Issue Number 1008 | Marrying With Money | Advocate.com Marrying With Money  |  | Advocate.com

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Marrying With Money
How the buying power of gays may win the marriage fight.
From The Advocate  May 20, 2008
Marrying With Money

When the people of springfield, the fictional hometown of The Simpsons, agreed to legalize same-sex marriage, it wasn’t out of a sense of justice or equality. Instead, they realized it was an easy way to make a quick buck. As Mayor Quimby quipped, “We shall legalize gay money -- I mean gay marriage.”

Most of us can sing the moral arguments for marriage equality in our sleep. We’ve talked about it over dinner with friends. We’ve discussed it at work. Though the argument for equality may have won over many of our straight allies, it’s the legislators and business leaders who still need convincing. And appealing to their heartstrings has yielded minimal returns at best.

It’s time to focus the argument on a place on which politicians and business leaders are all too often fixated -- our pocketbooks. We need to show definitively that marriage equality is sound economic policy.

Weddings and honeymoons represent a $120 billion industry that’s growing every year. The average wedding costs more than $19,000, big money for its host city or town. When San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in February 2004, approximately 4,000 couples came calling. While 90% of the licenses went to California residents, nonresident couples came from 45 other states and eight countries. That’s thousands of new tourists overnight. And they all needed lodging and food and places to buy bouquets and boutonnieres and bags of rice. Small businesses were happy. Big businesses were happy. And at least some politicians were happy -- a healthy economy represents a surefire reelection platform.

Unfortunately, the courts put the brakes on San Francisco’s gay marriages. And even though the California state legislature has twice passed bills extending marriage to same-sex couples, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed both pieces of legislation. So the people (and businesses) of California must now wait for the state’s supreme court to decide the matter in ongoing lawsuits testing the constitutionality of the state’s heterosexist marriage laws.

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Richardson is a former spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. He is currently pursuing an MBA at the University of California, Berkeley. He recently became engaged to his partner of two years.

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