The Social Science of Same-Sex Marriage

LGBT People and Their Relationships in the Era of Marriage Equality

Aaron Hoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000523652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Showcasing research from across the social sciences, this edited volume seeks to provide readers with an empirically grounded sense of how many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people marry in the US and Canada, what their marriages look like, and how LGBT people themselves are impacted by marriage and marriage equality.

Prior to marriage equality, lawmakers and activists across the political spectrum debated whether same-sex couples should have the legal right to marry, and likewise, academic research to date has focused mostly on the politics of same-sex marriage. However, this edited volume focuses on LGBT people themselves and their intimate relationships in the era of marriage equality.

Including both quantitative and qualitative social science research, it features 14 primary chapters that examine a diverse set of topics, including demographic patterns in same-sex marriage and cohabitation, marital aspirations and motivations among LGBT people, arrangements and dynamics within same-sex relationships, and the legal benefits and informal privileges associated with marriage. The edited volume will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, child and family studies, communications, social work, and economics, while also offering valuable information for laypeople generally interested in families and/or LGBT studies.

Chapter 1From the political to the personal: LGBT people and their relationships in the era of marriage equalityAn introduction

Aaron Hoy

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003089995-1

On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark case that finally, after decades of activism and struggle, legalized same-sex marriage across the US. At the time, I was a graduate student in sociology living in Syracuse, New York. When I first saw the headline announcing the decision on Facebook, I instantly leapt up and rushed downtown to join a victory rally that had been planned days in advance by several community organizations and activists. Similar rallies popped up all over the country, as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and their allies celebrated a hard-fought victory that had been many years in the making. In Syracuse, excitement filled the air, as if those who had gathered could not contain their overwhelming joy. Smiles beamed as people offered kind words of congratulations and hugs to others, most of them likely total strangers. As they drove by, cars honked their horns in support, and even a few police officers flashed their lights and sounded their sirens, a sign of support that I remember thinking stood in stark contrast to the hostility LGBT people often experience with police. After an hour or so, the crowd surrounded the steps of a historically progressive church and listened attentively as a handful of local marriage equality activists spoke about the various meanings of the Obergefell decision – how it represented, among other things, a triumph of love over hate, respect and security for LGBT people and their families, and a major step toward full equality for the LGBT community. No matter how they interpreted the decision, most at the rally seemed to agree that Obergefell finally brought the campaign for marriage equality to a happy end, concluding decades of argument and debate, organizing and lobbying, fundraising and mobilizing all on behalf of LGBT people and their right to legal marriage, now recognized by the US Supreme Court as enshrined in the Constitution.

Today, the dramatic rightward shift in the US political environment has raised serious concerns about whether marriage equality is, in fact, here to stay, with several conservative justices openly critiquing the Supreme Court's earlier ruling. In the end, marriage equality may not yet be a settled matter in the US, but in the summer of 2015, the Obergefell decision felt as though it had definitively answered the question of whether same-sex couples should have the right to marry, certainly among those who attended the victory rally in Syracuse and likely to many people across the country as well. This likely reflected the fact that the debate over marriage equality had been raging in the US for so long at that point.

Although this debate first gripped the country beginning in the early 1990s, the right to legal marriage had become a topic of concern within the LGBT rights movement, if not the broader LGBT community, much earlier. In fact, the question of marriage equality has been considered and debated by individual activists and organizations throughout the history of the LGBT rights movement. In the earliest years, though, few LGBT rights activists actually supported marriage equality, arguing instead that marriage and the family were both harmful to LGBT people. For instance, in “A Gay Manifesto,” Carl Wittman (1969) described marriage as “a rotten, oppressive institution” that “smothers both people, denies needs, and places impossible demands on both people.” Seeking the right to marry, he argued, “is an expression of self-hatred.”

By the 1980s, however, marriage equality had become an important issue for many LGBT people, as the AIDS epidemic and the so-called “lesbian baby boom” both made many of the legal rights and benefits attached to marriage increasingly necessary for LGBT people and their families (Chauncey, 2004). Thus, in 1987, the first public demonstration in support of marriage equality took place during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights (Ghaziani, 2008). Still, marriage equality had yet to register as a national issue. However, when three same-sex couples filed a lawsuit against the State of Hawaii for being denied the right to marry, the ultimate decision – Baehr v. Lewin, announced in 1993 – brought marriage equality into the national spotlight for the first time (Bernstein & Taylor, 2013). Conservative organizations quickly mobilized to ensure that same-sex couples were not given equal marriage rights, a possibility that only a few years before would have seemed outlandish to most (Stone, 2013). More liberal, pro-LGBT organizations mobilized also, first as self-defense but eventually with the goal to win marriage equality (Stone, 2013). Eventually, the question of whether same-sex couples should have the right to legal marriage became one of the central fault lines in the “culture wars” that dominated public discourse throughout the final decade of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century.

