Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

Suzanne Goldberg, Director of Columbia Law School’s Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic and the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law filed a friend of the court brief this week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger on behalf of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Foundation.  She argued that California’s Proposition 8 is unconstitutional because it violates the rights of lesbian and gay couples seeking to access the “unique social value of marriage.”

Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic has won asylum for a gay man who feared persecution because of his sexual orientation if forced to return to his native Brazil.

All eyes were on the Senate hearings this week on repeal of the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, meaning that before long members of the U.S. military will be permitted to do two things without negative consequences for the first time in U.S. history: i) say out loud “I am gay or lesbian,” and ii) have sex with another person of the same sex.

The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has been a top priority of the lgbt community since its adoption early in the Clinton Administration, and on one level of course it should be. It stands as one of the most stark examples of state-sponsored discrimination against lesbian and gay people, and is justified by and offers the opportunity for the expression of the crudest stereotypes and slurs about gays and lesbians.

Yet its demise comes with no small measure of discomfort on the part of more progressive members of the community in so far as this civil rights issue marries lgbt politics with the values of militarization, state violence, and enormous human suffering. (My dis-ease with the patriotization of lgbt politics in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” context shares an etiology with my reluctance to throw myself full bore into the marriage equality thing.)

Interestingly, the Senate’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” hearings took place in the same week that the DoD adopted the findings of its Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee which had recommended that levonorgestrel, also known as the “morning after pill,” be made available in DoD dispensaries. (Levonorgestrel is a synthetic progesterone, commonly labeled “Next Choice” or “Plan B,” that can work as a contraceptive if taken within 3 days after unprotected intercourse. Levonorgestrel can be obtained over the counter for women over 17 years old, but women serving in the U.S. military overseas depend on DoD dispensaries for their drugs.)

This week’s inclusion of levonorgestrel in the DoD’s “core formularies” reverses a Bush White House decision to reject the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee 2002 recommendation that the drug be made available to female members of the military. Critics such as Laura Ingraham have opposed its availability on the ground that it promotes “sex without consequences.”

This has been a busy month at the Pentagon for the sticky issue of sex and its consequences – both homo and hetero sex. Recall the controversial Army policy floated in December whereby female soldiers serving in northern Iraq could have been court-martial and possibly jailed if they become pregnant (and male soldiers and civilians employed by the Army who impregnated the women might also have been charged with crimes).

Here’s the thing: the military desperately needs bodies to fill out the ranks in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just as Abraham Lincoln famously mused in 1863 that mustering new troops was “like shoveling fleas across a barnyard … you take up a shovel full, but before you can dump them anywhere they are gone,” so too President Obama is facing a similar problem: otherwise qualified people who have joined, or would like to join, the military are “gone” because of the sex they’re having – whether it be homo or hetero.

Yes, let’s celebrate the demise of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the provision of better reproductive health care for women (and men) in the U.S. military, but let’s do so while well aware of the fact that these “victories” smack of a familiar kind of “interest convergence” as Derrick Bell called it in his famous 1980 Harvard Law Review article.

Woodrow Wilson “used” the enfranchisement of women in the United States in the immediate post World War I period as a means by which to champion the moral superiority of the U.S., and the U.S. military was racially integrated by Harry Truman after World War II for reasons that had as much to do with efforts to distinguish the U.S. from the Soviet Union as the rightness of African American civil rights. So too, as Bell argued, the nation’s schools were desegregated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 not only because the cause was right, but because the U.S. had a cold war-based reason to prove its moral superiority to the Soviets.

So here we are again – the military is becoming a “fairer” place to serve for gay men, lesbians, and heterosexual women not only because the injustice of not doing so is no longer tolerable on its own terms, but because the costs of discrimination have become too high. This is all to say that “sex without consequences” is now in the state’s interest as much as it is in ours.

Oorah!

The Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School invites applications for a sabbatical visitor for the 2010-2011 academic year to undertake research, writing and collaboration with Center faculty and students in ways that span traditional academic disciplines. The CGSL welcomes applications from faculty from any field who are interested in spending a semester or the academic year in residence at Columbia Law School working on scholarly projects relating to Gender and/or Sexuality Law.

