Life would be much easier if I could add my parents to my health insurance benefits.

I’m not married. I don’t have children. When I get my insurance papers in the mail, I look wistfully at the section that asks if I have any dependents. I plan to be taking care of my parents eventually, if I’m lucky and they live long enough. If what I did during the day could contribute directly to the well-being of the most important people in my life, I would approach work from a completely different standpoint.

In the United States, married heterosexual couples receive many financial and legal benefits which are denied to other equally interdependent pair relationships. As American University law professor Nancy Polikoff points out in an article for The Washington Blade:

“…[M]arriage is the wrong dividing line for these benefits. A young man caring for the woman who raised him should be able to cover her on his health insurance; two older sisters who pool their economic resources should not fear that the death of one will require the other to sell their home to pay estate taxes.”

A week ago, Polikoff spoke on an NPR program supporting the validity of these alternate types of pair relationships. It wasn’t until I looked her up on the Internet that I understood how similar the issues being debated in the gay community are to my own concerns about federal recognition of benefit-sharing in care-giving relationships.

In his article “Marriage: Mend it, Don’t End it,” Dale Carpenter argues for marriage. “No other relationship can quite replicate that signal,” Carpenter writes; relationships sanctified by marriage have both history and tradition on their side. In addition, the inherent expectation of endurance of marriage relationships gives the state motive to invest in marriage, conferring the benefits that make life so much easier.

Carpenter would like alternative relationships to receive benefits, but his fears overshadow his hopes:

“Polikoff probably assumes that abolishing marriage means everyone would get its goodies. At last, health care for all! Don’t bet on it. The more likely outcome is that standard marital benefits would be eliminated or reduced to help pay for benefits accorded to the newly recognized relationships. The social investment in former marriages would decrease, diminishing the return we all get from that bygone institution.”

A February article in The Advocate, “Marriage vs. Civil Unions? There’s No Comparison,” argues that a 1996 federal ban preventing gay couples from receiving “hundreds of federal marriage benefits” has left the marriage institution as the only tool gays could use to challenge that ban.

Some argue that civil unions are an equivalent substitute for marriage and that “all the rights and benefits would apply.” Polikoff disagrees, pointing out that while marriages are recognized worldwide, civil unions are not internationally recognized as an equivalent union. She writes in her article, “An End to All Marriage”:

Gay marriage will move us in the wrong direction if it limits legal recognition to married couples only.

Lesbian and gay marriage-rights activists counter criticism of their efforts by saying that the right to marry will provide a choice to gay and lesbian couples: Those who embrace the institution will have the opportunity to enter it, while those like me who find fault with it can simply choose not to marry.

This choice-based rhetoric contains an enormous fallacy. When the state gives one type of relationship more benefits and legal support than others, there is inherently some coercion and free choice is impossible.

The website www.relationshipllc.com, which advocates limited liability companies as “the new marriage model,” cites Polikoff as arguing that “organizing society around sexually connected people is wrong; the more central units are dependents and their caretakers.” Alternatives to marriage are growing, thanks to supply and demand. I don’t know whether the law or the economy is to thank for it.

It’s sad on the one hand to find that the issue of sharing benefits affects a significant part of our population, but on the other, it’s heartening to know the momentum is building in different camps. Our rights today are the direct result of the responsibilities those before us have taken on and followed through, sometimes with the knowledge that they wouldn’t live to enjoy the results in their lifetime. They must have hoped to leave the world a better place than the one they found.

Whether or not the question is as simple as whether to marry or not, the bottom line is the freedom to do so and choice. As Americans, we enjoy more rights than many other people in the world, a few of those being the right to travel, to relocate, to develop and share personal opinions, and to investigate and challenge the system that previous generations have set up for us.