Review: Sex Wars: Tenth Anniversary Edition By Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter New York: Routledge 2005 My family of origin has divergent ideas about same sex marriage. They all approve of it, especially Mum. She keeps getting this gleam in her eye whenever the subject comes up and I suspect she harbours dreams of me and Jeff walking down the aisle. My stepdaughter and she seem to be hatching a plot over the subject. As for my sister, her attitude is while she's right behind relationship equality, she's bewildered why any LGBT person would want same-sex marriage, given her own personal experience of eighteen months of my Australian brother in law, currently in massive child support default for supporting her and my four year old nephew. She's deeply sceptical about all the social conservative hysteria, given that she got hitched, had a church wedding, and did all the right things. Social conservatives live in a fantasy world when it comes to heterosexual marriage. According to them, heterosexual marriage represents a magical path out of poverty, and their romantic hyperbole serves as an excuse for slashing social welfare benefits and social services not only to solo mums, but also to married beneficiaries, on the spurious basis that either 'families' and/or Stable Marriages can provide them. It should come as no surprise that many US, Australian and other feminists object vehemently to the hidden agenda of the New Right and Christian Right cronies in all this. Which is? Money and service funding gets diverted from real people in need, and toward Christian Right "marriage promotion" outfits and so-called "faith-based initiatives," which are subjected to minimal state regulation. Actually, I can't think of a better recipe for homelessness, family fragmentation, youth criminality, youth suicide and escalation of substance abuse. Surprisingly though, many US and other feminists are in agreement with the alternative civil unions path to relationship recognition. They serve to disentangle religious involvement in the symbolic, kinship and economic roles of marriage, now generally redistributed to all other monogamous relationships. Civil unions are praiseworthy precisely because they don't buy into the marriage mystique, without actually eroding the provision of resources to those within optimal marital relationships. It might be due to increasing New Zealand secularisation and the decline of marriage as a heterosexual option that the same-sex marriage and matrimania debates are so quiet here. I suspect few LGBTs would disagree with the proposition that New Right and Christian Right matrimania should be fought, as it forces women into dependent relationships where there is possible abuse, and if anything, reproduction of intergenerational poverty and deprivation. We don't want abolition of the welfare state, we want inclusion within it. We want family and spousal pluralism, not one narrow coercive model of heterosexual marital supremacy. When we eventually debate same-sex marriage several years down the road, let's make it clear that we support marriage as one option amongst others, and oppose it being forced on others for whom ridiculous romanticisation conceals the realities of grinding poverty and/or spousal abuse. And quite frankly, I've had a gutsful of that vapid, lightweight excuse for 'social science' within the matrimania corner. To educate ourselves about what the coercive marriage promotion movement has meant for impoverished straight women and their families in the United States, see below. Craig Young - 16th March 2007