I prefer to focus on marriage as the love and responsibility of two consenting adults for each other. Everything else, such as religion, race, or gender, is incidental.

Even within the LGBT-rights movement, there are those who claim we are focusing too much on marriage. We should instead work to broaden the number of legal relationship choices available to cohabitating adults and families, they say, recognizing that more and more people are not living in traditional nuclear families.

I support this idea of an expanded menu of legal forms to protect families and relationships of all types. Just as a business owner can choose from various forms of partnership and corporation, families should be able to choose the legal form that meets their needs. Having said that, I believe that working out all the forms will be a very long-term process, especially in sorting out the interstate translations and equivalencies, even once we have convinced politicians that change is necessary. In the meantime, the lack of marriage rights for same-sex couples is a gross inequality in our country that we must address. Not everyone will find marriage is the right solution for them, but it should be an option available to all.