At The Least We Want a Decision That Shows EQUALITY for Gays

Whichever way the showdown on same-sex marriage plays out, gay and lesbian people in America will still face disadvantages and discrimination in a whole host of realms.

As the Guardian's gay rights interactive shows, hate crimes legislation applies to violence against gay people in only just over half of states, and fewer still cover crimes relating to gender identity. People with HIV/AIDS can face expulsion from school or be denied housing; men who have sex with men, even if they have never had unprotected sex, are still not allowed to donate blood. And in a majority of states – 29 of them – LGBT people can be fired from their jobs or evicted from their homes without any cause. A federal effort to protect gays in the workplace, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, has been introduced in Congress nine times since 1994 – and has never made it into law.

Given these concrete forms of discrimination, it's fair to ask why marriage has become the totemic struggle of the gay rights movement. Until the late 1990s, marriage was a minority concern among gay activists, one principally pushed by conservative voices such as the writer Andrew Sullivan (who, outrageously, told Buzzfeed this week that "the generation [of gay people] that would have most resisted this reform were dead").

There are two good reasons, though, that marriage has become the focus of our activity. The first is that a civil marriage confers a whole host of legal and economic privileges that no other social arrangement provides. This is the focus of Wednesday's hearing, US v Windsor, which contests the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma) – the national law that denies the 1,138 federal incidences of marriages to gay couples. Edie Windsor, the plaintiff in that case, was hit with a bill of over $600,000 after the death of her lawfully wedded wife, a bill she'd never have to pay if she'd been married to a man. Marriage has real consequences, and the denial of marriage rights is real discrimination.

But beyond that, the central reason that marriage has become the main struggle in the gay rights movement is that the right to marry is the principal marker of civil equality in America – as totemic as voting and much older. Hollingsworth v Perry, Tuesday's supreme court case, has hinged upon this. Nancy Cott, a Harvard professor and the author of the indispensable book Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, testified at trial that "marriage, the ability to marry, to say, 'I do,' it is a basic civil right. It expresses the right of a person to have the liberty to be able to consent validly." The history of American equality movements is intimately linked with the expansion of marriage rights – to freed slaves, to women, to racial minorities (notably Asian immigrants on the west coast, who faced brutal exclusion in the early 20th century), to prisoners, to the mentally disabled, and to other groups for whom the ability to marry is a fundamental expression of citizenship.

That's why this week matters – and that's also why it matters that gay people not only win the right to marry, but win it in the right way. How many states allow gay marriage after the court's decision isn't the real issue; what we want is a decision that declares, once and for all, that gay people are equal under the law. That won't just open the doors to marriage equality nationwi