"Marriage is a great institution, but who wants to live in an institution?" asked Susan Apel of the Vermont Law School, quoting actress Mae West.
The answer is at least one gay couple and two lesbian couples in Vermont.
Stan Baker, a partner in one of these couples, has decided to try to get inside the institution through the court system -- he and his partner Peter are challenging the ban on same-sex marriages in the case Baker v. Vermont.
Baker and Apel -- along with Cheshire Calhoun, a professor of philosophy at Colby College -- spoke yesterday in the Rockefeller Center in a forum entitled Same-Sex Marriage: What's at stake to discuss the reasons for legalizing same sex-marriages.
If Baker wins, Vermont will be the first state to recognize same-sex union as marriage. According to Apel, several municipalities, such as San Francisco, recognize domestic partnerships, as do a few other countries, including Denmark. These partnerships include some, but not all of the legal benefits of marriage.
Apel asked the audience how they would reply if asked why they or someone else they knew married. She said that they would probably answer because "they fell in love." Gay and lesbian couples, she said, would probably respond similarly.
Despite this, arguments against gay marriages are based on the notion that marriage is intended for procreation. This is the response that the Vermont court gave to Baker when dismissing his case to the Supreme Court, according to Apel.
Even domestic partnerships lack the cultural benefits of marriage, Apel said, because people in these arrangements still do not achieve the same social status as married couples.
"There's a deeper cultural piece that I think it's really important for us to recognize," Baker said.
He described how his neighbors brought champagne and engagement cards when they heard of his case in the paper. He said he had been missing this kind of cultural celebration of his partnership.
"I don't propose marriage as a template for the gay and lesbian community," Baker said. "But I think it should be a choice."
Apel critiqued the idea of marriage in general, based on the high divorce rate and the history of standard sex roles. She observed that marriage may not be the best arrangement for women and that perhaps it should be left to the church, but said "these observations are born of privilege, and that is the privilege of choice."
Both Baker and Calhoun pointed out that marriage was previously illegal for people of other races and for other religions to marriage.
According to Calhoun, in a case in Virginia people condemned interracial marriages because the tradition concept of marriage was within a race. The court finally dismiss the case, stating that appeals to traditional conceptions are not valid because traditional conceptions may encode bias.
Calhoun postulates that a similar bias is encoded in societal refusal to recognition same-sex marriages. She said there is also a history of culturally stereotyping gays as obsessed with sex and incapable of romantic love.
Baker suggested that, in fact, "far from tearing apart the institution of marriage, I think we [same-sex marriages] can breath new life into it."
In a question and answer session after the forum, an audience member asked whether the focus on legal issues sidestep the need to culturally validate gay-lesbian marriage. All three on the panel said the issue is in fact the goal of the struggle but that legal changes were needed to achieve cultural equality.
The question and answer period continued for almost and hour, while audience members raised questions about transgender marriages, discussed personal struggles with gay partnerships, and single sex-marriages with children.
The panel was sponsored by the College Ethics Institute, the Dartmouth Lawyer's Association, the Dartmouth Rainbow Alliance, the Committee on Student Organizations, the Programming Board and the '00 Class Council, as part of National Coming Out Week.
In conjunction with this discussion, another forum will be held: How People Come to Be: the Case of Same-Sex Marriage with Gerald V. Bradley, Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame, on November 22, from 4-5 p.m. in Rocky 3.
