“Community Columnist” Michael Schrader

(About gay marriage)

Written 06 July 2015

For those of you unfamiliar, “The Odd Couple” is a comedy play, movie, and television show about two men, Oscar and Felix, sharing an apartment in New York City. Oscar is a laid-back slob, and Felix a tightly-wound neat freak; the comedy derived from the interaction between these very different personalities and how, in the end, they can put their differences aside because they care about each other. The show ran for five years, and I do not recall any controversy about it and its “non-traditional” family. I remember watching the show with my parents.

In the 1980s, another show about a non-traditional family aired for multiple seasons and was lauded for promoting family values. In this show, three men shared a house in San Francisco and raised three daughters. To my recollection, no one protested “Full House” as being against “traditional family” values. Yes, it was quite sappy, but definitely not anti-family.

There have been many other television shows and movies throughout the years that featured “non-traditional” families, and no one cared. There have been many families throughout the years that have been “non-traditional” families, and no one cared. I had a friend of mine who, with his brothers, was raised by his grandmother. No one protested about the lack of a “traditional family”. So the question is this – if people were accepting of many different notions of what constitutes a family decades ago, why are they not now? Reading the tweets and responses to the Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage, one would think that the “traditional family” of mother and father and children all living together has been the only kind family unit up until a few weeks ago; that just isn’t the case. There have always been a variety of different family units, of which the “traditional family” has been one.

There is a reason why the decision was inevitable, and was the correct one, and despite what people might say, it has nothing to do with love triumphing or anything else like that. As I learned many years ago in law school, legal marriage isn’t about love, but about property rights. If you happen to love the person you are married to, that is great, but marriage is a very unique property contract, a joining together of the property of two people, two families. Look back through history, and you will see the importance of property, not love, in marriage; marrying for love is a modern concept. When George was dating Martha, he was still a relatively poor man, and she had the land and the property; it was after he married her that he acquired his wealth through her.

The marital contract conveys powers and rights that do not exist outside of it, which can present some serious, and potentially harmful, consequences. My wife’s biological mother left when she was a toddler, never to be seen again for over thirty years. Her father remarried and she considers her stepmother to be her mother, as she was the woman who raised her. If her father had come to a tragic end before she turned eighteen, the woman she considered her mother would have had no legal rights, and my wife would have been whisked away from the only family she ever knew to the total stranger who left her when she was a toddler. How would a strict definition of what is a family been beneficial?

When I moved to Michigan, I brought along my wife, two daughters, my grandson, and my stepson. When I signed up for insurance, I could not get insurance for my grandson, who is a blood relative, but I could for my stepson, who is not. Why? Because I am married to his mother, and marriage grants me rights regarding my wife’s children that I would not have otherwise, rights that I do not even have over my grandchild. It is not fair that these rights should be the domain of one particular group. To extend these rights to others who are not in my particular group is the right thing to do.

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