Family Pride’s Blog

Jason Kuznicki is a researcher at a public policy organization.  He and his partner have been together for nine years and have been married under Canadian law for four.  The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of his employer. Read more from Jason at positiveliberty.com.

This week the Maryland Court of Appeals — the state’s highest court — ruled against recognizing same-sex marriages.  The mood at our house was pretty dismal the night of the decision.  Had the Court ruled the other way, the marriage Scott and I celebrated in Canada in 2003 would almost certainly be valid today.

It didn’t help that the Court decided by a single vote.  Changing the mind of even one person would have made the difference — a difference that will define who we are to our neighbors, our families, and our children, perhaps for the rest of our lives.

As a family looking to adopt, we face some wide-ranging consequences.  Some of these may not be known for months or years.  But they need to be documented, and I will be writing a series of blog posts that will show just what this decision is costing us.  All of the well-meaning people out there need to know our side of the story.

They need to know.  Why?  So that they will stop electing politicians who demonize gays and gay families.  So that they will push their representatives to support marriage equality rather than indifference or demeaning half-measures like civil unions.  And they need to know so that our children can have the same legal protections that the children of straight couples enjoy.

The religious right talks a lot about preserving the sanctity of heterosexual marriage.  Sanctity is great, but we have to remember its very real human costs.  If preserving the sanctity of heterosexual marriage means hurting or even breaking up some families, then is it really worth the cost?  (Since when does the government dole out “sanctity”?  And since when does sanctity require hurting people?) Maybe as a society we’ll decide that all this is right and appropriate. But we at least ought to know the price we are paying.

In this series, I’m going to document all of the time, money, inconvenience, and loss of dignity that the Court has imposed on us.

I’m going to keep the receipts.  I’m going to do the math:  Adding up the extra taxes, the fees, the money spent on lawyers.  The vacation days that we’ll spend reading the fine print, lest someone take our children away.  And at the end of this journey — wherever we end up — I’m going to give an account of just how much this precious sanctity has cost our family.

It’s worth pointing out that relatively few of these costs are government benefits that would otherwise come out of taxpayers’ pockets.  For example, a second-parent adoption is a complex legal process that may end up costing us a lot — but it will also end up costing the taxpayers, too.  Conservatives often say they don’t want to see taxpayers subsidizing relationships that they consider immoral.

Fine:  Let us get married.  This cost, among many others, will disappear.

There is another cost, too, one that will be harder to document.

There is a quietly gripping passage in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale in which a young married couple has just learned of the new law putting the husband in charge of all property.

It doesn’t matter, the husband tells the wife.  He insists that it won’t change anything.  The wife, though, knows better.  The law is a living embodiment of a set of values.  The law is a teacher, and it works a subtle but often decisive influence on the public.

The woman who learns that she can no longer own property on an equal footing with her husband may hold the new law in contempt.  But the woman’s daughter may grow up in a different world.  That’s what the law can do.

For gays, the law has taught some harsh lessons over the years:  We are deviants, perverts, and criminals.  We shouldn’t be around children.  We shouldn’t be treated as family.  Sometimes, we shouldn’t even be treated as humans.

Straight and gay alike, we’ve absorbed these lessons, and it’s a tribute to our cultural and intellectual independence, to our stubbornness and our willingness to think for ourselves, that we are even having a debate about same-sex marriage today.  The law is a teacher, but as students, we can choose to think for ourselves.

The law taught us all a harsh lesson this week.  I thank my straight friends who assure us that it doesn’t matter, and that they think of us as married anyway.  But I’m still saving my receipts.

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