It’s Not a Gay Thing...

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Laws that distinguish between married couples and everyone else need to be reexamined. They stem from the days when a husband was the head of his household with a dependent wife at home, when a child born to an unmarried woman was a social outcast, and when virtually every marriage was for life regardless of the relationship’s quality. It was a very different time.

When the Supreme Court declared the laws differentiating between men/husbands and women/wives unconstitutional in the 1970s, the laws became gender-neutral. This created a new problem. It left distinctions between married couples and everyone else without assessing the justness of that approach. It’s time to make that assessment. Today more people live alone, more people live with unmarried partners, and more parents have minor children who live neither with them nor with their current spouse. The laws that affect families need to be evaluated in light of contemporary realities. A valuing-all-families approach does this by demanding a good fit between a law’s purpose and the relationships that are subject to its reach.

In every area of law that matters to same-sex couples, such as health care decision making, government and employee benefits, and the right to raise children, laws already exist in some places that could form the basis for just family policies: for those who can’t marry or enter civil unions or register their domestic partnerships; those who don’t want to or who simply don’t; and those whose most important relationship is not with a sexual partner. These laws will help many families, not just LGBT ones, and not just couples.

Successful reform that values all families may not come in the name of gay rights. It may come under the banner of, for example, patients’ autonomy, family pluralism, or the needs of children. Some lawmakers will support important reforms precisely because they help many people in many families and do not appear to be “gay rights” issues. In recent years, that motivation has produced a Salt Lake City policy that extends health insurance to any one adult member of an employee’s household and that person’s children, a law in Virginia requiring hospitals to allow patients to select their own visitors, and a change in federal pension law that allows any beneficiary to inherit retirement assets without paying a tax penalty. In these sorts of cases, gay rights leaders rightly trumpet that they will help LGBT families.

A strategy in the name of gay rights toward recognition of same-sex partnerships, where it is successful, is a civil rights triumph. It may, however, have unfortunate consequences for family policy. Same-sex couples will have the right to a formal legal status for their relationships; those who exercise that right will have the array of benefits that married spouses now receive. This will disregard the needs of LGBT couples who don’t marry or register, LGBT singles and households not organized around sexual intimacy, LGBT parents without partners, and the families and relationships of vast numbers of heterosexuals.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print