Sabbatical Visitors will receive an office with phone and computer, secretarial support and full access to university libraries, computer systems and recreational facilities. In addition, Sabbatical Visitors will be expected to participate in CGSL activities and present a paper at the Center’s Colloquium Series.

For more information: http://www.law.columbia.edu/center_program/gendersexuality/sabbatical

As Mai Ratakonda noted in the previous post, last Wednesday the International Olympic Committee announced the recommendations of a panel of “experts” on the manner in which the Olympics should “handle” persons with “Disorders of Sexual Development.” They concluded that the IOC should approach female athletes whose sex has been questioned, treat them as having a medical disorder, and they will be referred to special clinics for diagnosis and treatment, or as they call it, “management.” The recommendations address Olympic athletes whose “true” sex is called into question because they deviate from a socially determined female norm. The meeting of experts was convened by the IOC in response to the Caster Semenya case. (An earlier blog post addressed Semenya.)

The recommendations raise a number of problems. First, it seems that for athletes who wish to compete in the female division and who have had their “sex” challenged, they will have to agree to examination and treatment in order to remain eligible. “Those who agree to be treated will be permitted to participate,” said Dr. Maria New, an IOC hired panel participant, an expert on sexual development disorders, and a controversial figure in the intersex world insofar as she has been a strong advocate for genital surgeries for babies born with “ambiguous genitalia.” “Those who do not agree to be treated on a case-by-case basis will not be permitted” to compete. Dr. New suggests that the best first step in identifying and treating athletes of questionable sex is that “photographs of [those] athletes [be sent] to experts like her. If the expert thinks the athlete might have a sexual-development disorder, the expert would order further testing and suggest treatment.”

Imagine, for a second, how this will work: a world-class athlete, such as Caster Semenya, will have her female credentials questioned by another athlete – likely someone who just lost to the athlete whose female-ness is being questioned. That athlete will then have to remove her shorts, have her genitals photographed, and then have those photos sent to Dr. New for review. Applying what seems like a “know it when you see it” standard of abnormality, Dr. New may then determine that the athlete be further tested and treated/managed for her “Disorders of Sexual Development” as a condition of further eligibility in IOC-sanctioned competition. This new procedure creates a climate whereby female athletes who run too fast, throw too far, or jump too high “for a woman” stand likely to have their sexual identity challenged, thereby exposing themselves to the humiliation of genital photography and the shameful suggestion that they are freaks. Look what happened to Caster Semenya and Santhi Soundarajan who endured a similar sexual inquisition and attempted suicide as a result to know where this is leading.

Second, as if the privacy and shaming of the IOC panel’s recommendations weren’t enough, this new approach to policing the boundaries of women’s athletics smacks of sex discrimination. Many of the world’s top athletes have some physical “endowments” that explain, at least in part, their advantage over competitors. Take Michael Phelps, who won an amazing 8 gold medals in the last Olympics. Swimming fans are in awe of Phelps’ disproportionately large “wing span” (basically, really long arms), the fact that he is double jointed, and has huge feet. “His size-14 feet reportedly bend 15 degrees farther at the ankle than most other swimmers, turning his feet into virtual flippers. This flexibility also extends to his knees and elbows, possibly allowing him to get more out of each stroke,” wrote Scientific America in a special story on Phelps’ physical endowments. Phelps isn’t seen as having a joint or foot “disorder.” He isn’t forced to have pictures taken of his body that will be reviewed by medical experts who apply a loosey goosey standard to evaluate whether he needs treatment in order to make him more normal, and thereby allow him to continue competing. No, he’s just built for his sport in ways that give him enormous advantages over the average person. We stand in awe of him, not in judgment.

