About marriage Mae West once said, "marriage is a great institution . . . but I ain’t ready for institution yet." By not getting married Mae West missed out on a bonanza of perks provided by both government and business.

Most of us who are married simply take the legal advantages of marriage for granted. However, this week I did some research into the special deals I get because I am married. I discovered that in 1996 the General Accounting Office did a study. The GAO found more than one thousand places in the federal law where legal marriage conferred a distinctive status or benefit to married Americans. The Government has packed into marriage many special deals, from immigration and citizenship to military service, tax policy, and property rules. Corporate benefits, pensions, taxes, educational funding – Government leaders designed all to encourage marital unions. For example, Social Security and veteran’s survivors benefits go to legally married spouses.

The belief that married people pay more in taxes because of a "marriage penalty" is only partially true. Dual income, high-earning couples and lower income couples sometime suffer the penalty, but for more than half of all spouses, particularly those with children, marriage slashes tax bills. That means, for example, that high salaried executives with stay-at-home wives get subsidies that single working moms do not. In our society laws transfer wealth to the married class. Laws impose an array of taxes on singles – no matter how many people they care for or are dependent on them.

In the workplace, unmarried people make an average 25% less than married colleagues for the same work because of the marriage centered structure of health care, retirement, and other benefits. School taxes and growing inequities in pensions between married and singles represent a big bonus for married couples. The unmarried are often subject to discrimination in housing and credit applications. They pay more for auto and homeowners’ insurance and are shut out of discounts on gyms, country clubs, and hotel rooms. In some states, laws bar unmarried people from taking on roommates to help pay the rent.

The many perks that come with being married are a part of the reason that some homosexual couples have expressed an interest in same-sex marriages. Lesbians and gay men seek marriage for some of the same reasons ex-slaves did after the Civil War. They want access to basic civil rights. The exclusion of same-sex partners from the right to marry stigmatizes their relationship. This exclusion reinforces a supremacy of heterosexual over homosexuality in the same way laws banning marriages across the color line reinforced white supremacy.

Unitarian Universalists were the first clergy to officiate at same sex marriages in California back in the late 1960s. Although many such religious services took place in the 1970s and 1980s, it is only in the last ten years that government officials have taken up the issue.

The first break for same sex couples came in 1993 when the Hawaiian Supreme Court defined marriage as a "state-conferred legal partnership status, the existence of which gives rise to a multiplicity of rights and benefits reserved exclusively to the particular relation." The court said that heterosexual marriage was one of many possible state-conferred forms of marriage. In reaction to such court rulings twenty-four states passed legislation banning recognition in their territory of same-sex marriages, even if validated elsewhere.

Nationally Congress debated the "Defense of Marriage Act" during the summer of 1996. The Defense of Marriage Act explicitly defined the words "marriage" and "spouse" in Federal law as involving one man and one woman. It also said that the Federal Government would not require any state to honor a same sex marriage contracted in another state. This was despite the constitutional rule that each state should give "full faith and credit" to public action in other states.

The Bill’s sponsors announced that a traditional heterosexual marriage was the fundamental building block of our society. Homosexual marriages would start the dissent down a slippery slope to licensed polygamy, incest and even marriage to animals. Congressman James Talent of Missouri said:

It is an active hubris to believe that marriage can be infinitely malleable that it can be pushed and pulled around like silly-putty without destroying its essential stability and what it means to our society, and if marriage goes, then the family goes, and if the family goes, we have none of the decency or ordered liberty which Americans have been brought up to enjoy and to appreciate.

One cosponsor of the bill said it was "vital" to protect "our nation’s traditional understanding of marriage" as "the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony."

Jesse Helms complained about homosexual extremists eviscerating the nation’s moral stamina. Calling marriage sacred, Helms proclaimed that the moral and spiritual survival of this Nation was at stake in the measure and that the vote would decide "whither goeth America." The vote in the House was 342 for to 67 against and in the Senate 85 for to 14 against.

Two years later the fight over gay marriages moved to Alaska. The Alaska State Constitution explicitly guarantees the right to privacy and equal protection of the laws. In 1998 two gay men, who were denied a marriage license, sued the state, asserting that its disallowance of same-sex marriage violated their constitutional rights.

The judge in the Alaska case ruled in favor of the men. He called the "right to choose one’s life partner" constitutionally "fundamental." "Government intrusion into the choice of a life partner encroaches on the intimate personal decisions of the individual," the judge wrote. "The relevant question is not whether same-sex marriage is so rooted in our traditions . . . , but whether the freedom to choose one’s own life partner is so rooted in our traditions." In Alaska and Hawaii groups opposed to Gay marriage work to amend those state’s constitutions to declare marriage legal only between a man and woman. The two referendum banning gay marriages in Alaska and Hawaii passed in 1998.

By the spring of 2000 a total of thirty-five of the fifty states had passed laws refusing to recognize same-sex marriage. Despite California’s reputation for liberalism, more than three-fifths of the voters in California endorsed a resolution that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid and recognizing California.

On the other hand, in the year 2000, Vermont enacted a law, reserving marriage to one man and one woman but allowing a same-sex couple in the state the identical rights and protections in "civil union."

In June of this year the United States Supreme Court invalidated state anti-sodomy laws. On November 18, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marriage under the nation’s oldest state constitution. Five of the seven couples involved in the court decision are Unitarian Universalists. Nearly every day now the Post has had an article about same-sex marriage. Yesterday it was "Opponents of Gay Marriage Divided." They are having difficulty agreeing on the wording of a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. We are in the middle of a heated national debate.

