Same-Sex Unions

Michael J. Perry

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511657566.009

8 - Same-Sex Unions

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2010

Michael J. Perry

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Michael J. Perry: Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta

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Summary

In the preceding chapter, in pursuing the implications of the right to moral freedom for a ban on abortion, I illustrated the helpful role the right to moral freedom can play in shaping our discourse about the vexing, divisive controversy over whether goverment may ban abortion. In this chapter, I illustrate the discourse-shaping role the right to moral freedom can play in the context of another great, and greatly divisive, political-moral controversy: May government refuse to recognize – may it refuse to extend the benefit of law to – same-sex unions? Again, those two subjects – abortion and same-sex unions – are at the heart of the American debate; they are the principal subtexts of the American debate about the proper role of religion in the politics and law of a liberal democracy.

In the United States, most states refuse to extend the benefit of law to same-sex unions, and in so doing a state

effectively excludes [same-sex partners] from a broad array of legal benefits and protections incident to the marital relation, including access to a spouse's medical, life, and disability insurance, hospital visitation and other medical decisionmaking privileges, spousal support, intestate succession, homestead protections, and many other statutory protections.

State refusals to extend the benefit of law to same-sex unions implicate the right to moral equality if there is good reason to suspect that such refusals are based on the view that gay men and lesbians are inferior human beings – the view, that is, that they do not have not equal inherent dignity, which includes the view that their interests do not merit the same respect and concern as the interests of others.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy , pp. 138 - 156

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511657566.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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