A lot of same-sex marriage advocates really like the hashtag #loveislove. I don’t. It’s harmful.
Today deputy leader of the opposition, Tanya Plibersek, tweeted this in support of same-sex marriage in Australia:
It irritated me quite intensely. Partly because that’s not what same-sex marriage (or marriage equality, call it what you will) is; and partly because of the harmful message it sends.
Amending the law to allow same-sex couples to marry is simply a question of giving same-sex couples equal access to a legal institution. Nothing more, and nothing less. Amending the law is not about recognizing love: weddings (well, most) do that; the legal institution of marriage does not. We are not asking that the government recognizes the love involved in many of our relationships, or that the government supports the love involved in many of our relationships, we are simply asking that the government provides us with equal access to the legal institution for formalizing our relationships.
I feel like I am repeating myself too much, but it irks me that something so simple seems to be so widely misunderstood.
Facts aside, #loveislove seems like pretty good rhetoric to convince people to support same-sex marriage. And oh, how harmful that rhetoric is.
#loveislove says that we should be given equal access to a legal institution because we deserve it. Not that all legal institutions should be equally available to all, but that equal rights are for those who deserve them.
#loveislove invites people to base their willingness to allow us equal access to a legal institution on their opinion of the validity of of our relationships. It invites them to judge that our love isn’t real love in their eyes and deny us equal rights based on that.
#loveislove sets conditions on our equal access to a legal institution. It says our marriages should be based on love – when the law does not (the law says they must be genuine, for life, and exclusive – all of which I disagree with, but that’s another matter).
Worst of all #loveislove erases the queerness of our relationships. #loveislove demands our relationships be based on a heteronormative model of two people who love each other forming a monogamous life-long relationship, when a very large number of queer relationships are just not like that. #loveislove sets up gatekeepers of equal access to a legal institution, and gives the respectable gays the keys, keeping the scandalous queers out. It sets whatever exists of the queer community up against itself, and can only ever make our demands for equal access to a legal institution weaker.
So can we kill off #loveislove? Can we give up asking for permission? Can we demand equal access to a legal institution based simply on the fact that we are people, and without placing conditions on ourselves?
I hope so.
John Avocado 
I’m fairly confused by this reasoning. Putting aside the messy but very real complexities of where this leaves religious queers: The offer of civil unions that basically mirror marriages have been on the table for years. The reason many reject it is because of the emotional side, because so many of them impute such a strong romantic element into marriage that they do not feel exists within a civil union.
If it were merely about legal rights they would take the civil unions but the mere legal rights don’t sate the appetite for that mythic quality associated with marriage and to try and isolate the romantic side side from the rest of that is just impossible.
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I don’t think it’s an emotional element as much as it is a cultural element – marriage as seen as the “ideal” formalized relationship, with anything in the corm of a civil partnership (as exists in the UK) being seen as lesser (even though civil partnerships are essentially identical to marriages in the UK, people converting their CPs into marriages often use the word “upgrade”).
Equivalent but separate is also not an ideal, and it certainly isn’t equality by any standard, and what I think most people want to gain from same-sex marriage is equality before the law in every possible way.
There are also other issues, such as gender transitions within marriage – same-sex marriage is essential to provide for that – and here may be an issue where not love, but family stability is being sought from marriage.
I don’t argue that the basis for most marriages isn’t love, only that love shouldn’t be the basis for our argument: demanding equal access to marriage is a much more powerful argument – and one that doesn’t throw anyone under the bus.
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