This guest post is by Rahul K. Gairola, a queer scholar and teacher who completed a joint PhD in English Literature and Theory & Criticism at UW-Seattle. He currently teaches at UW-Bothell and Cornish College for the Arts.

There are obvious reasons that Pastor Ken Hutcherson, leader of the Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, recently pulled out of his appearance at a “marriage equality” debate at Seattle Town Hall sponsored by The Stranger. Aside from the fact that the city’s savvy inhabitants would crucify his homophobic sentiments, he would hope to garner more conservative support on the Eastside, in Bellevue. As if rubber-stamping Pastor Hutcherson’s move, Pope Benedict earlier this month called gay marriage a threat to "the future of humanity itself." As a person who identifies as queer and who regularly teaches classes and conducts research on topics like this, I find the corpus of the argument to be misdirected in major ways. In this context, my understanding of “queer” is someone who does not conform to the dominant institutions and lifestyles of straight or gay sensibilities.

What concerns me more than the apparent bigotry that is institutionalized in the arena of religion by Pastor Hutcherson and Pope Benedict XVI is that the success of the very institution of marriage is at an all time low. A recently published BBC article documents the all around decline of marriage in the US. While many gays and lesbians are extolling the wonders of “marriage equality,” I, and many others, are left asking how and why legal codification through the government leads to any form of equality. Indeed, many argue that the conscription of gays and lesbians to “marriage equality” is yet another way that the dire circumstances of people in the US already subject to race and class oppression will become worse. In plain terms, “marriage equality” justifies the further disenfranchisement of those who do not conform to the marital order by framing them as perpetually single or “off-system” while valorizing the insertion of gays and lesbians into the global exploitation that is capitalism. Many teachers, scholars, and activists, namely Yasmin Nair, Kenyon Farrow, Ryan Conrad, and the many other folks who comprise the Against Equality Collective have been arguing this for quite some time now.

The flaw at the heart of “marriage equality” is that, in purporting to institutionalize (normalize) gay sex/partnerships, it produces but another universe of legally codified restrictions that excludes millions of other peoples. It legally codifies prejudice against people who are single and justifies it through the veneer of “gay rights.” The two terms that make up “marriage equality” are incongruent: Marriage as a governmental and socially-accepted contract can never embody or nurture the equality all individuals because it is hopelessly invested in exponentially producing more and more categories. “Marriage equality” does not render any kind of equal footing to anyone; to the contrary, it implicates gays and lesbians in a 21st-century, “separate but equal” capitalist structure that leaves out those who do not conform to rites of passage copied from heterosexual union traditions (which are themselves based on the commodification of women). The flaw at the heart of “marriage equality” is that it is not about opening the heart, but rather the privatization of it. Like DADT, it conscribes gays and lesbians into a tradition that underwrites the conditions of excluding millions of others from basic human rights like health care. How does this embody “equality”? I am less interested in re-defining the heart than I am in revolutionizing it.