|
| Anne Stanback |
From the April, 2003 "O/AM News."
As a graduate of Yale Divinity School and a new member of a UCC congregation (Immanuel Congregational Church, Hartford), I have seen the transformative power of religion throughout my life. However, as a lesbian in a 19-year relationship and as president of an organization working to allow same-sex couples to marry, I too often experience religion used to criticize both my personal and professional life.
It is through this lens that I write to you about the work of Love Makes a Family (LMF) and the effort in Connecticut to win the freedom to marry.
Why Marriage? I write a few words of explanation/persuasion about marriage because I've come to realize many people do not understand LMF's mission of expanding our marriage laws to include same-sex couples.
People often ask me why we are fighting so hard for the word "marriage?" Why don't we just ask for the same rights and call it something else?
First, there is nothing that has all the rights and responsibilities of marriage BUT marriage. Whether we like it or not, "marriage"--in addition to being a religious concept--is a legal term with legal implications, and it is intrinsically woven into our society's laws and culture.
And second, this is an issue of basic civil rights. That's why "civil union" or "domestic partnership," while an important and perhaps necessary step in this fight, is not the end goal.
"Separate but equal" has not worked at other times in our nation's history, and it will not work in this instance. Separate is NOT equal.
What then, is marriage?
Simply put, it is all of these:
Marriage is also a civil institution that has evolved along with our understanding of human rights. At an earlier time, marriage was, by legal definition, an institution in which women were subsumed under the legal identity of their husbands. It was an institution that took "til death do us part" literally and made it almost impossible to end an abusive marriage. It was an institution that linked marriage and procreation until the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965 legalized the use of contraceptives for married couples. And it was an institution that required couples to be of the same race until as late as 1967.
There is no question that allowing two people of the same sex to marry represents a significant change. But there is also no question that marriage has withstood equally significant changes over the last 100 years and is a stronger, more inclusive institution for those changes.
Where are we today? As I write this, we have just lost a vote on a comprehensive Domestic Partnership (DP) bill in the Judiciary Committee. Ironically, we may have more support in the legislature as a whole than in this one very conservative committee.
Consequently, we are discussing reintroducing the same DP language as an amendment on the floor of the House or Senate. Would passage of such a bill be an important step forward? Absolutely. Would it be the end of our fight? Absolutely not!
Whatever happens or doesn't happen this legislative session, we at LMF will be intensifying our educational efforts to move public opinion in support of full equality--marriage.
Let me end with a very simple statement: we will not win the campaign for marriage equality without public support. Connecticut's "Gay Rights Bill" passed in 1991 after 18 years of trying. In my mind, the critical element that led to our winning was the creation that year of an interfaith religious coalition supporting the legislation. As with that earlier fight to prohibit workplace and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation, today's opposition is almost entirely religious in nature. Legislators often cite religious concerns as reason to oppose a marriage bill.
To win we must have strong, broad-based support from progressive lay and clergy leaders like you.
Love Makes a Family is a statewide coalition of organizations and individuals. See www.lmfct.org
The United Church of Christ has been a leader within Love Makes a Family since our organization was formed in 1999 to work on the issue of second-parent adoption for same-sex couples. When that legislation passed in 2000 and our focus moved to the more comprehensive issue of marriage, the UCC continued to be one of our most passionate voices for justice and equality.
The Connecticut Conference of the UCC was one of the five founding organizations of LMF and still has an organizational representative on the Steering Committee. And many of you have been supporting the work of LMF for years.
But there is still much work to be done. I know you are all extremely busy people; the good news is that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of time for you to make a tremendous difference in the lives of the same-sex couples in this state. Here are just a few suggestions:
As the battle for marriage rights heats up in Connecticut, we hear more from our opponents about what they believe constitutes a family. A religious leader from New Haven was quoted in the Hartford Courant recently as saying, "Two men or two women, no matter how loving or caring they may be to children in their care, do not and cannot a family make."
That kind of thinking still exists but is coming to sound ridiculous to a majority in our society. By speaking out against injustice, we are changing the hearts and minds of our neighbors, our co-workers and our elected officials. We can and we will win the freedom to marry, but to do it we need all of you.
- Anne Stanback - astanback@yahoo.com; 860/674-8942
