Good afternoon. I am the directors. It is a great pleasure and honor to moderate this panel. And really it is a celebration is a wonderful new book. But we are going to do this afternoon is have some presentations and responses to the book and then open up for question and discussion. And we have assembled a stellar panel of the people who are just the right people to undertake this discussion. They will speak in the order that we have determined, but it will begin with a brief presentation of the books and its main issues in history. She is the director of the center for gender and sexuality off which is wonderful institution that we are happy to collaborate with, and she is the author of wedlock the perils of Marriage Equality. Catherine has been working on marriage, gender justice, transitional justice, issues of gender and race in law, legal theorist, and academic, and activist, a public intellectual an amazing human being. Ibeing. I am just so happy to be celebrating her this afternoon. Our speakers will go in this order. We are 1st going to have patricia williams, professor of law at columbia. And you know dont no her through her monthly column entitled diary of a man law professor which you can subscribe to at www. Law professor. Our 2nd speaker will be an associate professor of sociology at Bernard College the research and her recently her 1st book is invisible families, gay identities, relationships, and motherhood. Published in 2011 by the university of California Press and with the winner of the 2013 outstanding book award by the american sociological association. She is working on a 2nd book project entitled the shadow of sexuality. Social history in support of my africanamerican lg bt elders. In the 3rd speaker is the professor of law and director for the center for law and culture. Kendall culture. Kendall thomas is the coeditor of crystal race theory. That found in the movement and coeditor of the theory. His most recent writing and research is focused on the law and culture of Death Penalty politics, racial democracy and resume in the law and politics of racial and neoliberalism. Please help me welcome catherine frankie. [applause] thank you so much. I teach in a room like this. Here is the book. Very exciting. Thank you all. [applause] thank you all for coming. It coming. It is wonderful to have you come out and honor this work and honor thinking about marriage in a complicated way. I no so many of you do that in your own work. So i appreciate having company because the perspectives i have are not always the most popular within the Gay Community. You are my committee right now. And thank you for cosponsoring this event along with my own center. When i was in college at Bernard College sodomy was a crime. But i moved here from illinois to a state that criminalize to our was or at least the things i did. And twice while i was a student i was assaulted by police. And they hurled homophobic epitaphs of me. Another time i was beaten up by some guys over here and Riverside Park , and police stood by and watched. So for people in my generation or for me the idea that a lot later we return to state regulations as a way to be more free and equal struck me as a strange move. And it still strikes me as a strange move. That not many years after our lives were criminalized by the state and we were prosecuted for publicly and privately. That we would invite the state into our intimate relationships and asked the states regulate them. That always struck me as an odd political objective. I thought i would write a book about it. That is what wedlock is. I also thought that samesex couples are not alone and that experience of having the state regulate there lives in the form of marriage shortly after or as part of the civil Rights Movement. And so i turn to africanamericans went through the web black people in this country went through during the civil war. And i thought maybe there is Something Interesting to learn from that experience as we have turned in the Gay Community samaras now as a form of liberty and equality. And it turns out there is quite a bit we can learn which is what this book does, it offers parables for todays movement, not to equate homophobic and racism , not to say is the same thing as what gay people suffered, but to create what was described as a juxtaposition between two movements. So that is reformulate our goals, articulated our values and pursue political projects today as we do so mindful of other movements we are juxtaposed with. And who can teach us something about the possibilities and the perils of certain political and legal claims. And so that is what the book aims to do, bring these two movements together, these two moments together to see what lies there. It turns out that Marriage Equality does have a racial history. It also has a racial presence. That is one of the takehome points, not only be careful what you wish for but the distinctions, the differences between homophobia and racism on the difference between Marriage Equality today and Marriage Equality in the 19th century points out something about the racial endowment that todays Marriage Equality movement has enjoyed and the ways in which marriage has been an enormously successful method by which to rebrand homosexuality to take the secular homosexuality. And to redeem gay people who are able to be respectable and scene entitled. Make a plausible claim of entitlement to the blessings of marriage, and in doing so they contrast themselves to those who are deserving of social judgment and social stigma and almost always those are people of color in the country. The juxtaposition helps us understand how unfortunately some of what we have learned has been a kind of zerosum politics or zerosum right for gay people and some samesex couples haveone a right to marry at the expense of others. Both implicitly and explicitly. So let me just say a little bit about what a couple of the chapters do in terms of be careful what you wish for. It can become a form of discipline, particularly when many sectors of the Society Still