Separate church and state: Abolish marriage!

The opinion given in today's CA Supreme Court ruling demonstrates how the fight for same-sex marriage continues to reinforce injustice, not support it. The "Marriage Equality" movement continues to empower the State and a majority of Americans in making sweeping decisions that interfere with the private lives of many, many non-traditional families, and not just queer ones.

The assimilationist strategies that mainline LGBT orgs have been pursuing -- despite their recent successes in the northeast and Iowa -- reinforce long-standing traditions of privileges for the few, not equal rights for all. Lisa Duggan put it this way in a Feb 2006 article in the Nation:

"In a bid for equality, some gay groups are producing rhetoric that insults and marginalizes unmarried people, while promoting marriage in much the same terms as the welfare reformers use to stigmatize single-parent households, divorce and "out of wedlock" births. If pursued in this way, the drive for gay-marriage equality can undermine rather than support the broader movement for social justice and democratic diversity."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040315/duggan

Even if the CA Supreme Court had overturned Prop 8 today, they would not have ushered in a new era of justice. All this gay marriage advocacy stuff does is support (and even INVITE) the State's interference in our vastly diverse and often non-traditional private lives.

Progressives, libertarians and conservatives CAN share common ground on the issue of so-called "same-sex marriage." Privatizing marriage (separating church and state) is a winnable fight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_privatization

While Alan Dershowitz is not my favorite legal scholar, on this issue I think he gets it right:

"Though some traditionalists would be certain to balk at an explicit division between marriage and civil union, a majority of Americans already agree that gay couples should be allowed to join in secular unions with the rights and responsibilities that generally accompany marriage.

So let each couple decide whether they want to receive the sacrament of marriage or the secular status of civil union. And let the state get out of the business of determining who should receive holy sacraments."