Final Essay

Marriage isn’t the problem (1565 words) 

In American cultural tradition, there are few things as well-respected and regarded as the institution of marriage. As Justice Kennedy described in his famous opinion on Obergefell v. Hodges, marriage “supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals” (Obergefell). Marriage is seen as so important, that for many people Obergefell was seen as the “end of gay history”, just like many viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as the end of the rest of history. However, this institution is not without its many flaws. Marriage throughout American history has frequently been used to enforce racial and gender power structures, whether it be white supremacy or the patriarchy. It’s why so many people so fervently fought gay marriage, not because they were afraid of two men kissing, but because they were afraid of how it would affect the hierarchy they sat on top of. It is only once the hierarchies that a monoracial heterosexual marriage codifies are torn down that queer people can be full citizens of the United States. 

One of the things that marriage enforced was white power within the United States. Certain states in the US, mainly in the south, had anti-miscegenation laws which prevented two people of different races from marrying or even engaging in intimate relationships. The main argument for these laws at the time was the maintenance of racial purity within these southern states, stating that it was unnatural for two people of different races to marry. Of course, the real purpose of these laws was power. If a black man could marry a white woman, or a black woman could marry a white man, the walls that held up racial segregation would start to crumble down. A black man could show himself as dependable, strong, caring, and a black woman could show herself as an equal to white women in keeping house and upholding morality. Then there’s their children who would blur the lines of the very strictly defined racial “buckets” or categories, further confounding racial stereotypes of the time. This is acknowledged in the case that struck down these miscegenation laws, Loving. V. Virginia, where Chief Justice Warren called this law an obvious “endorsement of the doctrine of white Supremacy” (Loving). While interracial marriage bans were invalidated, the specific way they did so encourages thinking of marriage as a system that upholds hierarchies. By controlling who gets married, the law effectively diminished the citizenship of people of color, denying them the ability to remove wrongful stereotypes pushed upon them, something that will repeat later with anti-LGBT laws. 

Marriage has traditionally enforced the patriarchy in the United States. The biggest reason people are afraid of gay marriage is because it could lead to a relationship where a man is not in a dominant position and a woman is not in a submissive position. In other words, gay people offend the gender hierarchy in a way that makes many in America uncomfortable. This can often be seen when gay people are asked “which one of you is the husband and which one of you is the wife?” (Shoen-Ukre). While one may assume this is just hetero normativity, the assumption that everyone does as heterosexuals do, this is more a confused expression of deeply entrenched gender roles. In a heterosexual relationship, there is the husband, who goes out, does the work, and is strong, stoic, and protective, and the wife, who stays home, cares for the family, and has children. These roles are normally automatically assigned to man and woman, maintaining the patriarchy and keeping women in a worse and subservient position. But when there are two men or two women in a relationship, society cannot automatically assign these roles, and for many it causes confusion. Confusion is then abused to create false narratives that harm LGBT people, and those narratives are then used to demonize queer people. Then, on top of this, the fear of queer people is used to condition how young Americans act, using the threat of being identified as homosexual to force people to fall into traditional gender roles, further reinforcing the patriarchy in the process, and repeating this self-reinforcing cycle. Patriarchy as the end goal of traditional marriage can be seen from the thoughts of conservative politicians, too. The so called “First Lady” of the conservative movement, Phyllis Schlafly, famously said “[m]y analysis is that gays are about 5 percent of the attack on marriage in this country, and the feminists are about 95 percent” (Hagen). Her admission that she is not offended by gay people, rather how gay people disrespect the gender hierarchy, reveals the hierarchy not as a byproduct, but the point. This shows how anti-feminist and anti-queer policies are inextricably linked, showing that women’s rights and LGBT rights cannot exist without each other.  

