Wedding Tableau ca. 1930. Photo: Sam Hood.

Ann Pellegrini | Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University

We’ve come a long way since The Feminists, a New York City radical feminist group—who billed themselves “as A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles”—staged a protest action at Manhattan’s Marriage License Bureau. It was September 1969.  In a pamphlet handed out as part of their action, they asked, “Women: Do You Know the Facts About Marriage?” Linking sex and economy, they decried marriage as a “slavery-like practice” that gave husbands open access to their wives’ bodies and household labor.

In that same year, and across the country, a different kind of marriage protest was underway in Huntington Park, a suburb of Los Angeles.  The Reverend Troy D. Perry—founder of the gay-affirming Metropolitan Community Church—performed what is generally held to be the first public same-sex wedding in the United States.  (The Metropolitan Community Church also makes a cameo appearance in Lori Beaman’s contribution to this dossier.)  The following year, in January 1970, Perry filed a lawsuit seeking state recognition of same-sex marriage.  The lawsuit was dismissed; but, 32 years later California remains a flashpoint in the ongoing legal and cultural battles over same-sex marriage in the United States.

Both these actions—the picketing at the Manhattan Marriage License Bureau and the same-sex wedding publicly sanctified by Perry—represented important critiques of state-organized marriage, even as they came out (so to speak) in very different places.  The Feminists wanted to abolish marriage and the sexual inequality they believed it both supported and depended upon; the Metropolitan Community Church wanted to broaden the marital franchise to allow same-sex couples the same rights, privileges, and social recognition available to heterosexual couples.

Three decades later, as the same-sex marriage train rolls inexorably towards a showdown at the Supreme Court, some of us are left wondering: what ever happened to the feminist and gay liberationist critique of marriage?  To be sure, some feminist and LGBTQ legal activists have argued that state recognition of same-sex marriage could transform heterosexual marriage, too, by promoting greater gender equality and patterning different ways of thinking about and enacting sex roles.  And perhaps this is even one of the things that worries opponents of same-sex marriage.  That is, when marriage traditionalists argue that legalized gay marriage would devalue “real” marriage and bring not just western civilization to its knees (and not in a good way), but destroy the planet, maybe one of the things they are defending against is the demolition of sexual difference.

Certainly, Pope Benedict XVI worried over just this cosmic chain reaction in his controversial Christmas 2008 message to the faithful in which he likened homosexuality to an ecological disaster: “It is necessary for there to be something like an ecology of man. This is not an outdated metaphysics, if the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected.  Here we are dealing with the fact of faith in the Creator and paying attention to the language of creation, the disrespecting of which would be a self-destruction of man and thus destruction of the work of God.  What is often understood by the word ‘gender’ finds its resolution in the auto-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator.  Man wants to… control everything that concerns him.  But in this way he lives against the creator. The tropical forest deserves our protection, but no less than man as creation….”

Gay marriage as some sort of environmental disaster was the background image for “The Gathering Storm,” a public service announcement produced by the conservative National Organization for Marriage (NOM), in spring 2009. The PSA was so over the top that subsequent video parodies of it were quite nearly a redundancy.

The Pope and NOM are strange sorts of optimists in comparison to those many of us, queer and straight, religious and unaffiliated, who suspect same-sex marriage would not be as earth-shattering and civilization-reordering as its opponents fear.  And that is precisely the problem.  My own brief—and I count myself among those progressive queer and feminist critics of the same-sex marriage movement—is not with state recognition of same-sex marriage per se.  If the U.S. state is going to hand out social benefits via civil marriage (1138 state benefits are doled out via marriage in the United States) and if marriage is the only way (certainly it is the simplest way) to access these 1138 state goodies, then of course same-sex couples should have access to the marriage franchise, too, as a matter of basic equality.

However, like many other progressive critics of same-sex marriage, I wonder at the narrowness of this vision of “equality,” and the jettisoning of a broader vision of social justice.  Marriage is a three-way with the state, which uses marriage and the families defined through it as a way to privatize not just affective labor but the manual labor of caring for children, elderly parents, sick family members, and other cherished intimates.  And yet, “other cherished intimates” are defined out of bounds by the cramped legal definitions of kinship as anchored in marriage and the conventionally coupled.

As Lisa Duggan put the matter in a trenchant essay in The Nation, “state regulation of households and partnerships does in fact affect the basic safety, prosperity, equality and welfare of all Americans—it determines who will make medical decisions for us in emergencies, who may share our pensions or Social Security benefits, who may legally co-parent our children and much more.”

For the neoliberal state, marriage is a bargain; for individuals, in the diversity of ways they actually live their lives—building intimacies and kinship networks that exceed the couple form (and baby makes three)—the cost-benefit analysis is not so clear.  The same-sex marriage movement in the United States cedes all these questions, and the issues of economic and social justice they implicate, when it focuses on “marriage equality” as the ultimate prize.

But, like I said, the same-sex marriage train is a-rollin’, and it may be too far out of the station for conservative opponents—or progressive critics—to halt the momentum.  According to 2010 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a strong plurality of Americans now favor some sort of state recognition of same-sex couples, whether in the form of marriage (37 percent) or civil unions (27 percent).  This is in comparison to 33 percent who opposed any form of state recognition. But once age of respondents is factored in, the numbers get even more stark.  As the Christian Century summarizes: “Among the youngest group surveyed (ages 18-29), a full three-quarters supported full same-sex marriage rights (52 percent) or civil unions (23 percent). But among those age 65 and over, only a small majority voiced support for same-sex marriage (22 percent) or civil unions (29 percent).”