July 3 the Washington Post published one of the most interesting articles I have read on this topic. The title was "Abolish Marriage" and the author was Michael Kinsley. Kinsley wrote:

We can add gay marriage to the short list of controversies—abortion, affirmative action, the death penalty—that are so frozen and ritualistic that debates about them are more like performances than intellectual exercises. Or we can think outside the box. . . . The solution is to end marriage. . . . Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. . . . Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. . . . If marriage were an entirely private affair, all the disputes over gay marriage would become irrelevant. Gay marriage would not have the official sanction of government, but neither would straight marriage.

I like Michael Kinsley’s proposal. Not only does it provide a creative solution to the debate over the legalization of Gay marriages, it also speaks to the problem of inequality between married and single persons. We might call this change in the relation between marriage and the state the "disestablishment" of marriage. The term disestablishment comes from religious history. Historians call a national church supported by taxes the "established" religion. Disestablishment did not mean that religious institutions disappeared. More often religious groups increased in number when no single model was, any longer, supported and enforced by the state. By analogy, I am suggesting that the particular model of marriage that was for so long the officially supported model now should be disestablished.

Of course, Congress and the fifty state legislatures are unlikely to vote to disestablish marriage. Nevertheless, the disestablishment of marriage is happening in the United States in a process of unorganized, mass civil disobedience. In spite of its perks, many people are deciding against marriage, and in favor of something else.

Married-couple households have slipped from 80 percent in the 1950s to 50 percent today. The unmarried now make up 42 percent of the workforce, 40 percent of home buyers, and 35 percent of voters. Families consisting of breadwinner dads and stay at home moms now account for just 10 percent of all households. Married couples with kids, which made up nearly every household a century ago, now total just 25 percent, with the number projected to drop to 20 percent by 2010. Thirty-three percent of children are now born to single parents compared to about 5 percent in 1960.

Sixty-two percent of households are without children. The number of unmarried couple households recorded by the Census Bureau multiplied almost ten times from 1960 to 1998. In 1999 cohabitation became the norm for men and women as their first form of heterosexual living. Almost two-thirds of those born between 1963 and 1974 first cohabit, without marrying. People living alone composed a quarter of all households in 1998. The proportion of adults who declined to marry at all rose from 15% in 1972, to 23% in 1998.

The situation today is similar to that in 18^th and early 19^th century America. Two hundred years ago people lived far apart on farms. Getting access to an official who could legally perform a marriage was difficult. Before 1750 most people did not even have a marriage ceremony. They just lived together and declared to family and friends that they were married. We know from genealogical records that in colonial America more than 50 percent of the time the official marriage date was less than nine months before the birth of the first child. Pregnancy or childbirth was the signal for a couple to consider themselves married. An Anglican minister in Montgomery County, Maryland said "if no marriage should be deemed valid that had not been registered in the parish book it would, I am persuaded, bastardize nine tenths of the people in the County."

After the Civil War the process of marrying became much more formal. As an incentive to get men to serve, the Federal Government offered pensions to solders. These pensions were to be paid to the widowers of the solders who died in battle. The war was so terrible that hundreds of thousands of women made claims for pensions. To discourage fraud the government wanted proof of marriage. As a result, from about 1861 on, couples began to take the paper work of getting a marriage license much more seriously.

Before the Civil War each local community had policed their own informal rules about marriage, allowing for some diversity in human relationships. Then the community was geographical. Today our communities are more cultural. Now people who are not following the conventional model of marriage look for endorsement from like-minded communities, and hope to be left alone by others whom they are not harming. This has happened with the gay community in the United States. It has also happened in parts of Arizona and Utah where fundamentalist Mormons have revived polygamy. This I suspect is the future of marriage. Every day fewer people are legally married. People are choosing other kinds of relationships.

Still I understand and support the desire to make same-sex marriage legal.

Speaking about the Defense of Marriage Act back in 1996, Congressman Patrick Kennedy of Road Island said that the bill was "not about defending marriage. It is about finding an enemy. It is not about marital union. It is about disunion, about dividing one group of Americans against another."

Without the approval of congress or state governments changes are occurring in human relationships. When they are changes that go in the direction of increased love and respect, they have my full support.

Personally, I am a heterosexual monogamist. This may be because I learned this model from the family in which I grew up. It may be because my genes have programmed me to be this way, or it may be a combination of both. I can say that I enjoy being a heterosexual monogamist, and that I highly recommend it as a way to live. Still I do not believe that everyone should be just like me. I have always resented the marriage laws and regulations that try to put all of us in the same box. When it comes to relationships, I believe in promises, discipline, self control, responsibility and love. But I also believe in freedom. I believe in freedom with promises, freedom with discipline, freedom with self control, freedom with responsibility and freedom with love.

Sources:

Conlin, Michelle, "Unmarried America," Business Week, October 20, 2003, cover story.

Cott, Nancy, Public Vows, A History of Marriage and the Nation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts.

Kinsley, Michael, "Abolish Marriage," Washington Post, July 3, 2003, Page A23.

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4099
Tel: 301-493-8300    Fax: 301-897-5713
e-mail: office@CedarLane.org
Sunday Services at 10 a.m.
© 1998-2008, Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Webminister