Clearly, the issue of marriage equality offers fertile ground for theorizing by social scientists. Public opinion on the issue has varied widely, both geographically among states, and nationally across time. There exists a multitude of interest groups concerned with the issue, and the positions of these groups, along with their respective tactics, vary depending on the state in which they operate.
As of the time of writing, thirteen states (CA, CT, DE, IA, MA, ME, MD, MN, NH, NY, RI, VT, and WA) have introduced marriage equality laws for lesbian and gay couples in their jurisdiction and six states ( CO, HI, IL, NV, NJ, and OR) have civil unions or their equivalent. These nineteen states achieved this result via one of three ways: a) a state’s legislature successfully passed a bill though both legislatives houses in support of marriage equality or civil unions and the state’s governor signed it into law; b) a state’s highest court judicially ordered the state to permit marriage equality or introduce civil unions; or, c) a statewide ballot initiative introduced marriage or civil unions. In fact, for many of these nineteen states, the current policy of the state has actually been achieved by some dynamic combination of at least two of the three methods. And, some states (such as CT, DE, NH, RI, VT, and WA) have moved through legislative action or judicial decision from civil unions to marriage, while at least one other state (CA) has moved via ballot initiative from marriage back to civil unions.
Simultaneously, thirty states (AL, AK, AZ, AR, CA, CO, FL, GA, KS, ID, KY, LA, MI, MS, MO, NE, NV, NC, ND, OH, OK, OR, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, and WI) have (or had) state constitutional amendments prohibiting legal recognition of same sex marriage in the requisite state. For their part, these amendments were introduced by state constitutional referendums involving a statewide popular vote, which was often initiated by legislative action. Interestingly, at least four of the states that presently recognize civil unions (CA, CO, NV, and OR) also have (or, in California’s case, had) such constitutional prohibitions. And, in a handful of other states (including HI, PA, WV, and WY) relatively recent legislation alone restricts recognition of marriage to opposite sex couples.
As is apparent from the details above, the categories of state policy responses and the movement activities that prompted them are complex, dynamic, and somewhat fluid. Amy Stone and Priscilla Yamin both effectively use this changing backdrop as a basis upon which to redefine accepted theories in sociology and political science. As such, their work is in direct contrast to much of the early theorizing around the marriage issue, which primarily focuses on utilizing the existing social science literature to theoretically situate the actions of the developing movement and the almost uniformly negative responses of the states. This newer approach is aided by the fact that there is increasingly a consensus that the size, caliber, and longevity of the marriage equality movements, and the lesbian and gay rights movements more generally, mark them as potential, logical counterparts of other rights movements. Much is to be gained by examining the marriage equality movements in connection with the paradigmatic examples of the civil rights’ movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental/conservation movement.
Stone investigates the effects of a process of continual engagement with ballot initiatives on the selection of tactics and the development of movement goals. She focuses on state and local anti-gay ballot initiatives beginning with the signature campaign in Miami-Dade County in 1977 involving Anita Bryant, continuing through to the campaign around Proposition 8 in California in 2008. According to Stone, “between 1974 and 2009, the Religious Right placed 146 anti-gay ballot measures on the ballot” (p. xv) in localities and states across the United States. Many of these ballot measures were designed to take away hard-fought legislative successes won earlier by the lesbian and gay rights movements.
But, as Stone notes, defending these statutory or administrative successes, which were initially jurisdictionally and politically limited, from popular reaction, as expressed in the short and quick campaigns that define ballot initiatives, had the deleterious effect of becoming largely determinative of the message of the movement itself as well as its primary recruitment strategy. The need to ensure electoral success within the framework created by ballot initiatives requires a narrowing of goals, a focus on the immediate, and often a broadening of the underlying issues beyond their present focus in order to garner the simple majority required to defeat the popular initiative. These aspects limited the ability of the social movement to generate a comprehensive approach that more accurately reflected key constituencies that had emerged from among an array of lesbian and gay groups. It also acted counter to identity-formation amongst the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) communities as ballot campaigns eschewed the promulgation of elements unique to these communities. Moreover, the repetition of this campaign context drained the movement’s financial resources and its volunteers’ time in ways that delayed the introduction of effective national and regional movement infrastructures. Finally, the repetition brought only limited positive effects from experience as the adopted process of learning from each campaign was itself damaging to sustaining professional staff and organizational coherence. As Stone notes, “one national political consultant referred to the criticism of campaign leaders after the election as ‘cannabilism,’ because the movement ‘ate’ its own leaders” (p. 122).
