Abstract
On June 24, 2011, New York legalized same-sex marriage. The same day, an oped column in The New York Times worried that employers might require “lesbian and gay people who have obtained health and other benefits for their domestic partners … to marry their partners in order to keep these rights. In other words, ‘winning’ the right to marry may mean ‘losing’ the rights we have now.”1 On July 9, the paper’s business section reported that several giant corporations had begun requiring employees to marry their same-sex partners in order for the partners to get benefits. These employers did not find it necessary to give a reason.2 In two weeks, “may” had turned into “must.” Something similar had happened seven years earlier, as a letter to the same paper recounts: “I married my same-sex partner in Massachusetts in 2004 after her employer, a large teaching hospital, eliminated domestic partner benefits for in-state same-sex couples and their children and gave us three months to marry.”3 This brief history provides not one but two examples of ironic freedom situations. Allowing people to marry has led to their being forced or expected to marry.4
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Notes
Katherine Frank, “Marriage Is a Mixed Blessing,” New York Times, June 24, 2011, 25.
Tara Siegel Bernard, “Safe, Legal, and Stigmatized,” Weekly Standard, February 3, 2011, 1B.
Robin Maltz, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, July 13, 2011.
Jaye Cee Whitehead, “The Wrong Reasons for Same-Sex Marriage,” New York Times, May 16, 2011.
Garry Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (New York: Penguin, 1979), 152.
Jonathan Rauch, “For Better or Worse,” in Same Sex Marriage: Pros and Cons, ed. Andrew Sullivan (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 181.
David Brooks, “The Power of Marriage,” New York Times, November 22, 2003, 198.
James R. Rogers and Georg Vanberg, “Resurrecting Lochner: A Defense of Unprincipled Judicial Activism,” Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 23 (2007): 442–68.
Melanie Philips, “Let’s Bring Back Stigma and Shame,” Spectator, September 25, 2004.
Joseph Brown, “Bring Back the Stigma of Teen Pregnancy,” Headway 8 (1996): 27.
Pandora Hopkins, “Manufacturing Shame: The Dangers of Purity,” Peace and Conflict Review 3 (2008); Michelle Adams and Scott Coltrane, “Framing Divorce Reform: Media Morality, and the Politics of Family,” Family Process 46 (2007): 17–34.
However, Kristol has not endorsed gay marriage. See Robin Toner, “Conversations with William Kristol: A Conservative Cheerfully Argues That ‘Family Values’ Has a Future,” New York Times, June 27, 1993.
Fred Barnes, “Safe, Legal, and Stigmatized,” Weekly Standard, February 3, 2003.
“Bring Back Stigma,” City Journal, Autumn 2000, http://www.city-journal.org/html/104_bring_back_stigma.html, accessed June 16, 2011.
William Kristol, “A Conservative Perspective on Public Policy and the Family,” in The Family Civil Society, and the State, ed. Christopher Wolfe (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 1998), 260.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 242.
Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 3.
Andrew Sullivan, ed., Same Sex Marriage: Pro and Con (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 123–28.
Alexandra Kollontai, “Communism and the Family,” The Communist, October 15, 1920, http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/family.htm.
Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 89–140.
Frank Browning, “Why Marry?” in Same Sex Marriage: Pro and Con, ed. Andrew Sullivan (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 132–34, 133.
Martha Albertson Fineman, The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 231.
Jonathan Rauch, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (New York: Times Books, 2004), 59.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 7 and 13.
Frederick Engels, The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 125–46.
See Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), chap. 10.
United Press International, “U.S. Marriage Rate Continues to Decline,” UPI, September 29, 2010, http://www.upi.com/Health _News/2010/09/29/US-marriage-rate-continues-to-decline/UPI-77271285810979.
Also, see Lisa Gartner, “Marriage Rates Hit Record Low,” Washington Examiner, September 28, 2010.
Jason Deparle and Sabrina Tavernise. “Unwed Mothers Now a Majority of Births in 20’s,” New York Times, February 18, 2012.
A report published jointly by the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, both “promarriage” groups, relies on these trends to predict a bleak future for children. Although the divorce rate has declined, unmarried couples are more likely to separate than married couples. Some commentators have suggested that it is difficult to untangle cause from effect here. See Brad Wilcox and Elizabeth Marquardt, 2011 State of Our Unions: When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable (Charlottesville, VA: National Marriage Project, 2011).
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 29.
David Parlett, The Oxford Dictionary of Card Games (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 181.
Garry Willis, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 47.
Center for American Progress, The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, 2009.
Bella DePaulo, “Shriver Report Serves Up Compulsory Marriage and Mothering,” Psychology Today, October 29, 2009.
John N. Kotre, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Andrew Greeley and American Catholicism, 1950–1975 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1978).
Andrew M. Greeley, The Uncertain Trumpet: The Priest in Modern America (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 98–99. While most Greek Orthodox parish priests are married, celibacy is expected of those who aspire to positions of leadership in the organization.
Andrew M. Greeley, Priests: A Calling in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
See Judith Hicks Stiehm, Bring Me Men and Women: Mandated Change at the U.S. Air Force Academy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 265–69.
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the only wellknown American sect that forces people to marry. Its president, Warren Jeffs, is now in prison, convicted of sexual assault. See Elissa Wall, Stolen Innocence (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).
See David B. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951);
David B. Truman, “The American System in Crisis,” Political Science Quarterly 7 (1959): 481–97;
John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Theory of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952);
Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism (Boston: Little Brown, 1967).
Tatiana Boncompagni, “Walking Miles of Aisles,” New York Times, July 24, 2011, 1, 11;
Laura Holson, “Star Wedding Planner Is at the Ready,” New York Times, July 24, 2011, 1, 10;
Michelle Higgins, “Competing to Draw Gay Honeymooners,” New York Times, July 24, 2011, 10;
Tim Murphy, “Ready to Wed? No, Mom,” New York Times, July 24, 2011, 1, 12.
Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2001).
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© 2013 Judith A. Baer
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Baer, J.A. (2013). Path to Liberation or Stigma as Social Policy?. In: Ironic Freedom. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031006_4
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