A recent report tells us that half of all new babies born in Scotland last year were born to unmarried parents. And those statistics are indicative of a growing trend in many places of families that do not meet the imaginary norm of two opposite-sex married parents and their biological children.
Oddly enough, this lesbian mom thought first of all those Scottish babies when I heard all the good news about legal marriage expanding in the past two weeks. My partner and I can now have our Canadian marriage recognized in Sweden, Iowa and Vermont and depending on the U.S. Congress's response to the city's decision, the District of Columbia. Add these to a growing list that includes Spain, Belgium, Massachusetts, New York and of course, Canada.
Marriage is indeed a handy thing for us to have. It protects us in the event of death or accident, making sure we can care for each other in extremity and inherit from each other easily. It protects the children that come into our family while we are married, making sure we are both recognized as their parents, and thus responsible for them. But marriage isn't the only way to obtain those kinds of benefits. And same-sex marriage does nothing at all for children born to unmarried parents, whatever their gender configuration.
There are many reasons families other than the Leave it to Beaver model need recognition, care and protection from the government, but even exclusively focusing on children's needs quickly alerts us to the many ways in which marriage is not the answer to these needs.
No, a child with a de facto, but nonlegal parent can't be covered by that parent's employer-based health insurance. But even when that de facto parent becomes a legal one by caveat of a marriage to the first parent or through second-parent adoption (when available) the child will remain uninsured if that parent has no coverage herself, as many don't.
Marriage allows its members to visit each other in the hospital in emergencies, but same-sex marriage doesn't help the mother and father, unmarried to each other in such emergencies.
Marriage means any child born into the family of a married couple is automatically the legal child of both. This doesn't help live-in, unmarried partners of any sex who raise each other's children.
Marriage offers special rights to an ever decreasing percentage of the population and the children born to that group. But rather than expanding who can obtain these special rights, the government should be designing family law to protect all families in their ever-increasing variety.
Some great suggestions for doing that, based on models from countries that do it better, as well as her own brilliant legal thinking, can be found in Nancy Polikoff's book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage. Polikoff's central idea is that we should strive to make marriage "matter less" to the well being of families, allowing it without discrimination, but only as a personal, spiritual and symbolic ritual that is not required to protect and defend families and their dependents (whether those dependents are children or dependent adults).
Universal health coverage, court arbitration for non-martial family break ups, parenting rights for all of a child's acting parents, and other reforms would go much further and protect many more people than merely extending marriage rights and privileges. Furthermore, same-sex marriage, under Polikoff's plans would cease to be a cultural or political dividing force. Why? Because families could get what they needed without "marriage" leaving marriage itself to be defined in whatever way legally toothless groups wanted to define it. If a certain church wanted to restrict marriage to women and men, it could (as all churches can now, by the way) and if another wanted to marry groups of more than two people in a spiritually meaningful ritual, it could do that as well. But access or lack of it to any of these ceremonies would have no impact on the rights of any given family.
Polikoff's ideas are simple, common sense ones and I am glad to see them in print. I hope I'll see them in law someday. I hope it more than I hope for gay marriage, however convenient that would be for my particular family.
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Image: Toby Talbot, Associated Press