In the debate over marriage equality, several distinct political perspectives coalesced, with liberal advocates of marriage equality and conservative opponents each advancing a set of arguments about how LGBT people and communities and even marriage and family as social institutions would be impacted if same-sex couples were granted the legal right to marry, or not (see Bernstein & Taylor, 2013; Green, 2010 for more detailed reviews). In general, conservatives made a series of arguments that framed the traditional, nuclear family as the bedrock upon which social order ultimately rests (Heath, 2012). Specifically, conservatives pointed to heterosexuality, a gendered division of labor, and monogamy as essential components of the traditional, nuclear family that benefit children and thus the society as a whole (e.g., Dobson, 2004; Lutzer, 2004).

According to conservatives, same-sex marriage threatened to undermine the traditional, nuclear family, which had already been weakened by decades of dramatic change, including declining marriage rates and high rates of divorce, single parenthood, and cohabitation. For instance, Baskerville (2006) and Gallagher (2003), both of whom were prominent voices in opposition to marriage equality, argued that if same-sex couples were allowed to marry, it would further encourage the separation of marriage and reproduction.

In contrast, liberal advocates of marriage equality argued in support of same-sex marriage by pointing to the wide array of rights that are distributed through marriage. For instance, getting married allows couples to access taxation, insurance, inheritance, and parental rights that are largely inaccessible otherwise. In fact, the campaign for marriage equality even popularized the fact that there are 1049 specific rights granted by the federal government that citizens can access through marriage alone. As such, denying same-sex couples the right to marry effectively denied them access to these rights, in turn relegating them to second-class citizenship (e.g., Eskridge & Spedale, 2006; Herdt & Kertzner, 2006; Wolfson, 2005). In this sense, same-sex marriage was, for marriage equality activists, an issue of equal rights, in line with other campaigns for equal rights throughout US history, including the Civil Rights movement and the Women's Rights movement (Chauncey, 2004; Wolfson, 2005). Of course, marriage equality activists acknowledged that marriage is also a way to access legitimacy for one's relationship, given the symbolic significance still attached to marriage. It was for this reason that many marriage equality activists opposed domestic partnerships and civil unions (e.g., Kaplan, 1997; Merin, 2002). Although these other forms of relationship recognition granted same-sex couples many if not all of the legal rights that come with marriage, they could not confer legitimacy in the same way.

Although conservative and liberal arguments regarding marriage equality were the ones most widely heard and debated – by lawmakers and the national news media, for example – many individuals and organizations within the LGBT community itself articulated a different perspective, one that echoed earlier opposition to marriage equality among LGBT rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, this more radical perspective was grounded in a critique of marriage as a heteronormative institution. As many radical queer activists emphasized, marriage is an institution that extends legitimacy and respectability to participants and, at the same time, exerts considerable pressure to adhere to marital norms (e.g., Brandzel, 2005; Seidman, 2002). For these activists, these aspects of marriage were, and are, problematic for several reasons. For instance, some radical queer activists argued that marriage equality would have the effect of undoing innovative relationship forms among same-sex couples (Ettelbrick, 1998; Lehr, 1999; Polikoff, 2008). Cast out of their families of origin and denied access to marriage, LGBT people have historically found new ways of creating and maintaining intimate bonds, often by prioritizing equality and autonomy for all involved (Green, 2006, 2010; Stacey, 2008; Weeks, Heaphy, & Donovan, 2001). However, some activists worried that getting married would eventually make same-sex relationships look quite similar to different-sex relationships. In addition, some activists worried that marriage equality would install a new status order within an already-fractured LGBT community, pulling some couples into the ranks of legitimacy and respectability but leaving others out (Walters, 2001; Warner, 1999). Those who cannot or refuse to marry would likely experience a form of secondary marginalization (see Cohen, 1999). Ultimately, then, radical queer activists argued that same-sex marriage would, in the final instance, reproduce, rather than resist, heteronormativity. It would bring the values and norms of the dominant heterosexual culture into the heart of the LGBT community. These are the grounds on which Duggan (2003) famously called the campaign for marriage equality “homonormative” – namely, because, in her view, it “[did] not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but [upheld] and [sustained] them” (p. 50).

Today, of course, same-sex couples do have the legal right to marry. In the US, same-sex marriage was first legalized in Massachusetts in 2003 as a result of the Goodrich v. Department of Public Health decision. Between 2003 and 2015, when the Obergefell decision was announced, many other states legalized same-sex marriage as well. In fact, by 2015, 37 of the 50 states already recognized marriages involving same-sex partners. Still, the Supreme Court's decision in 2015 extended the legal right of marriage to LGBT individuals in the remaining 13 states and ensured that all same-sex marriages would be recognized across state lines. In contrast, Canada achieved national marriage equality almost a decade before the US when, on July 20, 2005, Parliament passed Bill C-38, also known as the Civil Marriage Act. Much like in the US, national marriage equality in Canada was preceded by a string of provinces and territories passing their own laws extending legal marriage rights to same-sex couples, including Ontario and British Columbia in 2003 and Quebec in 2004. These laws were ultimately challenged in the appeals court system, but the Court of Appeal for Ontario declared in 2003 that denying same-se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 From the political to the personal: LGBT people and their relationships in the era of marriage equality: An introduction
• PART I Deciding to marry: Who marries and why?
• PART II Being married: How do LGBT people approach and experience marital relationships?
• PART III The effects of marriage and marriage equality: What difference does marriage make for LGBT people?
• Index