It’s Not a Gay Thing...

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 This necessity, coupled with the disruption of expectations that ending the state’s involvement in marriage would produce, suggests another approach.

I call this approach valuing all families. The most important element in implementing this approach is identifying the purpose of a law that now grants marriage unique legal consequences. By understanding a law’s purpose, we can identify the relationships that would further that purpose without creating a special status for married couples.

Sweeping legal changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s altered the significance of marriage and laid the groundwork for a more pluralistic vision. Those changes grew out of cultural and political shifts, including feminism and other social-change movements; greater access to birth control and acceptance of sex outside marriage; and increased dissatisfaction with marriage. The legal changes included decreased penalties on nonmarital sex, especially an end to discrimination against children born to unmarried mothers; equality between the sexes; and no-fault divorce.

Early advocates of gay and lesbian rights forged alliances with others who challenged the primacy of marriage: divorced and never-married mothers, including those receiving welfare benefits; unmarried hetero­sexuals, both those consciously rejecting the baggage associated with marriage and those who simply did not marry; and nonnuclear units, such as communal living groups and extended families.

The gay rights movement was part of broader social movements challenging the political, economic, and social status quo and seeking to transform society into one in which sex, race, class, sexual orientation, and marital status no longer determined one’s place in the nation’s hierarchy. Marriage was losing its ironclad grip on the organization of family life, and lesbians and gay men benefited overwhelmingly from the prospect of a more pluralistic vision of relationships.

There were setbacks. A backlash resulted in restrictions on women’s reproductive freedom, gay rights laws were repealed, and welfare mothers were sold out. Conservatives employed the rhetoric of “traditional family values” to fight any proposal advancing recognition and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and used antigay propaganda to raise money and garner votes for a wide-ranging conservative agenda.

Since the mid-1990s, two movements born of this history have placed marriage in the public policy spotlight. The “marriage movement”—with both religious and secular components—opposes not only recognition of LGBT families but also easily obtained divorce, childbearing and sex outside marriage, and sex education that teaches anything other than abstinence. It advocates government funding of “marriage promotion” efforts. Its most prominent religion-based groups are Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. They speak of family and marriage as God-ordained.

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