Of “Straight Sacrifices” & Uneasy Advocacy: A Response to “The Real Cost of Marriage Equality”

Daryl Yang
Jul 21, 2017 · 8 min read

After responding to an unsatisfying article on why a transgender woman did not support Pink Dot, an article titled “The Real Cost of Marriage Equality” raised my hopes of a radical queer analysis of the problematic pursuit of same-sex marriage in Singapore. Unfortunately, the writer was not so much offering a critique of assimilationist politics as they, presumably straight, were revealing deeper discomforts with the impending tide of social change.

The writer was not completely wrong though. Marriage equality will and does come at a very tangible and material cost. Editor of “Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion” Ryan Conrad describes in this enlightening article the dangers of prioritising marriage equality over other pressing issues facing the LGBTQ+ community:

“The gay-marriage campaign has been sucking up resources like a massive sponge, corralling everyone to give up their last dollar and free time, leaving little sustenance for other queer groups doing critical work in our communities. An Equality Maine campaign letter had the audacity to claim that gay marriage is “the fight for our lives.” I wonder whose lives they are talking about, when AIDS service organizations and community health/reproductive clinics across the state have been tightening their belts and desperately trying to crunch numbers so that more queer folks don’t end up unemployed, uninsured, or worse yet, dead.”

The rest of Conrad’s piece reveals the complex challenges facing LGBTQ+ advocacy that flies in the face of one of the writer’s strangest declarations that “advocacy is easy”. Contrary to the writer’s assumption, advocacy is not easy because it entails more than donning a pink shirt and turning up at Hong Lim Park once a year. Pink Dot is not all there is to the LGBTQ+ movement and such myopia is misleading.

It was unfortunate that the writer failed to engage with these important questions about the growing LGBTQ+ movement in Singapore. Nevertheless, I suspect they were finding less “politically incorrect” justifications for their own discomfort or gut fear about same-sex marriage than engaging in a critical analysis of marriage equality.

I can empathise with that feeling though, of finding seemingly non-dehumanising ways to explain away why we are not comfortable about change or difference. Just recently, I found myself feeling very uncomfortable at the Trans March in San Francisco. It was the first time I was in a minority as a cisgender person, where a majority of people present were trans or gender nonconforming. I did not feel comfortable in a space where my gender identity was so explicitly different, where something I’ve always assumed to be “natural” was being challenged on every level. I could feel the “transphobic” arguments I’ve read online flooding into my head to give reason to my feelings. Clearly, these arguments were not true or accurate but I could not find any reasonable way to explain away my discomfort and that made me even more uncomfortable that I was not as open-minded or progressive as I thought I could be.

After reflecting on that experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that such discomfort is unexplainable because it is irrational, or perhaps pre-rational. It’s probably an instinctual “tribal” response against others we perceive to be different from us and that is something we can all relate to no matter how liberal or progressive, open-minded or woke we think we are. Every one of us would have found ourselves in a situation where we were different, whether on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or nationality and a plethora of factors, both environmental and personal, will affect how we respond to them. An awareness of such a mechanism in our minds may be useful and critical in helping us sieve through post-facto rationalisations that distract us from our deeper feelings and thoughts.

It was against this backdrop that I was at first frustrated at the poorly reasoned arguments in the article but after some conversations with a few other people, realised that the writer was not completely (or truly) concerned about the economics of marriage equality; it was masking a more fundamental fear of change and difference. As such, I am writing this to address some of the issues that the writer highlighted and show why on those matters, the impending tide of social change is not one that needs to be feared or halted but instead should be welcomed, if not for the economics then the basic dignity of LGBTQ+ people.

The writer rightly points out that “existing laws and regulations will need to change”, citing the changes to the BTO policy as the most “salient example”. Another example they raised involved legal and policy issues regarding marriage and divorce. These concerns are not unfounded; just over the past month, the Supreme Court of the United States and other federal courts have had to grapple with questions of whether the 2015 landmark ruling in Obergefell also applies to various other aspects of family law. Yet, the writer fails to explain why such changes outweigh the benefits of legalising same-sex marriage beyond the fact that things would have to change. After all, Laws have always had to change with the times. The Singapore Court of Appeal has affirmed its role in developing our laws by determining “whether the contemporary political, social and cultural values of the country support” such a development. It is for the same reason that Parliament is considering a repeal of marital immunity against rape, and has made many changes to our country’s laws and policies over the years.

On the increased demand for public housing, in particular BTO flats, by the rise in married same-sex couples, the writer fails to consider that there currently already are many same-sex couples who live in Singapore. For some who are more well-off, they may live in private housing while those who do not usually wait until they reach the age of 35 to qualify for public housing. While marriage equality may mean that there will be a slight increase in the number of married couples competing for BTO flats, recent statistics suggest that the number of marriages has been decreasing anyway. Perhaps, legalising same-sex marriage might help to salvage this worrying trend of fewer families and children, adopted or otherwise.

