lidn't even look at
retted when he did
o remember white
er
Jose
coming be-
tg at me over and
you! Fuck you!" at
ng slave no more."
rrm, trying to calm
,down, man. Calm
. But they just held
dy mother walked
.l looked at my fa-
own, his hair now
vith his belly stick-
his was my father,
:ed
to be.
me go. I turned to
Iy shoved the arm
re door and down
:d up at a house of
relped me through
o where I couldn't
rere I was going to
k about what I was
rd Don still wasn't
ras
gone before he
Lo
table, but he saw
rst told me I could
nt when I could af-
rim,
"to
figure out
IMat Is Marriage ForT
341
42
WHAT
IS MARRIAGE
F'OR?
I'. ,I. GRAF'F
E'
I'
Graff is contributing editor to TIrcAmerican Prospect and out magazines, and a
visiting scholar at the Brandeis women's studies Research Center. Her work has
appeared in such publications
as Tlrc Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine,
Ms., The Nation, Tlrc Village Voice, Tlte Women's Reoiew of Books,and more than a
dozen anthologies. This address is based on her book entitled what Is Marriage For:
The StrangeSocialHistory of Otrr Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999).
11
ack in the 1970s, when I first fell in love,I knew I would never get
ffi
married. As did most of my friends during the 1980s, I expected
. . . LJ
we would live together without the intrusion of law. And besides,
who ever imagined two women marrying?
But today my marriage-or
rather, the possibility of its legal recogni-
tion
-
is being debated around the world. Three countries
-
the Netherlands,
Belgium, and Canada-now
offer same-sex couples full civil marriage
rights. The Massachusetts supreme
Judicial
Court has said that full marriage
rights must be made available to our state's same-sex couples beginning
May 77,2004. Other countries-including
all six Scandinavian countries,
Cermany, and South Africa-offer
lesbian and gay couples just about every-
thing about marriage except the word. Many more countries, provinces, and
states give us roughly half of full marriage's legal obligations, recognitions,
rights, and responsibilities: Australia, New Zealand, Hungary, Israel,
portu-
gal, France, eleven out of seventeen provinces in Spain, and two provinces
in Argentina. And more countries and states are on their way in the next two
or three years. Taiwan has said it will pass a same-sex marriage law. South
Africa, Sweden, Spain, and New
Jersey
are all strong contenders for full mar-
riage rights. Switzerland, England, and Scotland will soon add
"all-but-
marriage" systems that offer just about everything but the word. California
is expanding its domestic partnership registry to be essentially the equal of
vermont's civil unions, and I expect more Argentinian and Brazilian states
and provinces to follow suit.
My job here is to give some historical background to all this discussion.
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- Fall '08
- Staff
- Trigraph, nd, nd m ore, nd o ut, nd o ur, nd g ay
-
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