Only those endowments that are regarded as sex-related trigger an investigation into whether a female athlete is eligible for competition in a women’s division. But who’s to decide which are and which are not “sex-related”? Consider Lance Armstrong’s exceptionally large lung capacity and low heart rate which are looked to to account for his unbelievable success in biking (doping allegations aside). Not only are his physical advantages not treated as disqualifying, his body has been transformed into a lesson plan for high school biology classes. But maybe he should be referred to the sex police. Research shows that females demonstrate a somewhat different and better pattern of cardiac adaptation to exercise than do men, and as a result have better oxygen extraction by their working muscles due to greater capillarization and more mitochondria. So, in effect, Lance Armstrong’s body is more “feminized” as compared with the other male competitors. But you don’t see him getting called out for being insufficiently male and from having an unfair advantage over the other men in the Tour de France because his capacity to process oxygen is more typical of female than male athletes, do you? His endowments are not seen as sex-related, they’re just the envy of top cyclists. Hmmm.

So too, small male jockeys or petite male coxswains aren’t seen as cheaters (girly men competing in male sports) in the same way that Semenya was. Yet their light, lithe bodies are prized in their sports precisely because they are smaller than the average man. No sex police here.

Men, it seems, can compete under the influence of abnormal hormonal levels or other body functions so long as they use what “god gave them,” but women, it seems, may not. As Alice Dreger recently commented on the new recommendations:

That, then, raises the apparently unconsidered question of why athletes competing as women would be subject to such androgen-capping, while athletes competing as men are not (unless they dope). If we women naturally make all those same hormones – and we do – why do the guys get to keep all they naturally make, and we don’t?

Good question. And it raises a serious suggestion of sex discrimination in athletics.

Mai Ratakonda offers this reaction to the International Olympic Committee’s recent recommendations on how to handle athletes whose sexual identity is called into question, such as Caster Semenya.  Ratakonda is a second year law student at Columbia Law School, a staff member of the Columbia Law Review and received her B.A. from Georgetown University.

The International Olympic Committee just doesn’t know what to do with intersex athletes. The IOC convened a panel of medical experts to attempt to resolve the dilemma of whether athletes like Caster Semanya, who identify as female but have “male characteristics,” should be allowed to compete with other women. The experts’ recommendations last week stated that these intersex athletes should have their “disorders” diagnosed and treated on a case-by-case basis before the athletes are allowed to compete at all. These recommendations did not explicitly touch on the issue brought up most frequently since Caster Semanya’s case has been publicized- whether allowing intersex athletes to compete as females is fair to other female athletes.

A New York Times article reporting on the recommendation focused on the fairness issue. While making sure to present both sides of the fairness debate, the article, amazingly, did not question the labeling of intersexuality as a “disorder” or the recommendation for mandatory treatment. This implicit acceptance that those who are intersex are in some way mal-developed brushes aside years of debate and medical and lay activism advocating for intersexuality to be viewed, not as a disorder that must be treated, but as a biologically understandable, though statistically uncommon, condition.

This labeling of intersex people as abnormal and in need of corrective treatment may be a result of intersexuality recently being connected with, and internationally debated as, an athletic issue. The strong need for a prerequisite of fairness in the Olympics obscures more complex issues of intersexuality: the various levels of intersexuality, the fact that many labeled as intersex can lead healthy lives without any medical treatment, and what it means to be intersex from a psychological, sociological, or personal perspective. The focus on intersex as solely a medical issue, to be decided by medical experts, obscures these complexities as well.

Sympathy for female athletes who may never be able to physically reach the athletic condition of Semanya should not unreasonably or irrationally simplify the issue of intersexuality in how it is discussed, language used to describe it, and “remedies” offered to mitigate against any unfair results. Labeling a group as having a disorder will inevitably lead to exclusion and discrimination. This is not just an athletic issue, but a civil rights issue, and a gender justice issue. As international attention is currently focused on this issue as one of athletics, the IOC, as well as commentators, must be sensitive to the wider repercussions their treatment of Semanya and other intersex athletes will have on the future treatment of all intersex people.

Yesterday’s campaign finance case out of the Supreme Court (Citizens United v. Federal Election Com’n) might have inflicted a devastating blow to the functioning of democracy in the U.S. by giving corporations unlimited power to spend money in elections, but what does it have to do with Proposition 8 and marriage equality, you might ask?  Well, quite a bit as it turns out.  Not only is the lead lawyer in Citizens United, Ted Olson, also the lead lawyer in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal court challenge to Proposition 8.  More to the point is the degree to which issues of disclosure and public accountability are at stake in both these cases – a point clearly not lost on Justice Thomas who has already linked them up explicitly in his opinions in both of these cases.

The Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal group that works on a range of religiously fundamental issues, including opposing the rights of same sex couples to marry, filed an amicus brief in the Citizens United case urging the Court to invalidate the “disclaimer and disclosure” part of the election law at issue in the case (see below for what the case was about).  The ADF was concerned that people and organizations that funded conservatively oriented political speech would be harassed for doing so.  They argued in the brief that proponents of Proposition 8 had been terribly harassed after it was disclosed that they had contributed money in support of the Proposition (and in opposition to same sex marriage rights).  Justice Thomas picked up this idea and used the ADF’s Prop 8 harassment examples in his concurrence in the Citizens United case (as Nan Hunter has noted in her blog.)

The notion here is that corporations should have unlimited power to use economic power to influence elections and politicians but should not have to disclose that they are doing so.  Fortunately the majority of the Supreme Court didn’t go for this idea, at least not entirely.  Instead they said the problem of harassment could be taken up on a case-by-case basis.

The fact that Justice Thomas is so concerned about the harassment of financial supporters of conservative causes is interesting, given that the Supreme Court’s previous treatment of the issue mostly addressed efforts by conservatives to harass civil rights organizations, unions, suspected communists, and other leftist organization.  See my earlier posts on this here and here.

And this issue will come up again in the Court soon in the R-71 case, when it will decide whether people who signed Referendum 71 petitions in Washington State should have their names publicly disclosed (Referendum 71 sought to overturn a newly enacted gay rights law).

Here’s a little background to Citizens United:

The case was brought by Citizens United, a conservative organization with a mission of:

restoring our government to citizens’ control. Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security. Citizens United’s goal is to restore the founding fathers’ vision of a free nation, guided by the honesty, common sense, and good will of its citizens.

To further this mission they produced a film, Hillary: The Movie, a Michael Moore-style documentary quite critical of Hilary Clinton and sought to televise it on DirectTV the night before a number of democratic primaries were held in 2008.  The showing of the film was enjoined by a federal judge on the ground that it amounted to a kind of electioneering regulated by federal law.

The issue in the case as it made its way to the Supreme Court involved the constitutionality of federal campaign finance law that did two things: 1) prohibited “corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make independent expenditures for speech that is an ‘electioneering communication’ or for speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate.” and 2) required that televised electioneering communications funded by anyone other than a candidate must include a disclaimer that ‘_______ is responsible for the content of this advertising.’”  Citizens United felt the film amounted to a kind of speech protected by the first amendment, thus requiring the invalidation of part 1) above, and challenged the legitimacy of the disclosure and disclaimer requirements of 2).

Former New York City police officer Wilfredo Rosario was convicted yesterday of offering to destroy a summons he had issued to an 18 year old woman when she was in Riverside Park after hours if she would give him oral sex. Apparently this isn’t the first time he’s done this sort of thing and will go to trial soon on other sexual assault and rape charges.

The Daily News, reporting on the case, called him a “Renegade New York Cop who preyed on ladies” and the New York City Police Department fired him from the force immediately after his conviction.

Well maybe not so renegade. These sorts of sexual assault extortion and assault charges are not unknown to the NYPD. The Department’s view is that any large police force will have, unfortunately, a few bad apples and they take prompt action whenever one of their officers is found to have used the power of the badge to extort sex from women.

But as my students and I found last year, police departments do not include issues of sexual assault and extortion in their routine officer training. They get training on the constitutional limits on what they can do when they search, arrest and take suspects into custody, on racial profiling, excessive force, and proper use of weapons (pistols, tasers etc). But despite ample notice to the departments that some officers will abuse their authority and extort sex from female citizens, not one police department has implemented either policy or training informing their officers that this conduct violates the Constitution.

Here’s an excerpt from the students’ research:

• Police officers recently being trained in Maryland held a competition among the trainees to see how many of them could get pictures of women’s breasts in exchange for not writing them traffic tickets.

• My students were unable to find one police department that included issues of sexual assault or sexual misconduct in their training materials. And not one of the organizations that do back up to police departments, collecting or helping to develop training materials and personnel policies had a model policy on this issue.

