Speedkill

Juan Cole on his blog the other day proposed something I’ve proposed before, removing marriage from government all together – states deal in something like civil unions for any two people and churches can do whatever they want with marriage. TAPPED is not happy with this:

This is exactly the kind of thing that religious conservatives have long warned gay marriage would lead to and why they are so agitated about stopping any effort to allow it. Proposing to do exactly what conservatives fear most — abolish marriage as we know it — in order to accommodate gay people can only make the anti–gay marriage blowback that much stronger.

This is a somewhat valid point. But it’s hard for me to see much of a backlash. It doesn’t actually affect anything, it’s a semantic change.

Further, any arrangement that disentangled marriage from the legal protections that a century and a half of feminist agitating have finally got enshrined into marriage law would likely have an extremely deleterious effect on the rights of women over time. And while gay people have little to lose in the current debate over gay marriage, which they do not yet have the right to, straight women are about to lose a whole heck of a lot of rights they currently enjoy because of the anti–gay marriage backlash of 2004. People on the left need to do a little more balanced thinking about the trade-offs involved in taking various positions when there are so many constituencies with so much at stake in the marriage/family/reproductive rights arena. This is not an easy puzzle to solve; there are lots of moving parts.

This strikes me as complete nonsense. The protections won by feminists are still there, but instead of marriage, it’s called a civil union. Cole isn’t really clear on this, but marriage by a church would be nothing more than a religious ceremony. If you wanted to have the rights we currently associate with marriage, you have to get a civil union contract as well. That’s not really all that much different than now, is it? A church can marry two people, but it means fuck-all until you get a marriage license. There’s simply no way for women to lose any rights.

Besides, what if you believe in the institution of marriage as a secular social institution with an abiding moral and historical force? I know plenty of people married in non-religious ceremonies for whom the institution retains its moral and spiritual meaning as the lifelong union of two individuals and the social union of two families and the basic moral framework within which to have a family, even absent any religious imprimatur. Marriage has all kinds of different meanings for different people and in different cultures — think arranged marriages — but it is an incredibly radical thing in the Anglo-American legal and historical framework to propose the idea of getting the government out of the straight marriage business altogether and replacing it with a series of genderless contracts.

This I don’t really get either. You’re changing an official name. Nothing else changes. You can call it marriage if you want. You can have a secular ceremony if you want. The government simply doesn’t call it marriage anymore. Maybe she’s misunderstanding Cole? There’s no “series” of contracts. There’s one contract. With a different name. That’s it.

EDIT: Ok, I think I see more of her problems now; I didn’t read the last paragraph of the quote. I think this is easily fixed by making the religious part a religious ceremony that has no legal meaning.