The Skinny

see also background & facts, pro & con, links

What's Up

In November 2003, a Massachusetts’ Supreme Court decision legitimizing gay marriages sparked a nationwide debate that had same-sex couples running to the altar and state governments scrambling to define who could and who could not get hitched. President Bush brought the debate to DC by endorsing a change to the Constitution that would outlaw same-sex marriages. So far there’s been more bark than bite to the debates, with the status of gay marriages little altered since '03 and there being a small likelihood Congress will pass a constitutional amendment anytime soon. (Attempts in the Senate got nowhere in '04, '05 or '06.) But the pandora’s box of same-sex marriages has been flung open and no doubt the debate will simmer for years.

What the Debate's About

What the debate is not about is whether same-sex couples can get married in a religious ceremony; that’s out of the states’ hands and no one’s really talking about it. It is about civic marriages and the rights and benefits states give a couple when they say “I do.”

The arguments for allowing gay marriage look at the things married couples get that unmarried couples don’t, such as Social Security benefits and hospital visitation rights, as well as the “expressive value” of being able to say “we’re married,” which has more to do with principle than goods you can grasp. Opponents point out that gay couples can reap the same benefits as married couples using other civil laws besides marriage, and that protecting the heterosexuality of marriage has both moral and societal perks.

Sifting through the material benefits of being married can be a messy matter. In 2004, the GAO (General Accounting Office) found 1,138 national laws where it mattered if you were married or not (each state also has laws of its own that benefit wedded couples). Bush and his supporters on this issue stress that they are not trying to stop gay couples from living together. They say private contracts - name changes, wills, health proxies and such - can give gay couples nearly all benefits that the law gives straight ones.

While some critics of gay marriage don’t seem to have an interest in denying benefits to gay couples, they are concerned with both the moral and societal harm they say would come with gay marriages. Here, the “evidence” on both sides is murky, each side pointing to studies that prove the positive or negative impact of letting gay couples form state-approved families. Gay couples also warn about the moral and societal harm of not permitting same-sex marriages, saying that to do so denies equality to gay citizens - both legally and symbolically.

Where Things Stand Now

In Massachusetts state lawmakers are moving to change their constitution to nix gay marriages (that won’t happen until 2006 at the earliest). Meanwhile, gay marriages became legal there in May, 2004; although the state will only marry couples from other states that permit gay marriages (i.e. Massachusetts). Elsewhere, it's a legal free-for-all, with activist groups suing states, renegade mayors and clerks wedding gay couples, and eleven states passing their own constitutional amendments in 2004. At the federal level, the Senate failed in attempts to pass a marriage amendment three years in a row and is unlikely to try in '08.

Updated October, 2006

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