>Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> > I'm sympathetic toward Michael Warner's view, but I believe gay men &
>> lesbians who want the right to marry are not so much in quest of
>> illusions of normality, respectability, etc. as in need of social &
>> economic rights & privileges that the state automatically grants to
>> married partners, e.g., in health insurance, social security,
>> immigration, visitation, adoption, alimony, & inheritance.
> <snip>
> If Warner wants marriage not to be
>> portrayed as "better than other ways of living," he needs to attack
>> the material foundation that makes marriage the privileged unit of
>> social reproduction.
>
>True, to a point, but I still think two mitigating factors must be
>acknowledged. First, Warner suggests that by including gays and lesbians into
>the marriage dynamic, it not only elevates their standard of living, but
>further denegrates the status and standard of living of any who do *not*
>choose to marry, making choice as much a lightning rod for potential social
>judgement towards non-marrying G/Ls as others.
Will the legal recognition of marriages of GLBT people make non-marrying GLBT people worse off than before? That's an empirical question. Michael Warner might look at the conditions of GLBT people in countries where civil unions are already recognized, like France & the Netherlands, & see if he can establish a causal relation between the institution of civil unions and economic conditions of single GLBT people.
Generally speaking, though, with or without marriage, living by yourself likely makes you economically worse off than living with one partner (or more), unless your partner is financially dependent on you (in which case you are economically better off living alone). As Barbara Ehrenreich notes, high rents & dearth of affordable housings (which the official poverty line in the USA has neglected to take into account) make living on low wages especially difficult. Pooling two or more wages together -- whether via marriage, cohabitation, or getting roommates -- makes it easier to get by. Poor single moms with kids have the hardest time, whether they are homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, or whatever.
>Second, the benefits of state-sanctioned marriage are there, yes, especially
>as it may relate to entitlement programs. But there currently exist many
>legitimate legal avenues to protect financial and medical concerns for GLTBs
>that are never exercised! The number of GLTB people pushing for legal
>marriage who have never even sought to draft a will or a durable power of
>attorney to protect their joint interests or legal contracts establishing real
>estate partnerships is frightening! These actions are far simpler to invoke
>than turning an entire legislative body around, yet so few take advantage of
>it. As such, I am left to wonder how many really are motivated by fiscal and
>physical concerns instead of romantic, "normal-affirming" notions of a magic
>bullet cure.
Romantic feelings, I think, are inseparable from economic security. Marriage brings a bundle of social & economic entitlements, some (though not all) of which can be gained without marriage by hiring a lawyer & drawing up explicit contracts -- an individualistic solution that some of the rich gay men & lesbians probably have been exercising all along. Rich straights with lots of assets to divide in the event of divorce hire lawyers & draw contracts in addition to getting a marriage license, too. Marriage without a lawyer is for the rest of us commoners (with the exception of the poorest, for whom marriage brings little economic benefit & may make things worse sometimes).
Anyhow, as capital drew more women than before into wage labor & women's movements partially succeeded in gaining formal equality in civil rights between men and women, marriage ceased to be compulsory for straights. The present controversy over "gay marriage" is taking place in a society in which an increasing number of straights don't marry, cohabit without marriage, marry without procreation, divorce, and so on, and so forth. Pace Andrew Sullivan & Michael Warner, I think that GLBT people gaining the right to marry will do little to affirm marriage as the norm, & instead will make the meaning of marriage more diverse than ever (which conservatives interpret as the "emptying out" of the meaning of marriage -- hence their futile rear-guard "defense of heterosexual marriage", though the coinage of such a term itself shows how much the meaning of marriage has changed). To affirm marriage as the norm, capital has to push women out of wage labor & abolish civil rights for women, which it probably won't.
What needs to happen before the "nuclear" family becomes truly obsolete is further socialization of care-giving (of the young, the sick, the old, & the disabled).
Yoshie