What Entrepreneurship Has To Do With Gay Marriage In Maine

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Human Rights

Published November 02, 2009 @ 11:30AM PT

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Tomorrow, Mainers go to the polls to affirm or reject a state law allowing gay marriage. If they vote "No on 1," Maine will become the first state in the country where voters have ratified the right to marriage equality. It may not seem like something I would cover on this blog, but I believe that Maine's struggle with this question surfaces the core elements of social entrepreneurship that make it such an appealing approach to change.

Social entrepreneurship - indeed, entrepreneurship in general - are about agency. They are affirmations of the notion that people have the ability to create - to create value, to create wealth, to create meaning. Unlike charity (which I still believe is important), the actor whose agency is realized in social entrepreneurship is the doer, not the giver.

Questions of marriage equality are also about agency - the agency of two people who love each other to recognize that union legally, and receive the attendant legal benefits. Opponents of gay marriage might argue that their opposition is also about agency - the agency of the church to determine who is does and doesn't recognize. That may be fair, but it's also not primarily the concern of government what a religious institution thinks. In fact, it is it's job to preserve equality regardless of religion, or any other demographic difference for that matter.

Social entrepreneurship is also about dignity. Indeed, for many who believe in the power of markets to end poverty, their primary excitement about social enterprise is that by helping people exert their own agency to improve their station in life, it affirms their ability to control their own destiny, and in the process, affirms their dignity. Charity and aid can often reinforce the opposite assumption - that people don't have control of their own lives and need others to help. By creating dependency, the dignity of the poor is often undermined.

Now dignity and charity are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In some eastern philosophical traditions, mendicants - holy people who beg for alms - have just as much dignity as any other group. What's more, it's dangerous to take the relationship between dignity and purchasing power too far. All that said, the autonomy and dignity that social enterprise can engender are major elements of the excitement around the field.

Marriage equality is most certainly about dignity. It's about moving beyond the falsehoods, assumptions, and slander that characterize and demonize homosexuality. Marriage is not - nor should it be - the only path to dignity for the gay community, but the rest of society's denial of that right is an undeniable affront to their dignity.

Finally, social entrepreneurship - like all efforts for social change - must eventually come down to a question of justice. Justice is undermined when an individual or group is systematically denied the ability to live their lives to the fullest because of accidents of birth like where one happened to be born, or because of a characteristic the broader society has decided to label abnormal.

Social entrepreneurship is an attempt to remedy the injustice of unequally distributed opportunity. Put more plainly, people are talented everywhere, but people do not have the ability to fully use their talents everywhere. Social entrepreneurship is about finding ways to extend opportunity to talent, wherever it resides.

Marriage equality is an attempt to remedy the injustice of prejudice that impacts not just social perception, but actual legal rights. At the end of the day, marriage equality has to matter not because the government needs to regulate what individuals believe, or what institutions like churches decide about who they accept, but because the job of government is to insure that the common rights of all citizens are protected and held as equal under the law. Period.

I have a lot of faith that advocates of marriage equality will prevail in Maine tomorrow. Having grown up there, I know that these characteristics of entrepreneurship - dignity, agency, justice - and moreover the simple notion of living and letting live and doing unto others as you would have done to you are deeply, deeply embedded in the collective psyche. Even when Maine doesn't agree with the way someone lives, it tends not to be its instinct to believe that it's anyone else's businesses - and certainly not something that should be regulated.

Still, the forces against marriage equality have poured money into the state and run a campaign that would suggest that affirming the rights of gay people to marry would be equivalent to signing the execution papers for modern society. Who wins will be based entirely on who decides to turn up.

Tomorrow, stay tuned to our Gay Rights blog for the latest news.