I like this argument, but imagine thinking it is an argument in favor of marriage.
From slavery-era and post-Reconstruction miscegenation laws to the religion-fueled popular movements to ban same-sex marriage to the recent Obergefell decision which reflects a successful conservative redirection of the queer liberation movement into simply "marriage equality" and a movement to preserve marriage as a privilege and means to regulate public welfare, the entire pathetic history of marriage in America is one long case study in the failure of democracy.
For anyone interested, I can lend my endorsement to this document as both a decent overview of anarchist perspectives on marriage equality as well as a good list of further resources on the issue.
The late Peggy Pascoe is the author of "What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America," an award-winning history of miscegenation law. In this essay she points out some of the parallels between the fight for racial equality and the fight for sexual equality under marriage law:
"I would argue that it is virtually impossible to understand the current debate over same-sex marriage without first understanding the history of American miscegenation laws and the long legal fight against them, if only because both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage come to this debate, knowing or unknowingly, wielding rhetorical tools forged during the history of miscegenation law. The arguments white supremacists used to justify for miscegenation laws--that interracial marriages were contrary to God's will or somehow unnatural--are echoed today by the most conservative opponents of same-sex marriage."
I'm glad to see this perspective represented on a popular news site.
“What would be good for most people — regardless of marital status — is a more equitable distribution of wealth in this country, access to health care, education, and livable-wage jobs,” Essig said. “Marriage is, once these things are achieved, a personal choice. But until everyone has access to these things, marriage is a sign of privileging a minority of Americans.”
The one where Orson Scott Card calls for the overthrow of any government which licenses same-sex marriage.
‘The key move in Judge Jacobs’ opinion is concluding that sexual orientation is a “quasi-suspect” class justifying intermediate scrutiny. This requires the federal government to show that its policy is substantially related to an important governmental interest.’
A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court has issued an opinion affirming that California’s Proposition 8 is unconstitutional! From the majority (2-1) opinion: "The People may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry."
“That sound you don’t hear — the absence of outrage over marriage rights, and gay spokespeople for middle-American companies — is the sound of social change.”
“We have said that marriage is instituted for the sanctification of love: it is a pact of chastity, charity and justice, by which the spouses declare themselves publicly to be freed, both of them by one another, from the tribulations of the flesh and the cares of gallantry. Consequently, it is sacred to all and inviolable. That is why, apart from some stipulations of interest also require publicity, the family and the city appear in the ceremony: the engagement of the couple, made in view of Justice, carries farther than their persons; their conjugal conscience becomes part of the social conscience, and, as the marriage insures their dignity, it is for the society that proclaims it a glory and a progress.”
"President Obama’s inability to simply state whether he’s for or against gay marriage is unacceptable," Obama said during a spirited 30-minute address in which he sharply criticized the president for failing time and again to articulate his beliefs.