Earlier in this text, I said that some viewed marriage as the end of gay history, and while this is false, it is worth noting some of the positive effects marriage had. One is the dissolution of gay stereotypes. Before, gay people were painted as lawless vagrants who could not create a real family or life for themselves. In a post-Obergefell world, it is now very hard to maintain these stereotypes, as there are many queers who are happily married with children of their own. Even though this kind of homophobia still exists, these stereotypes will only be effective amongst people who are removed from the rest of American society, as any person who knows a gay person would not be able to maintain them. As these stereotypes crumbled, homophobes were effectively closeted. Post-Obergefell, many homophobes felt pressure to stay silent, as their view on marriage was now unpopular with both the people and the law. Even the strongest source of homophobic legislation in the United States, the Republican Party, cannot publicly homophobic, with Trump having spoken positively towards gay and lesbian Americans since 2016 (McGraw), though they have continued to be a scourge of the gay community up to present day. But the problem with all these gains is that they are very much temporary, and in the modern day we are seeing them slowly slip away with the remaining patriarchy diminishing our societal progress. As my colleague points out in his blog, “There is an evident population of people who, once again, are using religion and the accompanying morals to alienate Sexual Minorities further” (Lipsett). Clearly, this is a problem that Obergefell can’t address, and while it may have changed the legal reality of America, it certainly did not fix the societal one.

Following Roe v. Wade, a case which gave women full bodily autonomy, (Blackmun) there was a large conservative movement to repeal this ruling, one which was eventually successful. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that women did not have the right to an abortion, overthrowing 50 years of precedent in the process (Oyez). Even though this case had been decided for so long, without the fundamental problem of the patriarchy dealt with, the restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy were levied once again. In this same opinion, Justice Thomas suggests that Obergefell v. Hodges should be revisited at some point in the future, showing that queer rights are still on the chopping block and are not a done issue. Of course, with the new social climate following Obergefell v. Hodges, Conservative lawmakers knew attacking gay people directly could no longer work. As a result, they focused their effort on discrimination against transgender people. For them, transgender people cross the same imaginary line in the patriarchy that gay people do, and trans people are in a much more vulnerable position than their cisgender homosexual counterparts. For this reason, they have tried to litigate against them with policies such as gender-affirming healthcare bans, because the state of Tennessee hates transgender people, because the state of Tennessee wants to uphold the patriarchy. As part of this litigation, the rights of LGBT people as a whole have been questioned, as to be determined in L. W. v. Skrmetti which will decide whether LGBT people as a whole are a legally protected class (Millhiser). If this case goes in favor of the conservatives, many LGBT protections from the courts will vanish overnight, independent of their right to marry.  

Both Dobbs v. Jackson and L.W. v. Skrmetti illustrate how marriage had very little to do with the civil rights of LGBT individuals. Rather, it was the racism and the patriarchy that marriage upheld that is inseparably intertwined with the rights and the future of all queer people. Whether or not L. W. v Skrmetti is decided for queers or against them, the only way to stop the assault on queer people is to end the patriarchy and end racism, or at the very least tone it back to a point where it’s not a powerful force in American politics. If we want to stop queer people being the scapegoats for cishet people’s problems, we need to end the cishet people’s problems. This means teaming up with other civil rights organizations fighting for racial justice and women’s rights. If we can do that, then the future for queer Americans is undoubtedly bright. But if we bury our head in the sand and look at marriage as the only thing that ever mattered, that can never be the case.  

  

Citations: 

1. Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) 

2. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) 

3. Shoen-Ukre, Eric T. “Are You the Husband or the Wife?” HuffPost, HuffPost, 14 June 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/are-you-the-husband-or-the-wife_b_5940489ae4b0d99b4c920f5f. 

4. Hagen, Jamie J. “The 10 Dumbest Things Ever Said about Same-Sex Marriage.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 25 June 2018, www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-10-dumbest-things-ever-said-about-same-sex-marriage-197446/. 

5. McGraw, Meredith. “The GOP Waves White Flag in the Same-Sex Marriage Wars.” POLITICO, POLITICO, 16 Aug. 2021, www.politico.com/news/2021/08/16/republicans-gay-marriage-wars-505041.  

6. "Roe v. Wade." Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/1971/70-18. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023. 

7. "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization." Oyez, www.oyez.org/cases/2021/19-1392. Accessed 19 Nov. 2023. 

8. Millhiser, Ian. “A Monumental LGBTQ Rights Case Is Barreling toward the Supreme Court.” Vox, 10 July 2023, www.vox.com/scotus/2023/7/10/23789633/supreme-court-lgbtq-lw-skrmetti-transgender-health-care-jeffrey-sutton-sixth-circuit. 

             9. Lipsett, Zachary. “Final Paper.” Final Paper, Blogger, 4 Dec. 2023, azlipsett.blogspot.com/2023/12/final-paper.html.