Marriage equality for everyone
(Prepared by Anita Wessling)
The Green Party firmly believes that same-sex couples should have all of the same rights that heterosexual couples do and that the “Defense of Marriage Act” is a violation of civil rights. The rights of same-sex couples far outweigh the rights of what some people believe a married couple should be.
In keeping with the Green Key Values of diversity, social justice and feminism, we support full legal and political equality for all persons, regardless of sex, gender, or sexual orientation.
1. The Green Party affirms the rights of all individuals to freely choose intimate partners, regardless of their sex, gender, or sexual orientation.
2. We support the recognition of equal rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender persons to housing, jobs, civil marriage, medical benefits, child custody, and in all areas of life provided to all other citizens.
3. We support the inclusion of language in state and federal anti-discrimination law that ensures the rights of intersex individuals and prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, characteristics, and expression. We are opposed to intersex genital mutilation.
4. We support the right of all persons to self-determination with regard to gender identity and sex. We therefore support the right of intersex and transgender individuals to be free from coercion and involuntary assignment of gender or sex. We support access to medical and surgical treatment for assignment or reassignment of gender or sex, based on informed consent.
5. We support legislation against all forms of hate crimes, including those directed against people who self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, or intersex.
Civil marriage for gays and lesbians affirms the importance of the institution of marriage. Marriage is about love and commitment. Heterosexual love is not superior to homosexual love or vice versa. Partnerships should be seen as equal under the law regardless of the gender of the people in them.
Same-sex couples want the right to legally marry for the same reasons as do heterosexuals. They desire to be marry because they are in love, or because they just met the love of their lives or, more likely, have spent the last 10, 20, or even 50 years with that person – and want to honor their relationship in the greatest way our society has to offer, by making a public commitment to stand together in good times and bad, through all the joys and challenges that family life brings.
Some want the right to marry because they are parents and know that marriage offers children a vital safety net, guaranteeing them protections that unmarried parents never could.
And still other people – both gay and straight – are fighting for the right of same-sex couples to marry because they recognize that it is simply not fair to deny some families the protections that all other families are eligible to receive.
Decades of research all point to the conclusion that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that a person’s sexual orientation cannot be changed. Whom one is drawn to is a fundamental aspect of who we are.
In this way, the struggle for marriage equality for same-sex couples is just as basic as the fight for interracial marriage was. It recognizes that Americans should not be coerced into false and unhappy marriages but be free to marry the person they love – thereby building marriage on a true and stable foundation.
Allowing same-sex couples civil-marriage rights opens up marriage to more people and does not redefine religious marriage in our society. Granting marriage rights to same-sex couples would not require Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other religion to perform these marriages. It would not require churches, synagogues, or other religious institutions to permit these ceremonies to be held on their grounds. It would not even require that religious communities discuss the issue. People of faith would remain free to make their own judgments about what makes a marriage made in the eyes of God – just as they are today.
The concept of governmental neutrality concerning religion is written clearly in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, stating that neither the federal government nor state governments can pass laws that aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a “wall of separation between” the Church and the State. Supported by a number of decisions made by judges and justices throughout the years, such as Everson v. Board of Education and Lemon v. Kurtzman, the establishment of religion clause is absolute – no law shall be passed involving the establishment of any religion or religious beliefs. Simply put, no person's individual religious beliefs opposed to same-sex marriage shall influence another individual's fundamental civil rights.
Children benefit from legal marriage. One thing that both sides of the marriage issue can agree on is that marriage strengthens families – children are more secure if they are raised by two loving parents whose relationship is legally recognized and who can share the responsibility of parenthood equally. Children of gay and lesbian parents also benefit from the cultural acceptance of legal marriage.
Children of same-sex couples are penalized by marriage discrimination. More than one million children are currently being raised by same-sex couples in the United States, according to the 2000 census. Many lesbian and gay parents, however, are unable to assume full legal parenting rights and responsibilities, and in most states, there is no law guaranteeing a non-custodial, biological, or adoptive parent’s visitation rights or requiring child support from such a parent. Without the ability to establish a legal relationship to both parents, these children are left without protections such as Social Security survivor benefits.
Many of us grew up believing that everyone needs a mother and father, regardless of whether we ourselves happened to have two parents, or two good parents.
But as families have grown more diverse in recent decades, and researchers have studied how these different family relationships affect children, it has become clear that the quality of a family’s relationship is more important than the particular structure of families that exist today. In other words, the qualities that help a child grow into a good and responsible adult – learning how to learn, to have compassion for others, to contribute to society, and to be respectful of others and their differences – do not depend on the sexual orientation of their parents but rather on their parents’ ability to provide a loving, stable, and happy home, something no class of Americans has an exclusive hold on.
That is why research studies have consistently shown that children raised by gay and lesbian parents do just as well on all conventional measures of child development, such as academic achievement, psychological well-being, and social abilities, as children raised by heterosexual parents.
That is also why the nation’s leading child welfare organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians, have issued statements that dismiss assertions that only heterosexual couples can be good parents – and declare that the focus should now be on providing greater protections for the one million to nine million children being raised by gay and lesbian parents in the United States today.
Granting same-sex couples the right to marry, therefore, would enable the millions of same-sex parents raising children today to give their children what every child deserves – the safest, most secure environment possible, with all the legal protections that our country has put in place.
Civil unions and legally recognized domestic partnerships are no substitute for civil marriage. Though an important advance in the fight for equality, civil unions and domestic partnerships do not carry the full legal benefits (especially government and tax benefits) or cultural significance of marriage. The substitution of civil unions for legal marriage assigns same-sex couples to second-class status.
Civil unions only grant couples state benefits. Also, states differ in their eligibility rules for civil unions and states can decide whether or not to recognize civil unions at all. Couples eligible to marry may have their marriage performed in any state and have it recognized in every other state in the nation and every country in the world. Civil unions do not provide couples with any federal benefits.
Currently in the United States, same-sex couples in long-term, committed relationships pay higher taxes and are denied basic protections and rights granted to married couples. Among them:
In short, civil unions are not separate but equal – they are separate and unequal. And our society has tried separate before. It just doesn’t work.