How the buying
power of gays may win the marriage fight.
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.