MARRIAGE STRUGGLES ON

It’s still too early to see what the final outcome of the Massachusetts legislature’s struggle to prevent or allow equal marriage rights in the Commonwealth. The amendment that passed the preliminary round is by far the least objectionable. It would enshrine a semantic difference between heterosexual and homosexual marriages by calling the former “marriage” and the latter “civil unions.” But it would uphold the Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that there should be complete substantive equality in terms of all protections and benefits. In other words: Vermont, but by constitutional amendment, not law. What bothers me about this is that it amounts to the constitutionalization of pure stigma. There’s no possible reason to give gay couples something that walks, talks and squawks like a marriage but is called something else – except to maintain a purely semantic distinction, whose purpose is to reaffirm the inferiority of homosexual couples. Since many of these couples will get married in a religious ceremony as well, they may well describe themselves simply as married anyway. In time, common parlance will simply refer to all of the above as married. The only real difference may be that a civil union will be less transportable to other states. But that will also surely change, as some states will agree to recognize such civil unions, just as New York state has said it will agree to recognize Massachusetts’ civil marriages. Of course, this process in Massachusetts is not, in many ways, a bad thing. It really has initiated an extraordinary public debate that has enriched many of us. The legislative and judicial processes in that state are signs that the system is working on a state level, and there is no need for clumsy federal intervention to pre-empt this state-by-state process and impose a premature “solution” on the entire country through the drastic option of a federal constitutional amendment. That also goes for California, where the judicial process should be allowed to continue unmolested by Washington.