They do look awfully romantic, those chocolate brides in Victorian gowns and matching pink bouquets. But just as the romance of the wedding often belies the more mundane realities of marriage, the romance of the movement that has come to call itself “marriage equality” may blind us to how difficult and long the struggle for real political equality will be. After all, traditional gender roles have not gone the way of the dinosaur. Why should we expect this to be true of hierarchies based on sexual orientation, particularly if the vehicle for inclusion is the institution of marriage?

Feminists have long critiqued binary thinking, in theory and in practice. But like many political battles, the quest for same-sex marriage is full of binary oppositions. Are you for or against same-sex marriage? The movement for same-sex marriage has come, over the past two decades, to frame this question as the most important issue on the political agenda of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community. In doing so, the question has come to be framed as one of equality, as sameness: Same-sex couples are just like heterosexual married couples, except for this one small difference.

Framing same-sex marriage in terms of equality and equal citizenship has in some cases been a successful political strategy. In particular, the Iowa and Connecticut Supreme Court decisions establishing same-sex marriage were won on the basis of equal-protection claims. In fact, if you have not had the occasion to read these two decisions, I urge you to do so: They invoke what is best about the U.S. legal tradition. The Iowa decision, in particular, cites a long tradition of what one might call a plainspoken Midwestern sense of fairness. These are good victories. But we need to see them in context as we think about what is next on this fairness agenda.

One problem, as many scholars have pointed out, is that those who do not look the same, and whose interests are not the same, are not well served by a political strategy of sameness. This is the problem of secondary exclusions that Shane Phelan (Reference Phelan2001) pointed out almost a decade ago. Equality as sameness simplifies the issues in ways that may in fact be politically harmful to the interests of the broader LGBT community.

This objection is not theoretical: Witness, for example, the continuing earnings gap between men and women in both high and low-paying occupations (IWPR 2009). There are many factors, from occupational segregation to outright discrimination, that account for this gap, but the women whose wages are closest to men's wages in the same occupation are the women who look the most like men by being what Joan Williams has called “ideal workers,” with no dependents to interfere with their availability for work. In fact, women with children earn less on average than other women, while men with children earn more on average than other men. Obviously, this is a complex issue with causal arrows pointing in multiple directions.

For women, being an “ideal worker” usually means that they are single and do not have children. For heterosexual men, it more often means that they have a wife who takes primary responsibility for the household and children. Women who have children who leave the workforce even for short periods of time may suffer long-term losses in their earnings capabilities. Since most women choose to have children, most women have difficulty being “ideal workers.” One could see these as simply “choices” made by individuals with respect to families and the workforce. But these choices operate very differently in countries that provide paid parental leave. Thus, decades after the Equal Pay Act, women, even when they are the primary breadwinners, earn significantly less on average than men do. Requiring equality as sameness means that most female workers are not seen as “the same” as male workers. So the point still stands: Equality as sameness turns out to have lots of costs for most women.

Making the claim for marriage in terms of equality as sameness, however, has had an additional and, to me, more troubling effect on the LGBT movement's understanding of itself and of the place of marriage claims in the movement. Many people who support same-sex marriage have come to believe that establishing it will actually produce equality for LGBT people. The argument that nothing less than marriage will provide for equality gets turned around into the idea that having access to the institution of marriage will be productive of equal citizenship. And this just cannot possibly be the case in practical or political terms. Heterosexual privilege will not fall that easily, and marriage will not be transformed so quickly.

One thing that has become clear from feminist critiques of and efforts to reform traditional marriage is that the institution of marriage will exceed our ability to define it. Whether we wish to or not, we all have some relationship to the institution of marriage, and our personal relationship to it can cloud our thinking about what marriage is, about its possibilities and its limits, and about its place in political life. Marriage has many different meanings to many different people, and its meanings even to an individual will change over the course of a lifetime. These different meanings can be deployed, in certain ways, by social movements, but they can never be contained or confined. Movements cannot determine the meanings that citizens, or the polity, will attribute to marriage—its history is too long, too complex, and too personal for this to be possible.

As feminist scholars have amply documented, the cultural practices of marriage and of weddings are also both ubiquitous and pervasive, and linked to many aspects of social hierarchy. The prevalence of marriage in cultural production, from situation comedies and movies to the mass weddings of the Unification Church, makes clear that marriage as solution, as happy ending of many different kinds of narrative, has powerful meanings for people of wide-ranging political and social viewpoints. This romance of marriage as end-of-narrative, as solution to social and personal problems, will again exceed the possibility of any social movement to contain it.

So the cultural, social, religious, and political meanings of marriage are both pervasive and elusive. Thus, the idea that access to same-sex marriage will create equal citizenship for LGBT people seems, at the very least, inattentive to the history of the institution of marriage, particularly in relation to women and gender roles.

It is true that opponents of same-sex marriage are deeply invested in the maintenance of inequality; this is in fact their goal. Groups such as Focus on the Family, the American Family Association, and the National Organization for Marriage see heterosexual (and preferably Christian) marriage as better than other forms of family life, and they want heterosexual married couples to have more status and more benefits as citizens than those who are not heterosexually married (whatever the structure of their family). Indeed, these organizations also want to maintain traditional gender roles, insofar as possible in contemporary life, in heterosexual marriages.