is. And that is certainly true for nearly free people, not of the abolition of slavery abolished racism. Racism persisted in familiar forms, being able to inaugurate a new regulatory relationship for black people at the state. And so when black people coming out of enslavement who live together as husband and wife were automatically married by operation of law unwittingly and in the relationship broke up which in any population would be the case and people took up with new partners, mostly black men were prosecuted for bakery to the bigamy are dull to me. Which would put them in prison and render them subject to the convict leasing system because there was this body of workers. So marriage rights and particularly the law of marriage and divorce or divorce in the law of monogamys ended up giving the state of new power to discipline, punish, and sometimes kill black men just at this moment when they were freed from the crushing effects of slavery. Part of this was a civilizing mission. As i think we see this today. There is an enormous backlash against africanamericans are black people, and against samesex marriage rights now mostly undertaken in the name of religion, but not only. To the extent we have had smooth sailing today it has been local in many contexts is in in many parts of the country marriage rights are not feel are not something they feel that they can exercise. They know there will be retaliation against them. But they experience will metabolize that fear against the backdrop of this message from both people in and out of the Gay Community who say that being married. Allies you can attain those wild the citys surges of payment who dont know how to sign up for one another and commit and be monogamous. s andmonogamous. She then we had the very same thing about africanamericans at the end of the war, they somehow had savage sexualities. So the civilizing aspects of marriage is, the values it carries have their own portfolio. As in the book tries to answer that as well is. One other place where there is a similarity or compelling lesson to learn is about how our right to marry can collapse into a compulsion to marrys. There are some people that have a diagnostica diagnostic problem of over marrying. There is not that kind of compulsion, but the stable compel you to marry. And so in the 19th century we saw him before the end of the civil war in order for slaves were leaving the plantations to the safety of northern troops who set of refugee camps around the military operations that they were conducting its, minister was placed at the gate of many of these contraband camps the refugee camps, and you could not gain entry without marrying which was seen as the most pressing problem is, these folks were coming in and complicated families. People have lost their spouses and children as their owners and pull them away andin the families were reassembling and coming to the safety of refugee camps in the northern soldiers and missionaries overrunning them were saying we cant let un. We are going to marry you with the gate. As the right to marry turned into a compulsion to marry command we see that today as well not just generally but here columbia university. As soon as in new york state we gain the right for samesex couples to marry the university abolished this domestic partner benefits. And said you have a year to marry your partner. And partner. And if you doubt there will be kicked off our plan. Shocking. As we get them to reverse the policy. But not for different sex couples. Thecouples. The president promised they would keep domestic partner benefits is because in new york city are Domestic Partnership law recognizes same and different sex couples. But they only reinstated domestic partner benefits for samesex couples. Now the university discriminates against ray people. Gay people are paid more. Samesexsamesex couples are paid more in the sense that you can get benefits for your partners whether or not you marry them. As if you have a different sex partner you have to married. These are some of the difficult questions that have come up in history. This marriage ins marriage ends up overwhelming the politics of Larger Movement that mightve wanted to recognize more complex families. Is that we have lost where families is kind of the subject of gay rights as any of the sewer early this marriage has actually become a problem. It was a sexist institution written legally compromised to preserve property. s property. And creating viable life outside marriage with a political projects and something happened. Something happened, the moving overtaken is one less thing ii want to offer and then i would love to hear from my colleague. Ii feel kind of badly that we are racially segregated appear. I never talked publicly about this. Its when i was in college year i was sort of awakening as many undergraduate students due to being a lesbian. A poet and novelist in the memoirs to is very well known in the 70s and 80s. The journal of solitude. Very moving an important for me and for many of my friends command as i was coming out i thought. A lonely world, to be married. s and. s and i really did not want to be heterosexual. s and she wrote me back. s here is what she wrote me. Oldfashioned typing. Some she said you imply that what you want is love as a sideline and solitude is the main current. I dont see this as possibles. Love with our commitment is pretty cheap. This is remarriage comes in. As i read she was terribly afraid of being caught and people who marry simply because they want marriage is often find themselves caught. And its a simple as that. When you do and i hope you will, there wont be any arguments and then wouldnt you want children . He goes on to discuss how lonely life of the unmarried person will be. Its so let me quote quickly from Justice Kennedy. The decision from the Supreme Court. Marriage response to the universal fear that alone person, only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other. Really . That there is no life other than just our calling this . s winning the right to