Furthermore, given the proportion of LGBTQ+ people, the passage of marriage equality is unlikely to dramatically increase the demand for public housing vis-a-vis other factors such as the immigration of new citizens and the government’s lag in housing supply. Instead, it may even help to reduce the brain drain of many talented LGBTQ+ Singaporeans who have relocated elsewhere, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. In fact, the economic cost of the gay brain drain might be a notable question for Singapore in light of our shrinking population that should be examined further.

Two, on the changes to family law, particularly the issue of maintenance, women’s advocacy organisation, AWARE Singapore, has repeatedly called for the Women’s Charter to be reformed and a key proposal of its campaign has been the alteration of gender-based maintenance to a need-based one. As such, the changes that the writer has highlighted about are in fact not only welcomed but also necessary to usher in a new era of gender equity. While some women remain economically dependent on their single breadwinning spouses, many families are now dual-income and gender may not always be the best basis for determining maintenance and other matrimonial matters in a court of law.

On the issue of subjecting heterosexual and same-sex couples to different laws, legal differences are inevitable given that heterosexual marriage is after all not quite identical to same-sex marriage. Indeed, it may be timely to review the seminal writing by Peter Westen on why equality is fundamentally an “empty container” and what is equal depends ultimately on what are being compared. For instance, in the UK, same-sex couples cannot divorce on two grounds that heterosexual couples can, namely for non-consummation or adultery with someone of same sex. Equality is based on the simple but tricky idea that like should be treated alike. In this case, can heterosexual and same-sex couples be said to be treated completely alike? While it was encouraging that the writer has brought up this issue, it is one that may be very difficult to resolve and deserves more thought than a rhetorical question.

Returning to the problematic pursuit of marriage equality, it is worrying that the writer, and many others, conflate the LGBTQ+ movement simplistically with the marriage equality movement. The reality, however, is more complicated. Beyond marriage, there are many other issues facing LGBTQ+ people. From access to healthcare to bullying in school and discrimination at the workplace, marriage equality is not a panacea to the multitude of issues facing LGBTQ+ people. Yet, it can be an important step for same-sex couples to enjoy a huge plethora of civil liberties currently available to heterosexual couples. As far back as 2004, the US Associate General Counsel identified at least 1138 such benefits, rights and protections that marriage equality would grant same-sex couples.

Nevertheless, marriage remains an institution that not everyone can or wish to be a part of and should also not be the only or main goal of the LGBTQ+ movement. After all, it was not too long ago that marriage was not even a topic of huge concern as the gay community battled the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and police raids and harassment in the 1970s. To forget the history of the movement may be detrimental to our sustained progress in forging a more just and equitable society. The ongoing contestations over pride and the place of gender, race and class in the movement in other societies where “love has won” are worth our reflection and learning from.

Particularly, in Singapore where homosexual relations remains criminalised, we may be getting ahead of ourselves to debate the merits of marriage equality when we should perhaps first focus on the uneasy compromise on Section 377A of the Penal Code that affects both LGBTQ+ and straight Singaporeans. Ex Attorney-General (AG) Walter Woon has questioned the implications of the Prime Minister (PM) instructing the AG against prosecutions under Section 377A, given that the prosecutorial function of the AG is one that should be independent of the other branches of the government. Such an arrangement threatens the constitutional independence of the Attorney-General Chambers provided under Article 38(5) of the Singapore Constitution to “institute, conduct or discontinue any proceedings for any offence”, an issue that remains hotly discussed in light of recent events with the late Minister Mentor’s family house.

Ultimately, weighing these “straight sacrifices” that marriage equality will entail against what it will mean to the countless same-sex couples in Singapore whose relationships remain invisibilised and erased from our collective consciousness, I am not so sure what is the real cost that we should focus on. In Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words at the end of his judgment in Obergefell, “their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilisation’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law.” Like any other social progress human society made, there will be disruptions to and sometimes demolition of the status quo, be it with the abolition of slavery or prohibitions on women in schools and at the workplace. The question should not be how much such change will cost to those who benefit from the status quo, but how much our collective human dignity is worth uplifting those who remain marginalised and erased.


Daryl Yang currently serves as Executive Director of the Inter-University LGBT Network, a network constituted of 5 student-led organisations with the aim to foster safer and more inclusive campuses, and was previously Coordinator of The G Spot, Yale-NUS’s gender & sexuality alliance. He is currently a rising fourth year student reading a double degree in law and liberal arts at Yale-NUS College and the Faculty of Law at the National University of Singapore.

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Daryl Yang

Depending on your ideological leaning, I am either a “militant homosexualist”, “millennial activist” or a “liberal snowflake”. Yale-NUS College & NUS Law ‘19.

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