Too much to bear

Ted Lapkin

August 28, 2011OPINION

GREENS MP Adam Bandt bit off a bit more than he could chew with his parliamentary motion calling on fellow MPs to canvas public opinion on the issue of same-sex marriage. The measure passed through the House of Representatives last November with a one-vote majority and the numbers are now in.

And while you have to give Bandt full thespian credit for putting a brave face on disappointment, the results are lopsidedly in his disfavour. Only a handful out of the 30 MPs who reported back to Parliament were prepared to state that a majority of their constituents supported gay marriage.

In fact, the tide is running strongly against the idea of amending the Commonwealth Marriage Act even in Labor-held electorates. In the suburban Melbourne seat of Deakin, the ALP’s Mike Symon indicated that more than 93 per cent of the 1015 people he surveyed were opposed to same-sex nuptials. These electorate surveys were hardly scientific, and published opinion polls are more evenly divided, but even when religious faith is excised from the equation, there are valid reasons to take a jaundiced view of the push for gay marriage.

All Australians are entitled to the same rights and privileges as citizens of our democracy. Each and every one of us – gay or straight, black or white, believer or non-believer – is entitled to identical protections of law in our individual persons and property.

But despite the impassioned arguments of Adam Bandt and others, the debate over same-sex marriage does not pertain to individual rights. It instead revolves around the demand that collective privileges be conferred upon a group whose self-definition relates to what its members do in the bedroom.

Gay rights activists hasten to assure us that any redefinition of marriage to include same-sex unions will end right there. We’re promised there’ll be no flow-on effects and that the door to further changes won’t be left ajar.

But I’ve been around politics long enough to know that once the goal posts begin to shift, the precedent for further change has already been established. You can rest assured there’ll be other aggrieved groups waiting in the wings, eager to push the envelope further.

Case in point: American polygamist Kody Brown. He is a fundamentalist Mormon from the state of Utah whose family unit includes four wives and 16 children. And he’s so proud of his lifestyle that his clan was featured on a TV show entitled Sister Wives. But Brown is more than a television reality star. He’s also the plaintiff in a lawsuit intended to strike down America’s bigamy statutes. The lynchpin of his legal pleading is premised upon the 2003 US Supreme Court Lawrence v Texas ruling that overturned America’s sodomy laws.

And truth be told, there’s something to be said for the logic of Brown’s argument. If restriction of marriage to male-female couples is the indefensible fruit of prejudice, isn’t it equally bigoted to impose arbitrary limits on the number of spouses one can take?

So if Adam Bandt is pushing for same-sex marriage to be legitimised by law, shouldn’t he be cheerleading for polygamy as well?

And then the next cab off the rank will surely be consensual sex between adult brothers and sisters, adult fathers and daughters or adult mothers and sons. After all, we’re told individual choice is Holy Writ in such matters. And if people over the age of 18 years freely want to indulge in incestuous pursuits, who are we to tell them they can’t do whomever they want to do?

So we should bear in mind that those guarantees about the buck stopping at same-sex marriage will, in reality, guarantee nothing. The floodgates will inevitably open to a further slide down the slippery slope of social disintegration.

Advocates of same-sex marriage also like to liken their situation to that of interracial couples living in the pre-civil rights-era American South. But sexual activity is volitional. As a heterosexual man committed to monogamy, I restrain my natural libidinous impulses. And I have friends who ignore their sexual attraction to persons of the same gender for the sake of their commitment to celibacy.

By contrast, I can’t simply decide one day to abandon my Ashkenazi Jewish ethnic origins. I’m stuck with them. And it’s this crucial distinction between who you are and what you do that nullifies the gay rights pseudo-equation between sexual preference and race/ethnicity.

The ”sexuality-equals-race” argument falls short on other grounds, as well. People of different racial and ethnic categories have been falling in love since time immemorial. In the Hebrew Bible we read how Moses took an ”Isha Kushit” – a black woman – as his wife. Inter-group romance is the historical norm while those obnoxious Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws were an ephemeral aberration from it.

Yet it’s notable that the annals of humanity are devoid of any similar precedent that would legitimate same-sex nuptials. Across continents and centuries, the institution of marriage has invariably involved the male-female family model.

And that’s because of the kids. The universality of the traditional father-mother family unit stems from the superior child-rearing environment it provides. And the promotion of children’s best interests makes it entirely appropriate for the state to preference heterosexual marriage in law and practice.

Of course, it’s true that traditional marriages don’t always succeed, and that there are far too many single-parent households. And I’ll concede that many gay families provide loving environments to the child of whichever partner was involved in the gestational process.

But exceptions don’t invalidate the state’s legitimate interest in retaining limitations on marriage that exclude a family model where the father-mother unit is impossible by definition.

Nothing in any of my arguments would preclude the ability of same-sex couples to come together, live together and love together as they have been doing for time immemorial.

But the institution of marriage should remain as it’s always been – the union of a single man and single woman who come together for the primary purpose of rearing the healthiest children possible.

Ted Lapkin was a ministerial adviser to the federal Coalition, and was communications director to a senior member of the Republican leadership in the US Congress.