Will Gay Marriage Be Legal?

By John Cloud

Gay marriage is already legal in some sense: Michael and I recently bought a set of All-Clad pans together. We watch The Sopranos and split the HBO bill every month. We shave with the same razor.

Slightly more important, we both work for companies that offer health insurance to their workers' sweethearts, whether legally married or not. If we wanted them to, our families would come to one of those precious pseudo-weddings you've seen on sit-coms. Ours would involve tuna tartare and Madonna remixes, followed by a trip downtown to register with New York City as "domestic partners."

In fact, Michael and I can't really marry--not in New York and not even in Norway or Hawaii, which have thought about allowing same-sex marriages in recent years but ultimately decided not to. I shouldn't trivialize the perks we miss: law books at all levels contain thousands of statutes pertaining to spouses. If I were struck by a drunk driver, for instance, Michael wouldn't have the legal standing to sue the bastard or help decide on my medical treatment.

Will he in 2025? Almost certainly. In fact, within a decade, gay couples--at least those who live in progressive states--will probably enjoy all the rights, responsibilities and daily frustrations of married life, even if they don't have a marriage license. In Vermont the state supreme court has already ruled that the state must start providing the same benefits to all couples, gay and straight, except the title of marriage itself. Vermont legislators now have the option of granting same-sex couples the M word too. If they do--and it doesn't seem likely--they will ignite a federal case over whether other states have to honor Vermont's licenses. (Congress has said states can ignore others' gay marriages, but that law hasn't been tested in court.)

Ultimately, of course, the battle for gay marriage has always been about more than winning the second-driver discount at the Avis counter. In fact, the individual who has done most to push same-sex marriage--a brilliant 43-year-old lawyer-activist named Evan Wolfson--doesn't even have a boyfriend. He and the others who brought the marriage lawsuits of the past decade want nothing less than full social equality, total validation--not just the right to inherit a mother-in-law's Cadillac. As Andrew Sullivan, the (also persistently single) intellectual force behind gay marriage, has written, "Including homosexuals within marriage would be a means of conferring the highest form of social approval imaginable."

In this light, the Vermont decision looks more like Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling that allowed "separate but equal" facilities for blacks, than Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that finally required meaningful equality. If that analogy stands, it will be another half-century before gay couples can, in all 50 states, stand in the same line for marriage licenses as others.

By that time, Michael and I will be in our 80s, too old to stand in line for anything but mashed peas. He and I will have had a "gay marriage," probably one without an official certificate. Tomorrow's gay kids will enjoy simply marriage--without qualifiers.