Legal Strangers
Jason Kuznicki on Sep 25th 2007
This is the first in what I intend to be a series of posts over the coming months and years. It was originally guest posted at the Family Pride blog.
Last week the Maryland Court of Appeals — the state’s highest court — ruled against recognizing same-sex marriages. The mood at our house was pretty dismal the night of the decision. Had the Court ruled the other way, the marriage Scott and I celebrated in Canada in 2003 would almost certainly be valid today.
It didn’t help that the Court decided by a single vote. Changing the mind of even one person would have made the difference — a difference that will define who we are to our neighbors, our families, and our children, perhaps for the rest of our lives.
As a family looking to adopt, we face some wide-ranging consequences. Some of these may not be known for months or years. But they need to be documented, and I will be writing a series of blog posts that will show just what this decision is costing us. All of the well-meaning people out there need to know our side of the story.
They need to know. Why? So that they will stop electing politicians who demonize gays and gay families. So that they will push their representatives to support marriage equality rather than indifference or demeaning half-measures like civil unions. And they need to know so that our children can have the same legal protections that the children of straight couples enjoy.
The religious right talks a lot about preserving the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Sanctity is great, but we have to remember its very real human costs. If preserving the sanctity of heterosexual marriage means hurting or even breaking up some families, then is it really worth the cost? (Since when does the government dole out “sanctity”? And since when does sanctity require hurting people?) Maybe as a society we’ll decide that all this is right and appropriate. But we at least ought to know the price we are paying.
In this series, I’m going to document all of the time, money, inconvenience, and loss of dignity that the Court has imposed on us.
I’m going to keep the receipts. I’m going to do the math: Adding up the extra taxes, the fees, the money spent on lawyers. The vacation days that we’ll spend reading the fine print, lest someone take our children away. And at the end of this journey — wherever we end up — I’m going to give an account of just how much this precious sanctity has cost our family.
It’s worth pointing out that relatively few of these costs are government benefits that would otherwise come out of taxpayers’ pockets. For example, a second-parent adoption is a complex legal process that may end up costing us a lot — but it will also end up costing the taxpayers, too. Conservatives often say they don’t want to see taxpayers subsidizing relationships that they consider immoral. Fine: Let us get married. This cost, among many others, will disappear.
There is another cost, too, one that will be harder to document.
There is a quietly gripping passage in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale in which a young married couple has just learned of the new law putting the husband in charge of all property.
It doesn’t matter, the husband tells the wife. He insists that it won’t change anything. The wife, though, knows better. The law is a living embodiment of a set of values. The law is a teacher, and it works a subtle but often decisive influence on the public.
The woman who learns that she can no longer own property on an equal footing with her husband may hold the new law in contempt. But the woman’s daughter may grow up in a different world. That’s what the law can do.
For gays, the law has taught some harsh lessons over the years: We are deviants, perverts, and criminals. We shouldn’t be around children. We shouldn’t be treated as family. Sometimes, we shouldn’t even be treated as humans.
Straight and gay alike, we’ve absorbed these lessons, and it’s a tribute to our cultural and intellectual independence, to our stubbornness and our willingness to think for ourselves, that we are even having a debate about same-sex marriage today. The law is a teacher, but as students, we can choose to think for ourselves.
The law taught us all a harsh lesson this week. I thank my straight friends who assure us that it doesn’t matter, and that they think of us as married anyway. But I’m still saving my receipts.
Filed in The Bureau, The Boudoir |
I’ve had Kim and Kim has had me for 11 months and 24 days. If anything I would hope you were keeping a tally on the precious minutes and seconds that while you and Scott possess one another in a bond of time, that the anniversaries you celebrate in the state may entail some estimation of time added to this suffering and if you serve a bill should include the precious calculation.
All that said, you may have a dozen marriages before our nation sees reason, but you are married under the eyes of your friends and family. When the law finally decides to become a teacher, you get to know you were right while the majority was wrong.
Given our accounting system in history, you get to win.
This is part of the reason why I didn’t want to get married. The government shouldn’t have any right to tell anyone who they can or can not marry. When my father was sick in the hospital and I thought about the type of access my partner would have to me and to making decisions about me, I reconsidered. For a while I explored the same options you’re being forced to take. In the end we got married (in a civil ceremony, but it’s still considered a marriage by law because we’re heterosexual).
I can only imagine what you’re going through. I can’t know. But it still angers me that this type of discrimination exists. And I’m sorry to be part of a society that perpetuates it. One day I believe we’ll be ashamed as a society, not just as individuals.
I wish you all the best. My wife and I have been married for 11 years and 6 days at this point. I originally resisted the idea since I have no desire for children, and feel no need to bring either the state nor any religion into my personal life. Upon reflection I realized that legal prudence made marriage a good plan, so we had a lovely wedding, and now my mother in law accepts that my wife and I are together for life. Nevermind the decade or so of monogamous cohabitation which preceded the actual wedding…
It leaves me furious that our society can so entwine social and religious functions. Mind you, I live in Boston, so if you guys come out this way we can throw you a wedding-like-separate-but-equal-party (and who is being kidded here), but all the work I can do for equality does not seem to amount to much amongst the choir as it were.
So, society thinks you are deviant, perverted and criminal. Well, I think two of those are just fine, and the third is unjust :) Please remember (as you clearly do) that you do have allies amongst those who blend more easily into “normal” society. We will not give up, not just for your sake, but because it is the right thing to do.
I’ll keep you in my thoughts. I really hope MD comes through soon, or at least antoher state. I read somewhere that 70% of the population was against multiethnic marriages when they became legal.. I think same-sex marriage has a much lower number against. Then again, it boggles my mind that white/black/etc. marriages were ever illegal - I didn’t grow up in that time period.
I guess I just don’t understand why so many people are offended by the idea of same sex marriage. It hurts many people’s feelings when the far right spit out horrible, hateful things that some people actually listen to. Their day will come, soon, I hope. When everyone starts paying attention and goes ‘huh, what? are you nuts?” and throw the lot of hate talking radio jockeys and spiteful televangelists under the bus.
Then again, when looking up the lyric’s to Kanye West’s new song, there were so many people commenting things like ‘wow! this is aweome! my new favorite!’ and “this has so much deeper meaning” that I now want to just leave the country.