“Marriage as a family form is not more important or valuable than other forms of family,” writes gay rights activist and American University law professor Nancy Polikoff, “so the law should not give it more value." In Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, Polikoff criticizes the conservative “marriage movement” for blaming all social problems on the decline of life-long heterosexual marriage. She also takes issue with the gay rights "marriage-equality movement" for attributing the legal problems facing same-sex couples to the inability to marry, rather than to the “special rights” inappropriately granted married couples. When marriage serves as the bright dividing line between those relationships that legally matter and those that do not, Polikoff notes, countless families suffer. Her valuing-all-families solution is true to the roots of the gay rights movement and consistent with decades-old legal changes that have made marriage matter less.

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