Saturday, June 29, 2024
Opinion Today: In the United States, gay marriage was a missed opportunity
Nine years ago, when the Supreme Court enshrined same-sex marriage as a national right, President Barack Obama celebrated the ruling by remarking that progress "often comes in small increments, sometimes two steps forward, one step back." But his words also were an inadvertent warning. While in some countries the legalization of gay marriage has ushered in a new era of L.G.B.T.Q. equality and inclusion, in others — and especially in the United States — it has created an opening for new forms of discrimination and exclusion. That's one of the major insights I came to while researching my forthcoming book "Framing Equality: The Politics of Gay Marriage Wars," an attempt to examine the politics of gay marriage through transnational lenses. At the heart of the book is the concept of "framing," shorthand for the claims and appeals made by gay activists for ending the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from the institution of marriage. I argue that how a gay marriage campaign is framed determines the strength of the backlash and the effect on L.G.B.T.Q. equality. As I explain in my guest essay this week for Times Opinion, America's gay marriage campaign, seen from a global perspective, is notable for its very modest framing. Its core message emphasized how exclusionary marriage laws denied gay and lesbian couples benefits such as tax advantages, inheritance rights and hospital visitation privileges. By using this modest framing, the campaign missed a major opportunity to make a more ambitious case for L.G.B.T.Q. equality, as activists did in, for example, Spain and Brazil. For the most part, the U.S. campaign did not defend the morality and dignity of homosexual relationships. Nor did it confront the Christian right on its depiction of gay marriage as a threat to the family and to religious freedom. By failing to do so, the campaign limited the transformative power of gay marriage and helped enable today's backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
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