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Other than the two main discussions involving gay marriage―“the
kind of society we want,” and any Constitutional debate over what the
structure of government can permit—there is a third possibility. A
third would be critical of the Constitution itself, which remains short
of passing the ERA or Equal Rights Amendment for Women. With half the
population (or somewhat more) not recognized as equal under the
Constitution, what kind of meaningful debate over and above that is
possible where women are involved, as of course they are in gay
marriage? The background to considering women in this context is over
three decades old, thus largely forgotten. Of the seventeen thousand
couples in California
for instance, recently married under the State Supreme Court decision
in May, and now disenfranchised by Proposition 8 on November 4th,
perhaps half of them are women, and no one at this point would think of
asking what their status is in relation to their male counterparts.
During the early 1970s, their fate was sealed as part of a larger gay
movement dominated by men when it became increasingly apparent that the
feminist movement was determined to stigmatize and exclude them from
its ranks. Hold-outs, known as lesbian feminists, died as a political
force.
Slavery was debated for a hundred years in Constitutional terms, and
women for the next one hundred. African American men achieved voting
rights fifty-five years before women of any race. This enfranchisement
of a group of men made sense under a Constitution drawn up by the same
gender. Suffrage for women as enacted in 1920 was a type of oxymoron,
however a reasonable reform, easing the condition of women under a
system not their own. It was not a serious threat to the status quo.
Who could they vote for anyway, if not for men? With the advances of
women through the Second Wave, and present-day choices expanded—a
certain complement of women running for state and federal offices—the
highest positions have remained safely in the patrimonial majority.
With such new exceptions as Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and
of Hillary Clinton making a powerful run for the presidency, we can ask
naturally: What does the nation make of the extraordinary contradiction
between the Speaker’s “patriarchal” preeminence and her Constitutional
inequality? And further, in the case of Clinton, should she have succeeded, how would her role as chief executive have been squared with her Constitutional nonentityness?
The coalition of women and men under the civil rights issue of gay
marriage is another kind of oxymoron. A further allowance, such as that
for women voting, would mean different things to women and men. Women
would be participating in an institution historically disadvantageous
to their sex, carrying a message of obliviousness to the precarious
position of women at large. Gay men may want to forego the domestic services of women, |
and not mind acquiring the stigma of a serious minority, but their rights as men under the Constitution would remain intact.
George W. Bush has said, “Marriage, between a man and a woman, is the
fundamental institution of our society.” Barack Obama shares this view.
Neither Bush, nor Obama in his higher intelligence, would say that the
Constitution rests on this assumption. That would be edging too close
to the deeper assumption of society girded by patrilineal descent and
privilege. The whole subtext is that marriage, as traditionally
defined, is the cornerstone of patriarchy.
The parallel that people have made between the legalization of
mixed-race marriages in the nineteen-sixties and the controversy today
over gay marriage is specious when you realize that the earlier issue
stayed within the Constitutional framework of marriage as between a man
and a woman. Where marriage is not so defined, it raises the thorny
problem of the absence of the procreating male (reduced at best to
sperm in a bottle), whose rights as such are embedded, however
unarticulated, in the Constitution. Should 50 percent of the population
be gay and clamoring for marital rights, one can imagine a
Constitutional crisis. As it is, with 10 percent only, more or less,
where is the threat? Either society will move over and create a reform,
or it will exercise its majority prerogative negatively.
In the “what kind of society do we want” question, civil rights for
same-sex couples of both genders are of course most desirable,
especially for children, who suffer in ways similar to the children of
unwed mothers in the past—a blight still existing in many countries,
but also in significantly numerous layers of American society. Without
state legalization of their parents’ commitments, children are liable
to secrecy or concealment and are at much greater risk than “legal”
children for emotional and financial instability. Civil Rights
affording gay partners the same benefits of straight married couples
can of course be enacted ex-maritally, and they have been. For gay
women, the extra-marital benefit package should be ideal. When women
marry men, knowingly or not they condone their Constitutional inequity.
Married gay women, allowed into the system, would lose their
difference, i.e., the revolutionary potential they represent. If this
is true, the government would do well to recognize it and co-opt them
by letting them marry each other.
Only another feminist movement is likely to mount a Constitutional
challenge resulting in the passage of the ERA or equal rights for
women, which died in 1982, having been ratified in 35 states, leaving
it three states short of the required 38. Every year, the motion is
reintroduced to Congress.
If successful, marriage itself would no longer be the chief supporting
institution of patriarchy, existing at the expense of one gender over
the other. It would be simply a commitment between equal partners, and
marriage between two women hardly worth commenting on. |
