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The Broken Promises of Marriage

The Broken Promises of Marriage Timothy M. Griffiths Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Katherine Franke New York: New York University Press, 2015. xi + 275 pp. At the end of the American Civil War, reformers and members of the Freedman's Bureau argued that the "dignity" of the nation could be restored only through the right and national encouragement of newly freed African Americans to marry. One hundred and fifty years later, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, argued that denying the right of same-sex couples to marry was a denial of their "equal dignity" under the law. Marriage rights are accorded a great deal of importance as a benchmark of individual dignity in the United States; advocacy for them has been fundamental to mainstream US minority rights movements. Scholars like George Chauncey (2004) have observed that same-sex marriage emerged in part because the nature of marriage in US society had already been rapidly changing since the mid-nineteenth century, and mostly because of antiracist and feminist political thought. Work like Chauncey's, which is typically geared toward LGBTQ studies audiences, argues that same-sex marriage equality is part of a continuum of previous civil rights work on http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Duke University Press

The Broken Promises of Marriage

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
1064-2684
eISSN
1527-9375
DOI
10.1215/10642684-3818522
Publisher site
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Abstract

Timothy M. Griffiths Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Katherine Franke New York: New York University Press, 2015. xi + 275 pp. At the end of the American Civil War, reformers and members of the Freedman's Bureau argued that the "dignity" of the nation could be restored only through the right and national encouragement of newly freed African Americans to marry. One hundred and fifty years later, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, argued that denying the right of same-sex couples to marry was a denial of their "equal dignity" under the law. Marriage rights are accorded a great deal of importance as a benchmark of individual dignity in the United States; advocacy for them has been fundamental to mainstream US minority rights movements. Scholars like George Chauncey (2004) have observed that same-sex marriage emerged in part because the nature of marriage in US society had already been rapidly changing since the mid-nineteenth century, and mostly because of antiracist and feminist political thought. Work like Chauncey's, which is typically geared toward LGBTQ studies audiences, argues that same-sex marriage equality is part of a continuum of previous civil rights work on

Journal

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2017

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