ABSTRACT
Marriage equality has been framed as a happy ending in the struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people seeking dignity from injury, liberty for intimacy, and equality of identity. This chapter looks at how hope animates equality, alongside claims of love, in pro-LGBT marriage equality cases from Massachusetts and California. Reading love analytically in pro-LGBT marriage equality cases exposes how jurisprudential articulations of love enable the legal recognition of same-sex families and gay and lesbian equality that conform to normative ideas of monogamy and social productivity. Queer and feminist critiques of marriage equality have considered in detail the problematic way law privileges heterosexual/gendered love as the basis of relationship recognition. In pro-LGBT marriage equality cases, liberty has been mobilised alongside an “equal protection” doctrine that scrutinises invidious discrimination perpetrated against LGBT people. Hopeful recognition of equality, as expressed through pro-LGBT marriage equality cases, obscured ongoing economic and social marginalisation.
