Culhane: Why marriage matters to those who won’t By Culhane, Professor Housewives wants real sex MA Newtonville 2162 of Law, Widener University 8:00am UTC Here’s a question: Is the right to important if we’re not going to use it? Setting aside Kramer’s mistimed grumpiness, gays and lesbians and our straight allies were literally or figuratively dancing for last week when the first same-sex weddings were performed. In a typiy eloquent and undeniably moving piece for Newsweek, Sullivan joined in the celebration. Shutting people out of marriage, he wrote, takes a toll on our developing sense of self: “At the very moment you become aware of sex and emotion, you simultaneously know that for you, there is no future coupling, no future family, no future home. In the future, I would be suddenly exiled from what I knew: my family, my friends, every household on television, every end to every romantic movie I’d ever seen. My grandmother crystallized it in classic and slightly cruel English fashion: ‘You’re not the marrying kind,’ she said. I had an eerily similar conversation with my grandmother, so I get it. But was the younger Sullivan that he’s ing up in this essay really concerned about the legal right to? The most direct answer to that question has to be “no.” State approval isn’t required in order for us to couple, or to create a family and a home. And presumably the film and literature worlds aren’t blocked from creating, say, Brokeback Mountain or Tales of the City by the state’s refusal to recognize couples as such. – even those like me, who end up in law school – don’t really focus on the legal question, anway. What he sensed – what most of us sensed, accurately – was his coming exclusion from the social norms around home and family. There were very few models to whom we might have aspired, and only an underground and hard-to-find literature presented views of men and women. (Is the homosexuality on view in a book like Forster’s “Maurice” a depiction? Discuss.) FULL STORY: