Photo by staceyviera

In the Washington Post, Tara Bahrampour and Monica Hesse write up a necessary story on same-sex marriage and the divisions it has promoted in the gay community. In places, the authors hit upon the mundane argument that marriage is a difficult decision. “For those who can’t agree on whether to tie the knot, the new horizons have stirred up old conflicts,” the story says. But that’s just the way the story always goes, isn’t it?

Elsewhere, the writers strike up some conversations with gay people in the District and draw out some more specific hesitations. Plenty of them register with their straight counterparts: weddings are materialistic, weddings are for families, and so on. But specifically for same-sex couples, weddings are brand new. Denmark registered the first same-sex union in 1989; Canada performed the first honest-to-goodness same-sex marriage in 2001.

Inasmuch as marriage represents a legal right for which the LGBT community has fought for four decades, it has also served as a discriminatory state tool used to distinguish state-sanctioned relationships for far longer. The story gets at the queer queasiness some people feel about marriage:

There’s a whole segment of the [gay] community for whom the marriage equality bit seems way too heteronormative,” mimicking conventional heterosexual practices, said Suzanne Scott, director of women and gender studies at George Mason University. “Some would even argue that marriage is an outdated norm based on archaic rules.”

But that isn’t the root of the same-sex marriage debate. Many couples in the District and beyond would rather not push the envelope on relationship norms. Some of them are not dissuaded by the dismal statistics on (heterosexual) marriage. Some strive for the social standing and approval that marriage, rationally or irrationally, confers. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea for the LGBT community is a decision for many couples to make! But not, the argument goes, a decision for the state to make.