Baby activist...and a longer tangent than I meant to take

Edith has always liked to wave her flags and march, but this was the first time I came into her room and found her working busily to anchor one in the base. It was also the first time I've seen her play with this particular flag. Clearly she wanted to take a stand on New Jersey's pending marriage bill. (For those New Jersey readers who can speak in sentences, I'd urge you to contact your state legislator and do the same.)


To depart from Edith but stick with the theme for a moment, I heard an excellent panel of historians and legal scholars last week discussing this legislation. The first spoke on why making same-sex marriage legal would benefit straight women and men. The next explained how it is that this particular issue has risen to the top of the gay rights agenda. The third offered historical perspective on why same-sex marriage appears so threatening to some conservative Americans, as viewed through the lens of marriage counseling through the twentieth century. The fourth discussed how it is that the question of same-sex marriage has become fused with issues of religion, particularly for evangelical Protestants. They all made fascinating points that I'd love to share, so do ask if you're interested.

By the end, I was stronger in my belief that the state shouldn't be in the marriage business at all, but rather, should leave marriage to religious institutions, within which couples could still freely marry according to the tenets of their faith. The state, meanwhile, could offer civil unions to a much broader range of people without stipulating what their family ought to look like. A civil union would confer most of the legal benefits now associated with marriage--inheritance, hospital visitation privileges, child custody, health care coverage, tax breaks, etc.

One model I heard proposed sometime ago made great sense to me: Upon reaching legal maturity, a person would be asked to register with the government their next of kin. The next of kin would then be automatically granted most of the legal rights now accorded a spouse. If the next of kin ever changed, the person would simply re-register. Thus elderly single siblings who made a household together, say, would not have to worry about whether they would be allowed to make end-of-life care decisions for each other. In short, the state would no longer decide who could count as your closest family.

There are wrinkles, of course. Could you declare someone your next of kin who didn't declare you his next of kin in exchange? (A single adult declaring one of his parents next of kin when the parents declared each other next of kin, for example.) What would it mean for children whose parents were not each other's next of kin? But these seem to me like details to be worked out, not problems with the broader idea.

Anyone out there who has thought longer on these things should tell me what the drawbacks are to this model, though. I'd be curious. At the panel discussion there was a man in the audience from the Netherlands, who told us that in that country, where people can now choose between marriage or a strictly civil union, young people are no longer marrying. He says the idea would seem odd to them. I confess it sounded a little alientating to me--I like to think that those for whom the concept of marriage holds spiritual and emotional significance could still make such a commitment within a religious context (religious communities being imagined broadly). But when it comes to the state deciding who is family and who isn't...don't make marriage the starting point.

Since such an option is not currently on the table, however, one is faced with the question of whether to support current marriage legislation or not. And since marriage remains the entree into a whole range of legal benefits, I say expand its definition to serve as many families as possible.

Back to EME: Tonight is the first night Edith and I will spend apart since she was born. I am delivering a paper at an academic conference in Washington, and we decided that on balance, it would be easier for me to go alone than for us to truck our whole household down there. But it means Edith will go almost 48 hours without nursing and will wake up without nursing for the first time. I'm nervous for her and Tom both. Okay, and for me, too. The friends with whom I'm staying have promised to make me pancakes and let me sleep in tomorrow morning. Between worrying about the paper and about Edith, I wonder if I won't be staring at the ceiling from 5:30am onwards in spite of myself. Hold out good thoughts for us.