Thinking beyond “Healthy Marriage”

Rather than force parents into unloving marriages through so-called “Healthy Marriage” initiatives, the state could begin recognizing kinship that does not rely solely on the heterosexual nuclear dyad. The legalization of same-sex marriage could represent a moment when alternative family forms become acceptable and welcome, but we must be wary of a gay marriage politics that fall back rely on norms of middle-class respectability and responsibility, as did the Supreme Court’s rationale in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. I’m not a doomsday leftist critic of gay marriage who views it as the ultimate capitulation to bourgeois heterosexuality, but I do believe that without a clear sense of the politics of care and responsibility involved in the pursuit of recognizing new family forms we risk replicating structures of inequality by responsibilizing emerging family forms.