And yet that’s exactly what the same sex couples who do have civil unions, right now, are saying. They aren’t married. They know that they aren’t married. They have some of the rights of married couples, but the ones that are most important are still unavailable. They’re well aware of their separate and unequal status under the law.
Whether they consider their personal relationship to one another to be emotionally equivalent to marriage is wholly irrelevant. No one is demanding marriage equality so that when they wake up next to their partner in the morning and look over at them they can think “yay, we’re married!” We are demanding marriage equality so that when we have to file our taxes, or get health insurance to cover our life partners and our children, or a mortgage, or when we end up in the hospital, or develop Alzheimers or when we die, our families are not treated differently just because we’re a two-slot or two-tab couple rather than slot-and-tab variety.
And despite the fact that civil unions are meant to be the functional and legal equivalent to marriage in the states where they exist, for all purposes but federal law, that is not and will never be how they are treated by those with the capacity to interfere in people’s lives, like employers and insurance carriers and hospital administrators and family court judges.
Civil unions in the United States of America are a failed experiment in the incremental recognition of civil rights, because civil rights do not work that way. You either have them, or you don’t. You can either sit at the lunch counters or you can’t. There is no part way solution.
Individuals can be converted in their thinking. My mother is such a person (she is, by most definitions, elderly and is also very involved in her religious faith which is very opposed to LGBT equality of any sort). My aunt is (even more elderly, also religious) another such a person. My 85 year old uncle went from being a typically homophobic middle-class male to saying “oh who the hell cares, let anyone who wants to get married get married, how does it affect me?”
But all of that comes from being personally persuaded. No campaign or organization or protest is going to do it. It’s going to take the brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and grandchildren and nieces and nephews not letting members of their families get away with bigotry in the name of family peace or because bigots are old or “set in their ways.” When you hear it, you counter it, every single time. That’s how change happens.