Thus, it is pretty disturbing to see the citation by same-sex-marriage equality advocates of conservative marriage movement “research” to try to bolster arguments for same-sex marriage.Footnote ² As Nancy Polikoff rightly points out, the conservative marriage movement does not support same-sex marriage, though LGBT activists who cite these sources seem to be unaware that they are citing antifeminist and antigay sources (2008, 98–99). The conservative marriage movement advocates believe that heterosexual married people should be treated better than any other types of families—keeping the hierarchical privilege of heterosexual marriage is crucial to their vision of the meaning and place of marriage in society. This is why they see same-sex marriage as a threat to heterosexual marriage; letting same-sex couples “in” would take away the special privilege and first-class treatment that, in their view, should be reserved for heterosexual married couples. But just because conservatives defenders of traditional marriage believe that inequality is necessary does not mean that same-sex marriage will produce equality.

There seems to be a widespread expectation that demographic changes in the electorate will lead to change with respect to access to same-sex marriage.Footnote ³ In this scenario, progress toward greater inclusion is simply a matter of time, of the older people who oppose same-sex marriage dying off, to be replaced by younger people who are at worst indifferent and at best supportive of same-sex marriage. This may well be true in the states where access to marriage or to civil unions or domestic partnerships has already been achieved. But it does not give sufficient weight to the fact that the backlash to the marriage movement has also been quite successful, and that the institutional, political, and cultural change that will be required for inclusion of diverse families in the majority of states with state marriage bans and other antigay policies will require significant and sustained political organizing (D'Emilio Reference D'Emilio2006). And it certainly does not take account of the fact that many LGBT families will not achieve equality or protection of their relationships and interests through marriage alone (Polikoff Reference Polikoff2008).

The successes in states that now have marriage equality are encouraging. But these victories should not blind us to the fact that in most states in the United States, marriage equality is a long way off, legally speaking. Yes, Ted Olson and David Boies (the opposing attorneys in Bush v. Gore) have teamed up to try to convince the U.S. federal courts that denying access to same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.Footnote ⁴ Barring the success of that effort—which would, of course, require convincing the current Supreme Court to overturn state and federal marriage bans—the states that have constitutional marriage bans are unlikely to change them in the near future. Even as attitudes change, assuming that this continues, the institutional barriers to change are not small.

As community organizers tell us, people with power do not generally hand it over without a struggle, and cultural, institutional, and political change takes a long time. Just changing state constitutions is difficult. Despite the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967, it took decades to remove the subsequently unenforceable antimiscegenation provisions from state constitutions in the South, and even then, substantial minorities voted against removing these provisions. Mississippi repealed its state constitutional provision in 1987 by a narrow margin; Alabama was the last state to do so in 2000 (Owens Reference Owens2000; Winkle Reference Winkle1993, 142). Indeed, bans on interracial marriage were much broader than is often believed, including regulation in the western states of marriage between whites and Asian Americans and Native Americans (Pascoe Reference Pascoe2009).

Feminist arguments regarding families, including the critique of marriage, focused on the ways that the neopatriarchal family harms women. But feminists also argued that families come in many forms and that not just women but many people would benefit from the recognition of this diversity of family life. There are numerous rights and interests that are important to LGBT families, and to different kinds of families, that will not be secured by marriage equality, even in states where that is achieved. Parental rights and obligations are often established separately from marital rights and obligations, and even married same-sex couples may need additional legal proceedings, such as second-parent adoptions, depending upon their circumstances. This is also true for some heterosexual couples, depending upon the legal relationship between each parent and any children in the household.

So the states with constitutional marriage bans also present a political opportunity for developing the rights of diverse families. These states may provide the “laboratories of democracy” to expand the rights of diverse families without marriage. In these states, the quest for rights that affect a broad array of families may be the best way, and the only way in the foreseeable future, to obtain greater protections for same-sex couples and their children. Some of these rights are in keeping with policies suggested by Polikoff, and by the activists who wrote “Beyond Marriage” in 2006 (available online at http://www.beyondmarriage.org).

For example, current litigation in Florida seeks (again) to overturn the state's ban on adoption by gay or lesbian individuals. Recent litigation in several states that have state marriage bans, including Michigan and Ohio, secures custody and visitation rights for estranged partners with a variety of legal and biological relationships to their children. Part of the reason is that much of existing family law could be called into question by the failure to recognize already established parent–child legal relationships. If courts in Michigan or Louisiana refuse to recognize legal adoptions completed in states with second-parent adoption, the entire legal edifice of adoption law—for opposite-sex as well as same-sex families—might be called into question. Clearly, this would have the potential to cause disruption to many different kinds of families.

Thus, it already seems to be the case that litigation on state marriage bans is distinguishing between recognition of the legal status of relationships between adults in same-sex families and relationships between adults and children in those same families. State courts are finding state marriage bans irrelevant to the legal status of established parent–child relationships. As family courts continue to address the conflicts that arise in real, diverse families and seek to address the best interests of the children in those families, legal recognition of many different kinds of families may expand even in states where marriage equality is not a possibility in the near future.

Part of the question about marriage equality is about where we put our political energy. Perhaps the most fruitful place for feminist and LGBT political energy in the next several decades will be in expanding recognition of diverse forms of family life in places where same-sex marriage is not available. The romance of weddings thus might give way to the reality of families as most of us live them.