• The Violence Against Women division of the Protecting Citizen’s Civil Rights Project of the International Association of Chiefs of Police have begun to explore the development of training policy on this issue. Their earlier work centered on training police officers on violence against women crimes, strengthening the commitment of law enforcement officers to respond to these crimes, and enhance the ability of communities to respond to victims. I was pleased to hear that they are taking the issue of sexual assault by police officers seriously.

•For more information documenting this problem, see Driving While Female: A National Problem in Police Misconduct

The start of the trial this week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case challenging the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, makes the Law School Magazine’s feature article on the issue all the more relevant.  Read an excerpt from the article below:

With public opinion increasingly favoring the right of same-sex couples to marry, and more states legalizing marriage for gays and lesbians, the movement for marriage equality appears to be at a tipping point. Four legal scholars discuss the future of marriage equality in the United States and examine the larger issues that remain on the horizon.

2009 has been a landmark year for marriage equality advocates. In April, Iowa legalized marriage for same-sex couples. Vermont and New Hampshire soon followed suit, as did Maine—if only to have residents vote to repeal the right in November. The news did not stop there. In the same month, a narrow majority in Washington chose to grant same-sex couples the state-sanctioned benefi ts of marriage, but not the title. ¶ These developments, along with a host of individual triumphs and setbacks, sparked intense debates that echoed through the halls of Columbia Law School. Discussions were particularly pointed within the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, which offers the only curriculum of its kind at any law school in the country. ¶ Taking note of the variety of well-reasoned arguments, Columbia Law School Magazine approached four professors of varying backgrounds with an idea: They would document their thoughts on marriage for same-sex couples in a series of back-and-forth emails—no moderator, no referee. The scholars could drive the free-flowing conversation in any direction and expand on any thoughts that they found particularly compelling. ¶ In addition to Professors Suzanne B. Goldberg and Katherine M. Franke, the directors of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, the Magazine invited constitutional law and public opinion expert Nathaniel Persily to join the conversation, as well as Professor Elizabeth F. Emens, a noted scholar on discrimination and marriage. Each approached the issue with a unique perspective shaped by their legal expertise and differing experiences. Together, they discussed the future of marriage for same-sex couples in America.

Katherine Franke: Some have argued that marriage rights for lesbian and gay couples is the preeminent civil rights issue of this era. A long shot even five years ago (and a productive wedge issue for the Republicans in the 2004 presidential election), we’ve seen the tide turn in the last couple years such that the injustice of the issue has become more apparent to a larger section of the American people. To be honest, I didn’t see it coming quite so quickly. Did any of you?

Nathaniel Persily: The rapid and radical shifts in attitudes toward same-sex marriage since 2003 may possibly be unprecedented among so-called “moral values” issues that deal with family, sexuality, or intimacy. Let me begin by discussing the state of American public opinion on same-sex marriage. If present trends continue—and that is not a big “if”—a majority of Americans within five years will support the right of gays and lesbians to marry.

Read the rest of the conversation in the Columbia Law School Magazine

The Prop 8 trial in San Francisco has captivated the homo-imagination, not surprisingly. So this seems like an awkward time to suggest anything critical about the institution of marriage itself (even though Nancy Cott did a magnificent job as expert witness in the case over the last day and a half outlining the complicated history of marriage). But here goes:

Among the things that drives me to the highest levels of frustration when I consider the state of feminism today is the way in which women, particularly mothers and wives, have given up on men. Not so long ago we had a rich, systemic and unrelenting critique of the ways in which fathers and husbands felt little or no obligation to do domestic work – whether it be taking care of kids, maintaining the household – even clearing the table – or other “reproductive” work. The fact that men felt entitled to and received a free pass when it came to this work received a thorough working over by those who cared about dismantling the second class status of women. I know this sounds all “second wavy,” but it does make me nuts that we, today’s feminists included, no longer press these issues, and instead shift to other institutional sites (such as employers or the state) the burden of sharing what Martha Fineman calls dependency work.

