One of the lesser-known but still often used arguments against marriage equality in the years leading up to the Obergefell v. Hodges decision was marriage fraud, or the idea that two men or two women will marry but not because they love each other, but just for the benefits. They could even be straight, conservatives feared.
“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” said Cobb Co., Georgia, GOP Chair Sue Everhart in one 2013 interview, in one iteration of this argument. “Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this, it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”
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Elsewhere in the same article, Everhart also says that it’s “not natural for two women or two men to be married” and “If it was natural, they would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship.”
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So it’s likely that Everhart just had an aversion to LGBTQ+ people’s existence and used “marriage fraud” as a way to try to find a logical, impartial reason to oppose it, since just saying “It’s unnatural” isn’t that convincing to people who don’t already dislike LGBTQ+ people.
This month, LGBTQ Nation is looking back at the wild predictions made about marriage equality in the years leading up to the Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision, which legalized marriage equality in all 50 states. And one common theme is that most of these predictions are a way to turn either religious opposition to LGBTQ+ relationships or personal disgust at the idea of same-sex couples into objective arguments that can be used to make policy.
That is, these arguments were made in bad faith. And none of them was as bad faith as “marriage fraud” was.
It didn’t make much sense from the start. There was nothing pre-Obergefell to prevent this kind of marriage fraud from occurring between two people of opposite sexes. There is no reason why a male immigrant with good insurance couldn’t marry a woman who had no insurance but had U.S. citizenship in a marriage of convenience, even if the two weren’t actually a couple. Imagining both people are people of the same sex changed nothing about the supposed immorality of marrying for benefits instead of for love.
Moreover, marrying for the benefits is something that conservatives have, for decades, extolled. It’s something that the tradwives and alpha males of the rightwing social media landscape nowadays praise, arguing that marrying someone to create a lifestyle of material interdependence, no matter one’s feelings for one’s partner, is good because it gets people into marriages. But no one says that it’s fraud to marry someone because you want your spouse to have a job or raise your children.
Last, who’s to say that a marriage is fraudulent just because the two people in it don’t want to have sex with one another? If they agree to the contract that is marriage, then it’s legally legitimate, no matter what’s going on in their hearts.
It’d be impossible to tell if this prediction came true, or if same-sex marriages are more prone to marriage fraud than opposite-sex marriages. But it seems the only reason someone like Everhart would have to believe that they are is that she just didn’t believe that two people of the same sex could love each other.
It was a common issue pre-Obergefell that would come up in odd ways: Straight people would imagine that same-sex couples are made up of two totally heterosexual people, and then argue about how it’s ridiculous to give two straight female or male friends the same rights as a husband and a wife or the same social recognition as a girlfriend and a boyfriend.
That is, instead of understanding gay and bi people as just being different from themselves, they imagined them as straight people who choose, for mysterious reasons, to form relationships with people of the same sex. It was a result of an extreme lack of imagination.
The same thing still happens today regarding transgender people. Cis people who can’t imagine that trans people are a class of human beings who have different experiences from them instead imagine them as cis people like themselves who want to transition for more mundane reasons than to live authentically.
J.K. Rowling, for example, fell into this trap when she wrote a long essay about how trans men are really just women who want to escape misogyny.
The more she learned about trans men online, she wrote, “the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.”
That is, the commercially successful fiction writer didn’t have enough imagination or curiosity to accept that sometimes people are just fundamentally different from her.
Either way, it’s been 10 years since Obergefell, which is plenty of time for conservatives to prove that same-sex couples are more prone to being fraudulent than opposite-sex couples, if that were true. Instead, some internet research shows that they pretty much dropped this argument after Obergefell, and there haven’t even been any notable accusations of fraudulent same-sex marriages, much less studies on the topic proving a difference.
It seems that this prediction, like many others made before Obergefell, did not come true.
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