The lesson to be learned from the book is that while it was previously accepted that “campaigns and movements support each other, developing in the best of times a complementary relationship” (p. xxvi), the evidence from the current research suggests that “ballot measure campaigns and social movements have a contradictory relationship, and support each other at their peril” (p. xxvi). And Stone manages to bring together many of the existing criticisms heard previously both outside and within the movements—the slowness in building an effective national and regional infrastructure that would allow the movement to more effectively situate each individual ballot campaign in a larger social and political approach, the failure to publicly promote a queer identity that challenges hetero-normativity, the exclusion of transgendered issues, the failure to appropriately fight on more than one set of issues important to the movement, and the apparent temporariness of some campaign organizations—within a single, coherent theoretical framework that posits concrete institutional and organizational reasons why each of these aspects recur within the current setting.
Yet, there are troubling contradictions, some of which Stone readily notes in her approach. While they often captured much of the movement’s resources, ballot initiatives, as noted above, were but one aspect of a diverse set of strategies being deployed by various organizations within the movement. For example, many of the ballot initiatives were initiated to “roll back” (p. xxvi) existing victories by the movement at the local and state level. The relative success of the movement in the legislative and judicial arena partially belies Stone’s primary point about the effects for the movement inherent in these larger issue-based campaigns. Finally, notwithstanding ongoing movement qualms, marriage, employment non-discrimination, and removing sodomy prohibitions were among the very few political issues that managed to catalyze the loose coalitions of LGBT groups sufficiently to coalesce into the organizations that presently constitute the national infrastructure. But, to give Stone full credit, the recently demonstrated level of success of the LGBT movements around ballot initiatives “focused on the difficult topic of same-sex marriage” (p. 124) reflects in part strategies she highlights in her book.
Yamin offers the perfect complement to Stone’s analysis. For her part, she brings a sense of understanding to the question of why the struggle over the terms of marriage has come to dominate the LGBT movements’ goals for so long, and why such a struggle is so political in nature that it seems to invoke the greatest political resistance. She considers the positioning and role of marriage as part of the political transformation that occurred in five distinct historical moments in American political development: Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the Civil Rights / Women’s Rights Era, the initial rights struggle by lesbian and gay organizations in the 1990s; and the present era.
Two themes arise from this historical consideration. First, marriage as an institution is dynamic in its construction, constantly in tension between the dominant political and social forces of its time. Understanding its nature and role in society relies on first situating marriage within its present historical context and the debates that define that era. Notwithstanding this necessary historical aspect to understanding marriage, there is a consistency across times as to its role as a political institution: “It is striking that while marriage is mobilized differently in distinct historical moments, marriage itself generates consistent thematic and political dynamics, especially after moments of political dislocation and change” (p. 4).
Second, marriage is not simply a passive, codified reflection of the politics of its era; it is an active catalyst in both social transformation and political incorporation. Marriage is efficiently embedded into the very definition of citizenship and it is exceptionally designed to demarcate the boundaries of national and local political acceptance. Accordingly, it has come to occupy a key position in the larger historical struggles for political inclusion by formerly marginalized groups: “At critical moments of political change in the United States, actors turn to marriage to resolve tensions and to justify new political arrangements or maintain hierarchical relationships with regard to the rights, obligations, and social status of specific groups” (p. 13).
As part of telling this complex story, Yamin highlights the value and contribution of approaching these issues from the perspective of American Political Development. The work is historically rich. Yet, it is the historical details that both show the development of marriage and reveal the very consistency within its role as a political institution. And it explains why we presently should not be surprised to find it central in the struggles around sexual orientation, sex, and sexuality as it has been previously (and continues to be) in struggles around gender or race. More importantly, Yamin’s approach offers a means to theoretically situate the integral role in constructing the social understanding of identity that marriage has come to play in American politics.
As these two books demonstrate, social scientists, such as Stone and Yamin, are taking this rare research opportunity to begin a re-theorizing and re-consideration of accepted approaches. In doing so, each manages to bring new theoretical coherence and better synthesis to political actions that have previously been classified as relatively unique and disparate.
