I’m for anything that terrifies Democrats, outrages Republicans, upsets the apple cart. But exultation about the gay marriages cemented in San Francisco, counties in Oregon and New Mexico, and some cities in New York is misplaced

Why rejoice when state and church extend their grip, which is what marriage is all about? Assimilation is not liberation, and the invocation of “equality” as the great attainment of these gay marriages should be challenged. Peter Tatchell, the British gay leader, put it well a couple of years ago: “Equality is a good start, but it is not sufficient. Equality for queers inevitably means equal rights on straight terms, since they are the ones who dominate and determine the existing legal framework. We conform–albeit equally–with their screwed-up system. That is not liberation. It is capitulation.”

So the good news, as that excellent paper, UltraViolet (newsletter of LAGAI, Lesbian and Gay Insurrection), recently put it, is not that 400 gay couples are now legally married in San Francisco but that 69,201 in the city (UltraViolet‘s number) are still living in sin.

Marriage diverts us from the path of necessary reform. Civil union, today lawful only in Vermont, is what makes sense as a national cause. Unmarried couples, straight or gay, need to be able to secure joint property, make safe wills, have hassle-free hospital visits and so forth. But issues of hospital visits or healthcare should have nothing to do with marriage, and marriage as a rite should have nothing to do with legal rights. “Marriage” should be separated from legal recognition of a bond, of a kinship.

There’s a fork in the road for progressives. One path is sameness, expanding a troubled institution to same-sexers. But that path detours the real problems of relationships today and their official recognition. As a generation of feminists and the divorce rate attest, marriage is in sore trouble, well beyond powers of recuperation offered in Bush’s proposed constitutional amendment, which would be a touching souvenir of a world long gone. Why have prenuptial agreements become common among people of moderate income? Prenups challenge the one-size-fits-all straitjacket of marriage, as do other important arrangements devised in recent years in response to changing anthropological and moral circumstance: co-parent adoptions, adoptions by single people, many varieties of public and private domestic partnerships, civil unions. Expand and strengthen the options. Get religion out of the law.

Civil union across the country would help to level a playing field that’s become increasingly uneven. In some corporations gay couples have health benefits that unmarried straight couples don’t. Contrary to endless rants about the “marriage penalty” in the federal tax code, a larger number of people enjoy a marriage bonus, as reported by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation in 1999.

Unmarried workers may lose hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year in employee benefits compensation. For example, as the Unmarried America website (www.unmarriedamerica.org) points out, “Most states will allow workers to collect unemployment compensation if they quit a job to move to a new area when their spouse is relocated by his or her company. But state laws usually will not give these benefits to a worker who quits to relocate with his or her domestic partner.”

There are so many tricky questions, particularly now that morals and the surgeon’s knife have deepened their own relationship. What happens when, say, a man who is already receiving domestic-partner benefits at work for his male partner goes through sex reassignment surgery and acquires the physical impedimenta of the opposite sex? Should the couple lose their bennies until they get legally hitched?

None of this should have anything to do with various rites of marriage such as a hippie New Age union celebrated waist deep in a river with solemn invocation of the winds and other natural forces, or a white wedding in a high Episcopal church.

“The pursuit of marriage in the name of equality,” says Bill Dobbs, radical gay organizer, “shows how the gay imagination is shriveling.” Judith Butler, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, exhibited kindred disquiet in a quote she gave the New York Times in March. “It’s very hard to speak freely right now. But many gay people are uncomfortable with all this, because they feel their sense of an alternative movement is dying. Sexual politics was supposed to be about finding alternatives to marriage.”

As Jim Eigo, a writer and activist whose thinking was very influential in the early days of ACT UP, put it a while back, what’s the use of being queer if you can’t be different? “Why are current mainstream gay organizations working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make some queers less equal than others? Under its terms, gays who are willing to mimic heterosexual relations and enter into a legally-enforced lifetime sexual bond with one other person will be granted special benefits and status to be withheld from those who refuse such domestication…. Marriage has no more place in efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right of kings…. At this juncture in history, wouldn’t it make more sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals of the outdated shackles of matrimony?”

And why marriage, or even civil union, to just one person? Why this endless replication of the Noah’s Ark principle? You could have several people involved in some version of a reciprocal-beneficiary legal package.

For me the cheering political lesson is that Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco felt the hot breath of a challenge from his left (in the form of his Green opponent, Matt Gonzalez) and felt impelled to radical action to consolidate his victory. That’s good, because it shows the value of independent radical challenges, but that’s where my cheers stop. Gay marriage is a step back in the march toward freedom. Civil unions for all!