"Marriage Will Never Set Us Free"

After reading Dean Spade and Craig Willse's "Marriage Will Never Set Us Free", my outlook on same-sex marriage has changed. I have always recognized marriage as an institution of oppression for women. But I failed to see how it oppressed other groups because I did not think about it. I was looking at marriage through my queer lens but not through the lens of someone with other identities I experience privilege because I don't share. For example, I failed to look at marriage as a tool of racism, and colonialism. What I took as the main point of the article, is that marginalized groups experience oppression because they do not fit into normalized and preferred institutions; we reward those who fit into our ideal roles and we punish those who do not. We teach children to internalize the idea of the ideal family unit which will supposedly lead to happiness and economic prosperity. But what we don't teach them is that they are internalizing ideals that are unattainable to many Americans. They don't realize that they are being fed an idea that the ideal role is a white, cisgender, heterosexual man who is the bread winner for the family; or a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman who is the homemaker. If you are transgender, a person of color, queer, etc, than you cannot be rewarded by this system. Therefore, the institution of marriage reinforces the idea that some people are in the "charmed circle" while others are in the "outer limits." By letting more people into the "charmed circle" we do not eliminate the systems of domination that create the "outer limits" in the first place. We should try to eliminate the idea of unattainable normalcy instead of trying to normalize more people. The article supports this claim when it says, "Freedom and equality are not achieved when a practice crosses over to being acceptable. Instead, such shifts strengthen the line between what is considered good, healthy, and normal and what remains bad, unhealthy, stigmatized, and criminalized. The article also clearly states the problems that marginalized groups face and how we can actually remedy them. For example, queer people, trans people, people of color, and immigrants have minimal access to health care. While marriage would allow people who already receive benefits to share them with a spouse, this does not extend to help people in much worse a state who have no access already. The same concepts apply to the unfair immigration system, legal separation and loss of custody that queer people experience by states, and exclusive hospital visitation and inheritance practices. We need to cease our rewarding of normalized people within the "charmed circle" through marriage. We also need to stop demonizing people outside that circle by punishing them and taking away their access to citizenship, health care, custody, and inheritance. Legalizing same-sex marriage is good for relieving queer couples of harmful stigma and making them relatable. But same-sex marriage will not get rid of the practice of ownership, racism, colonialism, etc,  that marriage perpetuates. We need to fix our immigration system so it does not reward false marriages. We need to fix our health care system so it does not exclude trans people. We need to fix our visitation practices so that queer couples are recognized. Marriage will not accomplish any of these things. But we can!