Feb 22, 2008  |  By: ZACK ROSEN  | COMMENTS     

Winning same-sex marriage rights remains at the top of the legislative wish list for many gay rights activists, but one lesbian author is urging readers to reconsider the way they look at marriage.

Nancy D. Polikoff, Washington- based lesbian author of the just-released “Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under The Law,” believes that there are other ways of looking at the marriage equality movement.

“Marriage for same-sex couples will give same-sex couples what married people have, but that’s often the problem in the law,” says Polikoff, an American University College of Law professor who also helped develop the laws governing second-parent adoption and joint adoption for same-sex couples in D.C. “A gay man and lesbian … may make a commitment to raise a child that may or may not be a biological child of both of them, or two un-partnered people decide they’re going to retire to a home together and need a certain set of protections for the wellbeing of their relationship.”

Polikoff, who will be appearing at Busboys and Poets bookstore on Feb. 25, feels strongly that simply dividing relationships into marriage and everything else limits the rights of any kind of family. The impetus for the book was to educate a younger demographic on the true scope of marriage equality as it relates to the law.

“I discovered that a generation of young adults had grown up never knowing that the gay rights movement was part of a movement in support of diverse forms of family,” she says. “They grew up believing that if you support same-sex marriage they had addressed all they needed to in support of the needs of LGBT family. I wanted to recapture that history and describe another way to think about the laws of family.”

POLIKOFF HAS BEEN INTERESTED in gay family law since she was in law school, but the issue has gained personal relevance for her as well. The author has a partner of close to 20 years and a daughter, but the message in her book is also relevant to heterosexuals in non-traditional relationships. Polikoff says she’s heard a number of personal stories from straight couples that are disenfranchised by existing marriage benefits.

“Somebody on my own faculty is angry about having to marry her partner in order to get health insurance, because at my university the only domestic partners who can cover each other are same-sex — different-sex couples have to get married. That is the wrong way to think about employee benefits. It’s better to think that if we have to cover families, let’s cover families the way we decide them.”

The arguments in “Beyond Marriage” become more pointed in light of the 2008 presidential elections. In the book, Polikoff writes that the Bush administration has put $750 million into funding marriage promotion, based on outdated theories and that, in Polikoff’s words, “the decline of long-term heterosexual marriage is responsible for all our social problems.”

“This is the rhetoric of the right-wing marriage movement,” Polikoff says. “[They’re spending it on this] instead of actually spending it on programs that would really address poverty, income and equality and the other things that are core social welfare issues … It’s not something I’ve heard the presidential candidates talk about, but I’m hopeful that any Democratic administration would try to address social welfare issues directly without trying to argue that everyone getting married is the way to solve those problems.”