Good law is evenhanded law, forbidding the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges (as Anatole France once observed with a snicker). Written to attract support from legislators who might not be comfortable with actual gay marriage, the civil union bill passed last week by Illinois’s General Assembly doesn’t limit its blessings to gay and lesbian couples in love.
The bill’s charming conceit is that a civil union is something just like, yet other than, a marriage—and that’s why it should interest anyone who doesn’t exactly want to get married.
The 648 turn out to be a list of the “rights, protections and responsibilities” that come with marriage in Illinois, many so obscure that no one would ever think of them ahead of time, yet collectively transformational. For instance, if someone married wins the lottery, the spouse is automatically co-owner of the prize. A mobile home owned by either a disabled veteran or the spouse is exempt from taxation. A candidate running for a local school council must disclose the spouse’s economic interests.
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The civil union bill is a response to this sorry history—but we need to keep reminding ourselves that a civil union is not a marriage. And if our subject is the bill’s manifold blessings, let’s not overlook the blessed usefulness of legal obfuscation.
And when a civil union is dissolved, it is so astonishingly like divorce that the civil union act doesn’t bother to describe the process, instead simply declaring that the relevant provisions of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act “shall apply.”
The Catholic Conference of Illinois—the public policy arm of the state’s bishops, led by Cardinal Francis George—predicted in a November 22 statement that passage of the bill “will not appease those who wish to redefine the institution of marriage.” Cardinal George added a personal note: “Everyone has a right to marry, but no one has the right to change the nature of marriage. Marriage is what it is and always has been, no matter what a legislature decides to do. Sexual complementarity is the core of marriage.”
The states didn’t need the encouragement. Though they generally respect one another’s laws—the legal term is comity—they can balk when something legal in one state affronts another, such as the marriage of two 12-year-olds, legal where it happened but beyond the pale the next state over.
