The institution of marriage is widely regarded as not only a legal transaction with the state, but an embodied symbol of commitment, conflict resolution, care, love, and mutual understanding. Certainly the US marriage equality movement -- the campaign to gain full legal recognition for same-sex couples -- incorporates both of these meanings in its call for society to give a new level of respect to the families created by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people (referred to, throughout this issue of Peacework, as LGBTs).

Growing as it does from such recent and hard-fought struggles as the ongoing movements for civil rights, AIDS care and treatment, and women's liberation, the marriage equality movement has a well-honed awareness that inequality anywhere is, as Martin Luther King said, a threat to inequality everywhere. Civil unions, domestic partnerships, and, for that matter, Massachusetts same-sex marriages, do not exist in the eyes of the federal government. This movement understands, and is scrambling state by state to communicate to voters, that when we codify inequality in our most fundamental doctrines we open the door to active abuse and oppression, no matter what language we use to name the status of those with less. I recently got a letter from a friend who is helping a member of his Quaker community to raise money for legal fees. This man -- a high school teacher -- is in a grueling and expensive legal battle to prevent his beloved partner's body from being moved from one burial site to another by the partner's family. He and his partner knew that the family, which had cut their son off because he was gay and did not recognize his marriage, might cause such a problem, so they had made careful legal preparations and there is a good chance the teacher will "win." But it is only because in the eyes of our legal system their relationship has no real existence, that he is forced to go through this nightmare instead of grieving in peace.

When it comes to those more indefinable questions of what marriage is, its proponents (straight and gay) invoke love, commitment, hope, and stability. These are wonderful characteristics of a strong family nurtured, through thick and thin, by a healthy community. To my mind, they are thrown around a little too easily, taken for granted as the natural trappings of any relationship whose members throw a wedding, set up house, and observe a few conventions (monogamy, for instance). When I look around, I see that not every pair of people committed to each other can manage to create all those good things all the time -- and I also see that sometimes those who are doing the best at it are doing something pretty different from what "marriage" is commonly agreed to entail. If in the push for marriage rights, our awareness about the miraculous diversity of ways there are for people to love each other is lost -- an awareness gained and shared in the first place by LGBT people -- we will all be poorer.

Perhaps this same tension, between the yearning to have our commonalities embraced and the importance of taking pride in our differences, is what emerges in our organizing as well, even when we agree on the goal. Throughout this issue of Peacework, activists raise up the questions: How do we best coordinate our power -- through unity of message, or through actions and campaigns tailored to the separate regions and constituencies we know best? Do we speak in terms we know to be less threatening, more "familiar" to those we seek to move, or do we speak directly from the heart in our own unique voices, remembering how we ourselves first were changed by the sound of the truth plainly spoken?

Lisbeth Melendez Rivera observes that no great advancement of social justice has ever yet been achieved using one single strategy. This is worth keeping in mind for all of us, since married or not, we definitely want to live together.