Gay Marraige and Inequality

    So now we have gay marriage. Yeah for all those people who can get married. Except let's be honest: I'm not sure this won't increase inequality. Already the press has asked the question of whether civil partner benefits will remain. If they don't, we are headed towards increasing inequality. What upper middle class white people rarely realize, unless they work in a social profession, is that marriage is increasingly a class marker...a class marker not everyone can afford.
   If marriage were simply a luxury vehicle, there wouldn't be much of a problem. The real problem is that marriage is an institution tied up with money and social capital. It takes capital to get into it, and it returns capital both social and financial. So much so that on average kids raised by a single parent or cohabitating parents are statistically on average very different than kids raised by married parents. But does anyone really have a choice about which lifestyle they are choosing? Yes, of course, the people with enough capital to make the choice. On the other side of the problem are millions of people sunk in student loans or other usurious arrangements that make them much less capable of marriage. In the case of student loan holders there is a statistical gender split. Men with student loans are statistically marriageable; women are on average much less so. I doubt this surprises anyone. It confirms the unfortunate reality based stereotype that men are commitment-phobic selfish bums who have the upper hand in the dating market. This doesn't even stop in marriage. Anyone who works in medicine who sees the realities of organ donation can tell you there is a very real statistical difference between wifes willing to throw their husbands a kidney, and the reverse. As a culture we seem to be producing a bunch of selfish men. In this regards gay marriage seems on the surface like a perfect solution...now women can just marry each other and bypass gender inequality right?
 Wrong, by the numbers, marriage, gay or straight, by the numbers seems to be exacerbating economic  inequality in our society. In fact it won't surprise me if when it's all said and done lesbian households fall towards the bottom of the economic ladder just above single women households. We are usually talking about two WOMEN and their "chick jobs," right? For every lesbian couple I know where one is a high earning chemist, I know a pair where both have taken socially responsible but poorly paid employment like social work, education or activism. If anyone is going to undo the conservative plot for gay marriage (and I think there was such a thing if you look at it in a certain way) where these newlyweds all move to suburbia and start complaining about their taxes just like rich straight people- it's probably going to be these women.
  I don't think anyone is delusional enough to think we can just throw out a tradition this deeply entrenched into our cultures. As many people are too poor to involve themselves in marriage- or at least marriage in their reproductive years, apparently, by the numbers; the real question is what institutions can they use to even the game, especially when raising children.