What restimulated this annoyance was Liesl Schillinger’s review of Mika Brzezinski’s new book All Things At Once this weekend in the The New York Time Book Review. The review, entitled Her Way, could have just as easily been written by the Times‘ Work and Family beat reporter Lisa Belkin – it was one more relatively shallow account of how tough it is for upper class white women to have it all. Belkin has written this article over and over for the Times, and now Schillinger joins the beat.

The take home “insight” Schillinger offers is how “Brzezinski’s questioning (of the wisdom of being a working mother) will be familiar to all women who shoulder the triple load of career, motherhood and guilt.” This echoes the book’s media pitch put out by the publisher: the book is “a candid and inspiring motivational book that will help women of all ages confront the unique professional and personal challenges they face in the key moments of their lives.”

The Schillinger review highlights how Brzezinski, the well-known TV personality and daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, struggled with her fatigue when juggling her demanding job and two small children. “How could I have let myself get so run-down,” Brzezinksi laments, “so exhausted at work that I would fumble over my own feet and fall down a steep flight of stairs with my newborn in my arms?” In response, Schillinger offers empathetically yet problematically: “It’s a question that has no answer, but which is asked, in infinite permutations, by all women who shoulder the triple load of motherhood, career and guilt.” Triple load of motherhood, career and guilt!??? Oh please.

The review, much like Belkin’s writing (see her infuriating NYT Magazine cover article on the “opt-out revolution” for starters), leaves the reader with the impression that poor Mika has taken on this impossible task all by herself – the burden of raising her two kids and the demands of her job are hers alone to manage. I don’t want to minimize the real pressure that upper class women feel who have children and demanding jobs – they surely do. But writing of this sort perpetuates the old-fashioned idea that mothers, even privileged ones, are doing something bad for their children when they work. That’s where the guilt comes in. Guilty of what? Of not devoting all their energies to being a mom?

(Surely a woman of Brzenzski’s class has at least one nanny who cares for Mika’s young children while she’s at work. Indeed, Mika’s successful career likely depends upon the no doubt low-paid work of other women. What of the guilt, the stress, the fatigue her nanny feels caring for someone else’s children as her full-time job?)

You’d think, from the way the article was set up, that Brzezenski was a single mom. Mentioned only in passing was the seemingly marginal fact that she is married to Jim Hoffer, a successful journalist himself. He does not figure in the review as someone who has any role in taking care of the kids, taking care of Mika, or taking care of anything. The kids are her responsibility, and she may well have let them down by having a career. His career is a credential, hers is a liability and a source of guilt. Arghhh.

A couple months ago Suzanne Goldberg and I held a breakfast at a midtown law firm with a group of women who had graduated from Columbia Law School to talk about the law school’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law. The women we met with had very different experiences of law school and law practice: some having graduated as long as 40 years ago and others only a couple years ago. Perhaps the most interesting moment was when the more senior women asked the younger women whether they would call themselves feminists. “No” most replied – “it’s not something for our generation. We feel burdened by feminism – it means we have to do it all, but we haven’t been given any tools to pull this off: be successful lawyers, mothers, and good wives/partners.” What emerged from the conversation was a sense that the younger women didn’t see feminism as opening up opportunities for women, but rather heaping on expectations. The older women in the room were shocked.

There’s no denying that combining motherhood with wage labor work remains a challenge for most women. I hear it from my female students all the time – unlike their male classmates, the women in law school who want to have children agonize over how to time their legal education, the start of their careers, and beginning a family. Working women continue to be burdened with what Arlie Hochschild termed “the Second Shift,” and the younger women at our breakfast felt the heavy weight of that burden in ways equal to or greater than earlier feminists because of the enormous pressure on them to have robust careers and be mothers, while the men still get a free pass.

As the lgbt community pounds on the gate to marriage, demanding to be let in, it bears repeating that the institution, while an enduring signifier of full citizenship, remains one deeply stratified by gender inequalities and status hierarchies that seem as durable as the institution itself.

Some have argued that allowing same-sex couples to marry will have the revolutionary effect of dismantling the role stereotyping and status hierarchies that persist in marriage. We’ll see – I don’t know. The profoundly conventional arguments being marshaled in favor of marriage equality seem to point in the other direction.