While a number of wonderful feminist bloggers converged at WAM! this past weekend, a few weeks ago I attended a conference at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, entitled Gender and the Law: Unintended Consequences, Unsettled Questions. The conference included a number of provocative panels, including one on gendered states of citizenship, and another called “Gendered Bodies, Legal Subjects.” Maggie Gallagher, of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, spoke on this latter one of her fear that legally doing away with marriage would create “genderless-ness” as an ideal and expressed her concern that, by forgetting how bodies matter, the law would eventually hurt women by taking away the special status of crimes like rape. Gallagher is a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage, and appears to use a similar, if more convoluted, rationale concerning the significance of bodies and gender to support this position, arguing that by making the gender of a citizen’s marriage partner meaningless, the state interferes in a citizen’s private realm by disallowing its citizens to attach meaning to gender.

Yet recognizing marriages in which the selected sexual partner is not of the historically normative gender does not seem to neutralize gender to me, but instead recognizes the full significance of gender as it intersects with sexuality and marriage-like commitment. Laws may need to be changed and language refined for marriages in which the partners are no longer assumed to be of opposite gender, but a more specific law seems an altogether better law to me.

I do, however, agree with Gallagher that marriage does still matter—to both straight and gay couples. Yes, I can easily imagine a society in which government no longer has a say in, or provides benefits to, those who have made a private commitment to each other, but I don’t think our current society has reached that point yet. Hence, full recognition of gay marriage is essential for the full equality of gay couples in the United States.

An opinion piece in the New York Times last month proposed a “reconciliation” on gay marriage. The reconciliation was that the marriage issue should be dropped:

It would work like this: Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own. All of these changes would be enacted in the same bill.

I am sympathetic to the compromise trying to be made here—in order to progress the rights of gay couples at the federal level, the authors propose to jettison the concept of marriage and promote civil unions with religious exemptions. As a result, a church that employs a lesbian woman would not be required to provide health care benefits for her civil union partner. Yet I am wary of this being proposed as any sort of goal or focus for the gay rights movement as opposed to a necessary intermediary step.  Two states have legalized gay marriage, and while this may not seem much, less than a decade ago we were still debating whether to support civil unions or not. The Vermont Senate passed a bill legalizing gay marriage a week ago—marking the first time these rights may be granted through a legislative instead of judicial process. I appreciate these authors care for the practical benefits enjoyed in civil unions, and the progress made toward legalized gay marriage may seem like baby steps right now, yet it does feel like we are getting closer to a watershed moment that will result in a deluge. At heart, the very purpose in distinguishing civil unions from marriage to emphasize the need for full equality for gay couples, to enjoy the same rights as straight couples in the United States. For the many married couples in California who now face suits demanding their divorce, marriage is a very real subject. While momentary compromises may need to be made, marriage does matter—and it’s important to maintain as a primary goal.