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marriage rights
This may be a controversial subject.
One of the numerous people who've run into problems with US Customs lately apparently had her legal difficulties because she is not married to her partner, who is here on a work assignment.
She writes, "We weren't (and still aren't) married - mostly for political reasons; why should we get married when not everyone else could? - but that wouldn't pose a problem, right?" But of course it did.
Now, as a liberal I approve of people living their lives the way they want to. Any couple - opposite or same sex - who wants to get married or not married, I consider that their business, and what I'd advise them to do should have no bearing on their right to do it. (The kind of celebrity couple who get married at midnight in Vegas on a whim, and then divorce the next day or the next year, sometimes leaving a child behind, I consider very foolish people, but I don't go around denouncing them. There's more than enough moral disapprovers to do that.)
But when someone is expressing not just private preference by their actions but, as this couple did, are making a political statement - that is, making a moral judgment on the rest of the world - as part of the rest of that world, I reserve the right to react.
So I have to wonder, exactly what is an opposite-sex couple trying to prove by not getting legally married because, in most places, same-sex couples cannot? How is the institution of marriage going to suffer for its discriminatory policies because you're boycotting it? Who is going to be hurt by this? As it turns out, the people you hurt, with the assistance of Customs, are yourselves. That ought not to be the case, of course, but it is.
And what are they saying to those of us who are married? The writer links approvingly (or tries to; the html is misformatted) to another poster who says, "Taking advantage of [privilege], when you have a choice, [is] where being a bad person starts." Now that person is drawing her conclusion from an incident of Customs treating white people with less automatic suspicion than brown people, and is not specifically discussing marriage privilege. But it's intended as a generally applicable principle.
Does the first poster apply that principle to marriage? Does she think that those of us opposite-sex couples who do get married are flaunting our privilege and degrading those who can't take advantage of it? Where does that leave same-sex couples who do get married in jurisdictions that permit it, or those who marry extra-legally?
I take a different view. Marriage is not like a club that you should drop out of if you don't like its membership policies. It is the false belief that marriage is a club that brings bigots to worry about the devaluing of their own marriages, and to think they have to "defend" marriage from the riff-raff. The best way to counter-act that view and to expand the privilege of marriage is to get married and then to support other people's right to get married too. We're not pulling up the bridge behind us; we're saying it's so nice here that we want everyone who wants to be here to be able to join us.
One of the numerous people who've run into problems with US Customs lately apparently had her legal difficulties because she is not married to her partner, who is here on a work assignment.
She writes, "We weren't (and still aren't) married - mostly for political reasons; why should we get married when not everyone else could? - but that wouldn't pose a problem, right?" But of course it did.
Now, as a liberal I approve of people living their lives the way they want to. Any couple - opposite or same sex - who wants to get married or not married, I consider that their business, and what I'd advise them to do should have no bearing on their right to do it. (The kind of celebrity couple who get married at midnight in Vegas on a whim, and then divorce the next day or the next year, sometimes leaving a child behind, I consider very foolish people, but I don't go around denouncing them. There's more than enough moral disapprovers to do that.)
But when someone is expressing not just private preference by their actions but, as this couple did, are making a political statement - that is, making a moral judgment on the rest of the world - as part of the rest of that world, I reserve the right to react.
So I have to wonder, exactly what is an opposite-sex couple trying to prove by not getting legally married because, in most places, same-sex couples cannot? How is the institution of marriage going to suffer for its discriminatory policies because you're boycotting it? Who is going to be hurt by this? As it turns out, the people you hurt, with the assistance of Customs, are yourselves. That ought not to be the case, of course, but it is.
And what are they saying to those of us who are married? The writer links approvingly (or tries to; the html is misformatted) to another poster who says, "Taking advantage of [privilege], when you have a choice, [is] where being a bad person starts." Now that person is drawing her conclusion from an incident of Customs treating white people with less automatic suspicion than brown people, and is not specifically discussing marriage privilege. But it's intended as a generally applicable principle.
Does the first poster apply that principle to marriage? Does she think that those of us opposite-sex couples who do get married are flaunting our privilege and degrading those who can't take advantage of it? Where does that leave same-sex couples who do get married in jurisdictions that permit it, or those who marry extra-legally?
I take a different view. Marriage is not like a club that you should drop out of if you don't like its membership policies. It is the false belief that marriage is a club that brings bigots to worry about the devaluing of their own marriages, and to think they have to "defend" marriage from the riff-raff. The best way to counter-act that view and to expand the privilege of marriage is to get married and then to support other people's right to get married too. We're not pulling up the bridge behind us; we're saying it's so nice here that we want everyone who wants to be here to be able to join us.
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Traditionally, couples eligible for marriage who decline to do so have said, "It's just a piece of paper." Well, guess what: pieces of paper are important.
The same-sex couples who want to get married aren't under the delusion that pieces of paper are unimportant. I was moved by the testimony in the Prop 8 case that being able to call themselves legally married, and to be considered such in the eyes of neighbors and the law, was important to them.
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