Why Marriage?
An introduction by Betsy Adams
followed by an excerpt from a column by Andrew Sullivan
published in The New York Times on May 17, 2004

For many of us whose sexual orientation is gay or lesbian (perhaps particularly those of us born in the baby boom years), there are two events –occurring within less than a year of each other and both the result of judicial action– that have given us continued hope for equality under the laws of the land we live in, and for full inclusion in the institutions that define the cultural landscape for all of us, regardless of sexual orientation.  

The first occurred on June 26, 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Lawrence v. Texas, ruled that “[t]he state cannot demean [the] existence  [of homosexuals] or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”  I had turned 50 a month before that decision, and for the first time in my life, I could be most fully who I was anywhere in the United States without breaking the law.  The second milestone event occurred on May 17, 2004, which also happened to be the 50th anniversary of the decision in Brown v Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in America’s schools unconstitutional. On that day, the earlier decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Goodrich v Board of Public Health went into effect, giving all of us who are homosexual hope for a further and much more far-reaching integration into the fabric of the society in which we live, work, raise families and try to contribute the best that is in us. This was a potentially much more far-reaching event than the Lawrence decision because, while Lawrence affirmed our right to privacy, the Goodrich decision affirmed our right to “publicy” ― by legalizing marriages between those of the same gender, the highest court in at least one state affirmed our right to full integration into the public institution that is at the core of our communal lives.

One of the most eloquent statements about the importance of the Massachusetts court decision was made by conservative social commentator, Andrew Sullivan, in a column published in The New York Times on the day marriages between individuals of the same gender became legal in Massachusetts. In writing about the social integration that the right to marry provides to gays and lesbians, both those who are in committed relationships and seek to marry and those who aren’t and/or don’t, he gave voice to the reality that civil unions or domestic partnerships are not marriages and “separate but equal” isn’t equal. The integration he speaks of is of equal meaning and importance, it seems to me, whether we are talking about marriage equality in our civil laws or in our church sacraments. The following is excerpted from Andrew Sullivan’s column.

“ [The integration is on two levels.] It is, first, a human integration.  Marriage, after all, is perhaps the chief mechanism for integrating new families into old ones.  The ceremony is a unifying ritual, one in which peers and grandparents meet, best friends and distant relatives chatter.  It’s hard for heterosexuals to imagine being denied this moment.  It is, after all, regarded in our civil religion as the “happiest day of your life.”  And that is why the denial of such a moment to gay family members is so jarring and so cruel.  It rends people from their own families; it builds an invisible and unscalable wall between them and the people they love and need.

“ You might think from some of the discussion of marriage rights for same-sex couples that homosexuals emerge fully grown from under a gooseberry bush in San Francisco.  But we don’t.  We are born into families across the country in every shape and form imaginable.  Allowing gay people to marry is therefore less like admitting a group of citizens into an institution from which they have been banned than it is simply allowing them to stay in the very families in which they grew up. 

“ I remember the moment I figured out I was gay.  Right then, I realized starkly what it meant:  there would never be a time when my own family would get together to celebrate a new, future family.  I would never have a relationship as valid as my parents’ or my brother’s or my sister’s.  It’s hard to describe what this realization does to a young psyche, but it is profound.  At that moment, the emotional segregation starts, and all that goes with it:  the low self-esteem, the notion of sex as always alien to a stable relationship, the pain of having to choose between the family you were born into and the love you feel.

“ You recover, of course, and move on.  But even when your family and friends embrace you, there is still the sense of being “separate but equal.”  And this is why the images from Massachusetts … strike such a chord.  [B]y insisting on nothing more or less than marriage, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has abolished that invisible wall that divides families from within themselves.  This is an integration of the deepest kind.

“ It is, second, a civil integration.  That is why the term gay marriage is a misnomer.  [Yesterday was] … not the day “gay marriage” arrive[d] in America. It [was]…the first time civil marriage … stopped excluding homosexual members of our own families.  These are not “gay marriages.”  They are marriages.  What these couples are affirming is not something new; it is as old as humanity itself.  What has ended ― in one state, at least ― is separatism.  We have taken a step toward making homosexuality a non-issue; toward making gay citizens merely and supremely citizens.

“ … And so, [i]t is a private moment and a public one.  …[I]t represents, just as Brown did in a different way, the hope of a humanity that doesn’t separate one soul from another and a polity that doesn’t divide one citizen from another.  It is integration made real, a love finally come home:  after centuries of pain and stigma, the “happiest days of our lives.”