Call to rethink marriage

As the broader gay community armours up to fight the same-sex marriage battle, US academic Nancy Polikoff has called for an end to the term.
Speaking at a Melbourne University public lecture last week, Polikoff said LGBT rights groups in the US are chasing the wrong outcome and should instead be agitating for a more inclusive word than -˜marriage’ to achieve relationship equality.
Drawing from her book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under The Law, and drawing parallels to Australia, Polikoff argued the case for US law becoming a -œbetter fit for the relationships which exist within it.
Polikoff, a law professor at American University Washington College of Law, has spent 30 years writing about and litigating cases for gay families.
The problem is the special status, or, as Polikoff says, -œa privileging of marriage above all other family forms.
-œI would have thought that the historical and traditional significance of marriage was precisely what the gay rights movement and the feminist movement had opposed for the last four decades, she said.
-œIf the state abolished marriage for everyone or replaced the word -˜marriage’ with a new term for intimate partnerships such as civil union, civil partnership or domestic partnership, that would also be equality.
Polikoff said rhetoric from gay rights activists in arguments for same-sex marriage demonstrate the restriction and strength the status of marriage has over society.
-œWhat disturbs me so much is the lengths to which the gay rights groups … do not want to participate in a conversation that says equality is satisfied if you change the word -˜marriage’ for all couples, and really I find that shocking, she said.
-œIt’s a result that’s completely driven by the impact of the right-wing marriage movement, the same ideology that makes it impossible.
-œMy solution is not marriage [for gay couples], but law reform that values the families and relationships that people value, without carving out a special category for marriage.
Unlike the US, in Australia there is little legal difference between defacto and married couples. In Victoria a statewide relationship register has drawn the two closer again.
Polikoff said despite favouring the abolition of the use of the word -˜marriage’, there should be no legal impediment for same-sex couples in Australia to get married.
-œIn Australia same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. There’s no reason for that denial other than discrimination and a sort of denigration of same-sex relationships, she said.
-œMarriage in Canada for same-sex and different-sex couples is a matter of choice, because nothing turns on it in the law. I hope that will be the result here because otherwise you are left with this inequality between gay and straight relationships that certainly has nothing to recommend itself.
-œOn the other hand if there was any mechanism for changing the word… if there was an avenue to define that word in a way that essentially melded it into something called -˜civil partnership’ or some other term… I think that would be a positive result for everybody.