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Further, Wolfson thinks that, like it or not, no matter how one feels about marriage equality, this is the fight we are having now, and it is essentially about the larger place of gay people in America. "I think it’s important that we engage in this debate with our fellow Americans — especially to reach out to those who have not made up their minds about the injustice of second-class citizenship. This should not just be a private debate within the gay community, but a real engagement with the majority of Americans."

Wolfson is a realist about marriage equality, but others who argue the case have often represented civil marriage for gay people as a panacea for what ails the queer world. Andrew Sullivan has famously said that as soon as we have gay marriage, we can shut down the movement. Most activists and litigators would not go to that extreme, but there has been a clear message from the beginning of this fight that gay marriage is the "big win." As the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund’s "Roadmap to Equality: A Freedom To Marry Educational Guide" states, "There is no other way for gay people to be fully equal to non-gay people."

But the simple fact remains that the fight for marriage equality is at its essence not a progressive fight, but rather a deeply conservative one that seeks to maintain the social norm of the two-partnered relationship — with or without children — as more valuable than any other relational configuration. While this may make a great deal of sense to conservatives — Jonathan Rauch, the author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, argues that one of the purposes of marriage is to explicitly and legally value some relationships over others — it is clear that this paradigm simply leaves the basic needs of many people out of the equation. In the case of same-sex marriage the fight for equality bears little resemblance to a progressive fight for the betterment of all people.

This conservatism also shows up outside the family circle. The fight for equality under the law — i.e., the law as it now stands, no matter how ill-advised or unfair it may be — often promotes and perpetrates pre-existing inequality and unfairness. For example, in its public discussions about what it means to fight the ban on gays in the military, the gay-rights movement has never taken into consideration that it is mainly poor people who even think about joining the armed forces and are — especially now, as we continue to occupy Iraq — the most likely to be wounded or killed. Nor has the gay-rights movement had a public discussion about including sexual and gender orientation in hate-crimes legislation that recognizes that these laws often add draconian "extra" time to prison sentences and add to the power of a troubled and often-corrupt court system that historically and routinely affects young African-American men more than any other group. The professionalized gay-rights movement — as distinct from the plethora of grassroots organizing that has co-existed with it over these last 35 years — is a very middle-class, white movement that has always has trouble seeing beyond its own limited landscape.

Same-sex-marriage advocates have argued that marriage is nothing more than a personal choice, that what gay people were denied is the "freedom to marry." But marriage — or any legal or social contact — never concerns only one or two people. It concerns the entire fabric of the society in which they live. The gay movement has to begin asking some bigger questions, looking at issues in a larger, more socially conscious way. This is not simply a matter of "what about poor people" or "what about people who want to live their family lives outside of a dyadic coupling." If the gay movement is to be a true social-justice movement, it has to think about social justice for all GLBT people. Critics such as Paula Ettelbrick, Lisa Duggan, Kara Suffredini, and Madeleine Findley have pointed up a serious flaw in how the movement, with its focus on marriage, has configured itself in the past and is continuing to do so in the present. This is not a matter of tactics, but an ethical challenge: the question the gay movement should be asking is not how to make life more livable for all gay people, but how to make it better for all people. The fight should not simply be for same-sex marriage equality, but for reforming marriage laws to make them equitable to meet the needs of all families. A fight for universal health care would better address some of the basic needs of all families — gay and straight — than the fight for same-sex marriage will. There are those in the gay movement who argue that health care isn’t a "gay issue" — well, tell that to a single lesbian mother with two kids and no health insurance or to a man with AIDS and no access to medications. There are also those who would argue that universal health care, at this point in US history, is simply unobtainable. The same argument was used to dissuade people from the fight for same-sex marriage. The bottom line is that you get what you organize for.

GLBT people have often been in the vanguard of social change precisely because they have been on the outside and can see how society might be refigured and reshaped. Unfortunately, the gay-rights movement has been looking at life too long from the inside, often to the detriment of the very people it is trying to help.

"Equality under the law" is a pretty phase and one that resonates well at a Fourth of July wedding, along with phases like "sweet land of liberty." The only other phase that was missing here was "with liberty and justice for all."

Michael Bronski’s latest book, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), just won a Lammy Award for Best Anthology. He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com