Why Equality Means More than Marriage

I’ll be honest: I was disappointed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to uphold state bans on same-gender marriage, especially since every prior circuit court had found them unconstitutional. The issue hits close to home for me; I’m a married gay man, who is grateful to live in a state where my marriage is recognized. More than this, I am terrifyingly aware of the fact that I dissolve my marriage every time I fly home to visit family in Texas.

As disappointed as I am by the Sixth Circuit’s decision, I am even more disappointed by the fact that marriage equality has become the LGBT rights issue of our day. Marriage is important because it automatically grants thousands of federal and state benefits, which range from trivial to profound, but marriage isn’t the most important issue for most LGBT issue. As the National Center for Lesbian Rights points out, you can be fired in 29 states because of your sexual orientation and in 34 because of your gender identity.

Right now, a same-gender couple can get married in Oklahoma on Saturday and be legally fired for doing so on Monday.

Congress has repeatedly failed to pass an Employment Non-Discrimination Act that covers sexual orientation, much less one that covers gender identity.

This is as important as marriage equality because a disproportionate number of LGBT individuals live in poverty.

Marriage equality is important, but it’s an issue that’s been primarily driven by white, cisgender, gay men, the sort of people who control the boards of groups like the Human Rights Campaign. I’m one of those people, and, like I’ve said before, I’m grateful to have a state-recognized marriage. However, as a Christian, I can’t just pursue justice for myself. I also have to pursue justice for my neighbor. (See Matthew 22:39.)

As Presbyterian minister Marvin Ellison reminds us, “a liberating Christianity, in promoting sexual justice as an indispensable component of a more comprehensive social justice, must advance a larger change agenda than extending the freedom to marry to gay men and lesbian women or even restructuring marriage on egalitarian terms.”[1]

The goal of dismantling the patriarchy is not to establish a new hegemony to replace that of straight, cisgender, white men. The world won’t be a better place if gay men or white women start calling the shots. But it will be a better place if we work to dismantle the interlocking systems of oppression that place queer people of color, especially queer women of color, on the bottom of the socio-economic heap. Refocusing our efforts to secure justice for LGBT people from marriage equality to ending workplace discrimination and raising the minimum wage will help us move toward that goal.

The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs is an Episcopal priest who serves a church in Baltimore, Maryland. He uses he/him/his pronouns. His seminary coursework focused on queer and feminist readings of the Bible and sexual ethics.

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[1] Marvin M. Ellison, “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: Continuing the Reformation of Protestant Christianity.” Pages 37-68 in Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect. Edited by Marvin M. Ellison and Judith Plascow. Cleveland: Pilgrim, 2007.