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When I read comments like Cassidy’s, I wonder: What era does she live in? Anyone who claims in 2013 to have kids who are actively shamed for having unmarried parents—statistically far more likely to be the case these days—is being hyperbolic. Her words are, of course, the rhetoric of a practiced politician. But they do speak to the deep social conservatism in which gay marriage comes wrapped.
In states like Massachusetts and Connecticut, employees at state universities and other workplaces can no longer place their civil union or domestic partners on their health plans: they have to get married because, the logic goes, since you can get married, you must (it’s still unclear whether this will become the case in Illinois). We should consider the economic ramifications of incentivizing marriage for anyone, gay or straight, by way of refusing benefits (like health care and immigration status) to those who won’t marry (consider that not marrying is, for many, a political choice). And we need to foreground the economic underside of gay marriage, instead of focusing on its social conventions.