Significantly, this generation gap holds even among white evangelicals, traditionally the group most vociferously opposed to same-sex marriage.  An earlier 2008 PRRI study found that: “Support for same-sex marriage is significant among some young religious Americans. Among young (18-34) white mainline Protestants and Catholics, close to half (48% and 44% respectively) support same-sex marriage. Among young evangelicals (18-34), a majority favor either same-sex marriage (24%) or civil unions (28%), compared to a majority (58%) of evangelicals overall who favor no legal recognition of gay couples’ relationships.” When it comes to winning the hearts, minds, and souls of the younger generation on the question of same-sex marriage, religious and social conservatives have lost.

And so have women.  What do I mean by this?  That same Christian Century article contrasts the rising support for gay marriage, especially among younger Americans, with public attitudes towards legalized abortion.  The survey found that support for abortion held steady over the past five years, but so did opposition to it.  More significantly, there was no demonstrable generation gap, as there is on the same-sex marriage issue.  That is, both support for and opposition to legalized abortion held steady across age groups.  One clear implication of these trends for younger evangelicals and, I’d venture, for younger Americans more generally, is a developing cleavage between legalizing gay marriage, which they increasingly support, and legalized abortion, which they continue to oppose.  As PRRI researcher Robert Jones concludes, “The survey reveals a decoupling of the social issues of same-sex marriage and abortion, which have traditionally been mentioned in the same breath in the public discourse.”

Well, yes and no.  Rather than see these two issues as “decoupled,” I actually see a disturbing connection between rising support for same-sex marriage and the continued and, even, hardened opposition to legalized abortion (and that opposition is gaining traction at state legislatures around the U.S. in the wake of Republican victories in the 2010 elections).  When rhetoric in favor of same-sex marriage equates marriage with personal responsibility and psychological maturity—as so many of the advocates have argued—it promotes the idea that gays and anyone else who does not want to buckle down and marry are childish, at best, dangerously irresponsible, at worst.  Such arguments for marriage equality turn into pleas for heterosexuals and the state to help homosexuals grow up and get on with the business of being responsible, disciplined adults.

But this equation—marriage equals developmental maturity and the capacity to exercise responsibility over oneself and to one’s larger community—in turn contributes to a larger moral economy in U.S. public life in which sex becomes the place where we measure whether an individual is “properly” self-disciplined or moral at all.  Wanna get married?  You pass.  Want or need an abortion?  Not so fast.  Abortion conjures raced and classed images of an out of control female sexuality.  An unwanted or unplanned pregnancy, which can happen for so many reasons—including failed contraception or a failure to educate young people about contraception at all (hello, abstinence-only sex education)—is instead recast as a woman’s failure in self-discipline and sexual morality.

The “responsibilization” of sexuality thus cuts both ways, towards a growing acceptance and, even, promotion of same-sex marriage and towards the declining fortunes of abortion access and reproductive freedom more broadly nation-wide.  Proponents of same-sex marriage are not to blame for the ratcheting up of laws aimed at limiting women’s and girls’ legal access to abortion.  But they do contribute to a public political climate in which such laws make a kind of moral common sense.

Increasingly, the neo-liberal state can make room for self-disciplined, “responsiblized” homosexual couples.  And this embrace of Adam and Steve alongside Adam and Eve can even go hand in hand with a diminution in reproductive freedom and a narrowing, as well, of public discourse concerning sexual ethics and social justice.

This is the view from the United States, admittedly, one very cranky and partial view.  How do things look elsewhere in the Americas?  How have debates over same-sex marriage variously engaged religious notions of sexual responsibility?  How does the role of the state in regulating sexuality change as we move across different national sites with their different history of relations between Church and State?  Moreover, given that marriage in the United States is left to individual states to define and regulate, how are battles over same-sex marriage playing out regionally in the U.S.?

These are among the questions addressed in the cluster of essays and one video commentary that make up this Flashpoints portfolio, with correspondents from Argentina (Juan Marco Vaggione), Mexico City (Rafael de la Dehesa), and Canada (Lori Beaman) helping us grapple with the difference that national location and specific religious-secular formations make to same-sex marriage debates.  Meanwhile, in her contribution to this forum, Rebecca Alpert, a Jewish Studies scholar and an ordained rabbi in the Reconstructionist tradition, makes a cogent religious freedom argument for same-sex marriage in the U.S.  Her approach potentially opens up discursive space to talk about—and enact—both religious and sexual difference.  Finally, as a way to shine a light on just how region- and religion-specific these debates are, we are featuring a video commentary by Troy Williams, a Salt Lake City-based activist and radio host.

Ann Pellegrini is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies at New York University, where she also directs the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race; co-author, with Janet R. Jakobsen, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; co-editor, with Daniel Boyarin and Daniel Itzkovitz, of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question; and co-editor, with Jakobsen, of Secularisms. With José Esteban Muñoz she co-edits the book series “Sexual Cultures” for NYU Press. She is currently completing a new book on the politics and performance of religious feelings.