marry, life outside of marriage is whether you choose it will you find yourself there for complicated reasons is a graham, lonely, dark life. That is not a clear value in my mind. Resilience, creativity, and forcing her life outside marriage. It is so wonderful. Thank you so much for inviting me. Congratulations wherever you are. This book is really the most interesting excavation of the history imaginable. Comparative cities aside. s totally absorbing and quite revelatory of the circumstances. And one of the things that i was most impressed with was the malleable line between intimacy and the untouchable. Untouchable. And the question you raise in the subtitle is one of the perils the Marriage Equality. Theequality. The question of whether it is marriage is that does all the work. The Marriage Equality i think will probably be addressed more thoroughly. So i am going to narrow my reflections too much smaller set of observations. That really is for those of you read anything about my life and i am here because my great great grandmothers was married off. The saving ultimately her own marriage. I think that it is is what i wanti want to note is that marriage is really did set and i mean assets and the effective sense the institution of marriage among whites. As catherine notes the significant number of slave marriages or overseen by owners, investors. Another dimension is the degree to which much of that permission to marry is not through the owners of property the lives of those owners and slaveholders. And that prompting to some degree operates like any other marriage. It makes public and exclusivity of intimacy. And to some degree to eliminate the dangerousness as well as the perversions of sexualitys. Marriage among africanamericans purify respectability and also understood the dangerous untouchability a black. But those 1st africanamericans marriages were rachel performed against the backdrop of the brain firms the catherine talked and the mysteriously lightskinned how service and unnameable accidents asked. s to say nothing of progenitor. It was and still is a ritual prompted way of corralling the unregulated brown this black sex. All this is interesting to me, the kind of formal genuflection to the repair. Something to be said. Something of the great thing for slaveholding families. The sexual affirmations that have only recently begun to be publicized are acknowledged from Annette Gordon reeds history of Thomas Jefferson all the waiters from sermons, this is a dramatic history they apply to a Cultural Landscape toward an appended by the unspeakable. And so marriage operating continues to as the pathway salvation but as assumed against the leakage of miscegenation. This again, i think this effect or dementia as a company marked in the words we use and dont use to this day. Its very peculiar when it comes to africanamericans, not so much when they married but when they marry outside the race. Just think of the word biracial, a kind of formal recognition of a certain a dissent, not just the product of being tossed around. A legitimacy according to the lineages of intermarriage, formal marriage between blacks and whites in modern times. To get out of the presence of that one black and one white. It is a kind of recognition alegitimacy according to the lineage of the wider nonblack parent that does not otherwise give margin vocabulary. s i think it was a kind of comfort. A white mother and he loved her so he will be a big edge of the race. s the has been normalized. s just another black man. There was a shift in nomenclature for some. So marriage among all with africanamericans have this extra burden of operating to simultaneously the language by which we assign the benefits uses racial category to narrow or expand our perception of who is more like homes habit of carrying relentlessly promiscuous nature of our duty renders us blind to havent really weird type. Again consider if he may williams washington. s the one hand by his familys black man. Notice how they have no market thurmond and that link the name. She also live your life as a negro, attended an allblack college, but in their 70s and became publicized the suddenly redesignated as biracial. Even with that designation she was always referred to as a child by his made have not been able to find any reference to as his child. I take tiger woods. Rarely as asian americans. So there is something unspoken and indicative about african descent and is dangerous. Very interesting locutions you could address mayor de blasio not empathize as of the hashtag black lives matter. Elizabeth norris go describes the perversion. It uses the speech of the subject but only to mimic nature for which its been extricated. That is why perverse discourse can always space that appears to exclude which it owes and to me it is that effective mention in all cases and catherines wonderful metrics. [applause] hello. I have some laryngitis so just bear with me. As has been stated thus far in different ways, katherines superbly written book wedlocked the perils of Marriage Equality looks at the marriage for enslaved people in samesex couples. She asked what kind of freedom and what kind of quality does the capacity to marry actually mobilize . The book reveals that gaining rights can bring about disadvantage in other ways particularly when a group in question does not have full equality. She states quote a close look at the history of marriage among africanamericans and the newly won right of samesex couples at the price of stigmatizing other groups and ways of life on marriages outside. As a family sociologist who focuses on the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality is particularly interested in thinking about how the ideas in this book play out with peoples lives today. Particularly those who are experiencing the after effects of the Marriage Equality movement to sociologist like to talk about, we like to ask questions and wed like to talk to people and we like to use this data as one base for evaluating information. What if anything do we gain by using m