Rhode Island s laws recognize the trust and emotional attachments that exist between partners in marriage, the economic and financial relationships of married persons, and the relationship between married persons and the state and third parties. No two people can contract their way into divorce and the full range of domestic relations laws, or the tax code, or the workers compensation and unemployment systems, or the right to sue based on a spousal relationship. Civil unions, as much as they attempt to create equality for same-sex couples at the state level, simply cannot. Marriage is more than the sum of its legal parts. It is a cultural status which plugs into a common vocabulary of family, love and commitment.
People don t sing songs about domestic partnership or civil unions.
The inability of gay and lesbian families to use the language of marriage to describe our lives and our loves makes us permanent outsiders and keeps people from seeing the families of gay and lesbian people as like theirs deserving of the same protections and supports, and subject to the same obligations and responsibilities. Marriage is also a badge of citizenship. The Yale University historian Nancy Cott, in her recently published book on the political history of marriage in the United States, talks about how slaves were not permitted to marry because they were not free. 2 Professor Cott goes further, and argues that the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage reinforces a caste supremacy of heterosexuality over homosexuality just as laws banning marriages across the color line exhibited and reinforced white supremacy. In this state, two competent people can marry if they are of the requisite age, are not too closely related, and pay a small fee.