Married with a house in the suburbs, 1.9 kids and a white picket fence? No thanks. Some people on the left have echoed this caricature, arguing that radicals should oppose gay marriage — or at least turn our attentions elsewhere.
True, marriage is a legal contract that binds two people in a relationship of property rights. Socialists are fighting for a future society in which people's sexual lives would be a purely personal issue, with living arrangements free of any material constraints and interference by the state.
But like the fight of African Americans for the right to vote in elections — even when there are no politicians worth supporting — the gay marriage battle today is a fight for equality, democracy and basic human dignity.
That's why thousands of gay and lesbian couples camped out in the rain outside San Francisco's city hall waiting to get married. As Cynthia Rickert told the San Francisco Chronicle, "Everybody has a right to love each other. It's time for us to get off the back of the bus".
Discrimination against gays and lesbians is pervasive and, like all forms of discrimination, weakens the ability of workers to unite in struggle. A class divided will not be prepared to win the battles ahead. With marriage rights, gays and lesbians could participate more fully in — and therefore strengthen — class battles for reforms such as family leave, pensions and health care benefits.
What's more, the more seemingly radical argument against same-sex marriage ends up being indifferent to the real material benefits for working-class gays and lesbians.
Though gay marriage accepts certain norms of capitalist society, it also cuts through the hypocrisy of family values and opens the door to ideas about new forms of social organisation. That's why the right wing is so threatened by it.
Those who dismiss the battle for same-sex marriage as simply an embrace of bourgeois morality are missing the context in which this fight is taking place. This is a time of growing social polarisation over issues such as the war and occupation of Iraq, the loss of millions of jobs, and socially repressive policies.
The threat of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage has uncorked that disgust in millions more people. The potential for mobilising people outraged by the right-wing blowhards exists in the fight for gay marriage.
[Reprinted from US Socialist Worker <http://www.socialistworker.org.>]
From Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004.
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