"Gay Marriage?"
Introduction In countries around the world, there are growing demands for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. This dossier reports on progress in Western Europe.
The starting point is equal rights.
"Straights" (heterosexuals) can acquire a range of rights by marrying. And, whatever we think of marriage as an institution, lesbians, gays and bisexuals should have access to those same rights.
Some progressives disagree: they say that marriage is reactionary, and should be opposed, ignored or abolished. Of course, this opposition to the institution of marriage was not very concrete - until lesbians and gays demanded the right to marry.
Progressives who oppose lesbian and gay access to marriage because of their dislike of marriage as such find themselves lined up alongside conservatives: people who believe that the superiority of straight relationships is so obvious that marriage must not be degraded by opening it to perverse, same-sex
Some lesbians, gays and bisexuals would like to get married, others can't stand the idea. But it is in the interest of all people - whatever their sexuality - to work together either to change the institution of marriage, or to abolish it altogether. We should also demand better legal rights for couples - gay or straight -who do not want to marry. 20 International Viewpoint #308 February 1999
There are still no fully developed alternative models. But whatever alternatives the movement puts forward, several principles are clear.
First, every option has to be equally accessible for same-sex and opposite-sex couples.
Second, any arrangement that is an alternative to marriage has to include fewer rights and responsibilities than marriage now does. It makes no sense to have alternatives unless their content is really different.
One neglected aspect of the partnership debate is the importance of increasing individuals' rights independently of whether people are coupled or single.
Lesbian/gay/bisexual movements have no unified standpoint on this issue. In fact the discussion is scarcely happening at all. Even the women's movement seems no longer interested in challenging the many ways in which women's individual rights are made dependent on their relationships with men.
The whole neo-liberal offensive of the 1980s and '90s has pushed this struggle onto the back burner. Real individual rights require social support. But neo-liberal austerity policies have cut this to ribbons, privatising what should be social responsibilities and imposing them once more on the family.
Governments prefer to make husbands and wives, parents and children care for the sick, old, young, disabled or unemployed rather than shouldering their rightful burden.
In many countries, government inspectors can force their way into welfare recipients' homes, in the malicious and mean hope of catching them in hidden relationships - which could be a reason to cut off their benefits.
Lesbian/gay/bisexual movements should certainly not demand reforms that would trap even more people in these humiliating forms of depen-
Instead, they could perhaps play a vanguard role in changing this situation, encouraging women's groups and trade unions to challenge it as
The problem is that even the left has a very cautious and limitted approach to the partnership issue. There is still much hesitation on the fundamental issues of gay adoption and child custody rights. Lesbian and gay parenting is still taboo, it seems.
The underlying problem is still an unwillingness to accept homosexual relationships as fully and entirely equal to heterosexual ones.
Why such resistance to equality, even on the left? Presumably because full equality for lesbians, gays and bisexuals would undermine the foundations of the alienating models in whichour societies imprison people. It would threaten the perceived 'naturalness' of heterosexuality. It would challenge gender roles (men are like this, women like that). It would question parental authority and inherited status founded on procreation.
Some people are nervous about demanding fully equal recognition for same-sex relationships. But this should certainly be our goal. It opens a door through which we can glimpse new possibilities: new kinds of social and emotional relations beyond alienation and dependency, new patterns of ones, twos and mores that could flourish in diversity and freedom.
Revolutionaries in lesbian/gay/bisexual movements need to discuss these possibilities.
The current debate on civic partnerships is an opportunity for revolutionary lesbian/gay/bisexuals to work together with currents in the lesbian/ gay/bisexual movements that go beyond the idea of 'equal rights.' We can resurrect the movement's original call for genuine liberation
It is time once more for straights and gays to fight to break with constricting heterosexual norms,