Why I’m not for gay marriage

Before you decide I’m a homophobe, let me be clear: In a society where the government sanctifies heterosexual partnership under the name of marriage, I regard the denial of that sanctification to same-sex couples as a violation of basic rights. If the government grants anyone that right, it must grant it to all.

But instead, let the government stop granting marriage to anyone.

But I am married, so what gives?

There you get to the heart of why I’ve been thinking so much about this issue, but have taken so long to post on it. I have always been skeptical of marriage, and I used to have nightmares about finding myself in a white dress walking down an aisle. (Eek! How did I get here?) But after I had been with the man I’m now married to for a few years and realized I planned to create a lifelong partnership with him, I came to see refusing to accept the label of marriage as largely irrelevant and pointless. We had a wedding—I wore red, not white—and against all my expectation I enjoyed it. A woman rabbi married us, our families were there, and I, who am an only child and the daughter of a single mother, was delighted to be embraced in a new family. Warm and loving as that family would have been to me if we had decided not to get married, there’s no denying that that ceremony gave me a new status in the family. I now belong in a deeply comforting way. I gained a privilege that gays have traditionally been denied and that must change.

I also gained the 300-some dubious legal benefits of marriage. I say dubious, because many of these benefits are gains for my family unit but they have the effect of disempowering me. Our family unit may gain economically from the marriage—we can file a joint tax return, and my husband can claim for the family the right to Social Security based on 150 percent of his income, instead of 100 percent. But as a wife, I will face significant disincentives on my paid work. Because of joint filing, my earnings are taxed at a much steeper marginal rate than they were when I was single. (Ann Crittenden explains this well, although she doesn’t emphasize that this is a different problem from the more commonly known “marriage penalty”—the problem remains even if the couple as a unit doesn't pay any more than the total the two would pay separately. For a more technical explanation, see Siv Gustafsson’s scholarly paper [PDF]. For a full-length book on the subject, check out Edward McCaffery's terrific Taxing Women. )

Many women in this situation elect to drop out of the paid workforce, basing their decision only on a comparison of current costs and benefits. Yet dropping out of the workforce results in major long-term costs, including big hits to my lifetime earnings, my savings (including government-encouraged, tax-free savings under a 401K), and my accrual of Social Security. Social Security is designed to allow me to receive benefits under my husband’s umbrella, but my marriage had better survive for more than 10 years or I get nothing. If the marriage survives and I do take paid work, I likely will get no return on the Social Security taxes I pay on my earnings; that is, a non-wage-earning wife will get the same Social Security benefits I do, despite all the additional taxes I pay in.

If I am among the working poor, and I stay in the paid workforce once I marry, I will likely lose all or most of the Earned Income Credit, subjecting my earnings to whopping effective rates higher than the rich paid under the New Deal.

When a couple has a child, these disincentives to the wife’s paid work kick into overdrive. Rather than treating childcare as a business expense (as it clearly is) and allowing full deduction of it, let alone offering major tax credits or a full system of government-funded childcare, we get a token credit on a small fraction of the enormous cost of childcare. So lots of women drop out of the paid workforce when they have a child and even more do so when they face the cost of childcare for two or more children. Yet earnings are power, so this means they lose power, both within the marriage and in the larger world.

Marriage as a government-backed institution, whatever the privileges that come with it, remains a raw deal for women.

A majority of Americans now support domestic partnerships, but are uncomfortable with gay marriage. To which I think the solution is the abolition of marriage—as a government-backed institution. Which is not to say that marriage should be abolished altogether. Just get the government out of it. Let rabbis, priests, imams, and gurus and their associated communities provide the sanctification people want and need and let them call it what they want. Meanwhile the government would offer only domestic partnerships. And while we’re at it, let’s extend the right to enter these partnerships not just to gay and straight couples, but to any pair of consenting adults who want to live together and share living expenses, property, and, perhaps, responsibilities for children. Which is to say, junk the link between sex and partnership. Friends, sisters, cousins could become domestic partners if they liked.

When an unmarried acquaintance of mine faced a terminal illness, she knew she’d be turning to Medicaid to cover the high costs of dying, but Medicaid required her to spend down all her assets first. Her only asset was a condominium she occupied with her sister and wanted to pass on to her. If the sister had been her husband, she could have done so, without jeopardizing Medicaid coverage. Why should the government treat this relationship with her sister as any less significant than marriage to a man? Why should the government treat any life partnership between two adults less seriously than a sexual one between a man and a woman? Gays have raised this question, but we should take it far deeper and broader. This is both a practical matter and a matter of liberty and human flourishing, especially for women. Let us create less rigid and more expansive notions of family.

We should abolish joint filing and jettison the system that grants social benefits—from Social Security to health care—on the basis of marital status, in favor of granting them as rights of citizenship, or better yet as human rights.