The Pennsylvania House of Representatives is expected to vote as early as today on HB 2381, a proposed amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution that not only limits marriage to a heterosexual couple but could also take away existing legal protection, under local laws, for committed long-term couples and their children, such as hospital visitation rights, inheritance rights, pension benefits and health insurance coverage among others. It is likely to undermine the domestic partnership laws that have been created in many localities, such as Philadelphia.
I urge you to contact your state legislators to tell them that you oppose HB 2381. Contact information for state legislators can be found on the Neighborhood Networks website.
In honor of this struggle, I have posted an essay I wrote awhile ago entitle Gay Marriage and Polygamy. It answer the conservative charge that acceptance of gay marriage requires us to accept polygamous marriage as well. (Senator Santorum has also suggested that we might be required also accept inter-species marriage.) My essay explains why, given the nature of contemporary marriage, polygamy is unacceptable and why, for the very same reason, gay marriage should be accepted.
The essay is a little long for a regular post. It is also a little heavy in that it is meant, in part, to show the importance of an argument I make in my academic work in political philosophy, that while a liberal state must be tolerant of different lifestyles—or in the philosophical jargon, conceptions of the good life—it can legitimately encourage certain kinds of life rather than others. Some of you however, may be interested in it.
Two interesting biographical notes about the essay: I wrote the first draft around a year ago and posted a link to it on a few listserves. I got an interesting email back from an acquaintance who criticized it because she thought I was rejecting or condemning the notion of a polyamorous relationships—or what were called in the sixties open relationships. That lead me to do a little more research–since my wife reads thsi blog from time to time, I should emphasize library research–about what those relationships are about today. I discovered that people who take part in such relationship or in the not quite the same phenomena of swinging, for the most part do not consider those relationships to be similar to marriages as they are generally understood in modern Western political communities. Rather they are thought to be replacements for or complements to a more or less conventional view of marriage. So I think my central claim—that a marriage between two people meets certain needs in the modern Western world that cannot be met by polygamous marriage–stands even in the face of this challenge. And thus the second claim—that given the centrality of marriage to a good life, gays and lesbians should have the same right as heterosexuals–stands as well.
Second, I wrote the essay around Valentine’s Day. I was thinking about my own marriage as I wrote it and it is really a love letter to my wife, Diane, substantially transformed into a philosophical / political essay. I always say that I could not accomplish what I do without her. It is especially true that I wouldn’t have any idea what marriage was about or why it is so important without her. So, like everything else I write, this is for her.