Amber Stewart , back in the late 90s, when the idea of legal same-sex marriage first began to seem like an attainable goal, many activists, including me, didn’t want to push for it.

We were afraid of exactly the kind of assimilation you’re talking about. We wanted to conserve and preserve our cultures as we continued to explore different ways of being. Diverse ways of being that were perhaps not rooted in ancient forms of paternalism.

But equal legal rights matter. I lost my home when my partner died, for example, because we couldn’t be married legally.

So that real tension exists. Balancing legal Equality with cultural diversity was always going to be hard.

And as you point out so well, we’re probably not getting it right. Which is exactly what we were afraid of when the marriage debates started.