Hopelessly out of tune on same-sex marriage
- Date:ÂÂ
Steve Dow
Arts writer
New Zealand forges ahead with a new progressive law, but in Australia, both sides of politics are bogged down in conservatism.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson.In the New Zealand Parliament, they were singing. Yes, singing. A century-old Maori love song, no less. Can you picture that happening in Canberra? My boyfriend of 14 years and I sat on the couch with our dog Oscar in our apartment on Wednesday night and watched the news. We could only imagine.
Pokarekare Ana is thought to have been composed some time around World War I. It has been translated into English and is often played at ceremonies involving both New Zealand and Australia: ”My poor pen is broken, my paper is spent / But my love for you endures, and remains forever more. / Oh my beloved, come back to me, my heart is breaking of love for you.”
A native of New Zealand’s North Island, my partner, whose name is also Steven – it’s so convenient for people to remember us – had texted me at work last week with the news his Australian citizenship had been approved. He was chuffed that the next step was the citizenship ceremony, where he would make some sort of pledge. I was beginning to think we didn’t deserve him.
As the New Zealand Parliament legalised same-sex marriage (not gay marriage, please, you don’t need that sexual identity to qualify) and the vote was a convincing 77 to 44 in favour, I wondered if we would get a better deal if we hopped on a plane across the ditch. Steve and I would certainly feel included in society.
In Australia in 2013, our conservatives simply wear a different cloak.
Julia Gillard, our Prime Minister who remains unmoved by the New Zealand example, gives gay, lesbian and bisexual people plenty of reasons to maintain a historically well-developed sense of oppression. Her continued opposition to same-sex marriage is nonsensical – the electorate is largely supportive – but it doesn’t need to make sense. This is all about self-interested power, fear and lack of leadership.
Simply, the ALP national executive controlling Gillard’s views on this issue is as socially conservative as Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, who clings to the notion marriage is for one man, one woman. At least we can see where this capital-C Catholic is coming from.
Both major parties are afraid of what the large pockets of voters in Queensland and western Sydney might think. Those voters are being sold intellectually short.
In New Zealand it was the Labour Party that introduced the same-sex marriage bill, but the conservative Prime Minister John Key backed it. Perhaps the ”u” in NZ Labour stands for ”us”. Hence in Australia, we call it the Labor Party, where the Catholic roots need a new dye job. Labor’s failure to separate church and state is as pernicious as any such ideology lingering in Abbott, a former seminary trainee.
So will Australia get same-sex marriage, joining New Zealand, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, nine US states and, soon, Britain and France?
Not under Gillard. Not under Abbott. The country needs a change but not simply of government. The opposition’s shadow minister for communications, Malcolm Turnbull, told Radio National in late 2011 he hadn’t historically advocated same-sex marriage but would now be willing to vote according to his constituency’s wishes ”and I don’t have any doubt that there’s a large majority of people that support same-sex marriage”. Labor’s Employment Minister, Bill Shorten, personally supports same-sex marriage.
Abbott, meanwhile, thinks his sister Christine Forster is ”courageous” for revealing herself to be a lesbian. He may think she’s brave but he certainly doesn’t consider her his equal. Gillard, who’s never believed in marriage for herself, wants to withhold it from others, because that’s her Machiavellian way. She’s painfully alert to misogyny but is blind to ALP parliamentary homophobia.
Same-sex couples deserve health, happiness and to be part of society. Their children deserve to have parents supported by society. Same-sex marriages won’t harm heterosexual marriages and, in the unlikely event they did, perhaps those unions weren’t strong enough in the beginning. In that traditional Maori song, they got it dead right: ”I have written you a letter, and enclosed it with my ring / If your people should see it, then the trouble will begin.” What, exactly, has Canberra got against happiness?
Steve Dow is a Fairfax journalist and author of Gay: the tenth anniversary collection (iBooks/Kindle).
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/hopelessly-out-of-tune-on-samesex-marriage-20130418-2i2rd.html#ixzz2Qy9fgzg1
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And another comment:
Gay or not, nuptials are now divorced from sense
- Date
The problem with gay marriage is not the gay bit but the marriage bit. In a sane world, heterosexuals would be demanding the rationalisation of marriage or, better, its abolition. What we have instead is a strange new belief that marriage is a fundamental human right. Human beings have never had, and do not have now, a right to be married. Though a ”right to family life” is recognised by the European Bill of Rights, it does not include a right to be married.
For most of the Christian era a significant proportion of the European population died unmarried. Huge numbers of people were prohibited from marrying for all kinds of reasons: because they were under age, because they lacked parental consent, because they were within the prohibited degrees of relationship by blood or by spiritual affinity (i.e. their families being related through baptismal sponsorship). Or because they were in domestic service or articled or apprenticed, or in the armed forces, in which cases they needed permission from their superiors, who didn’t have to give it unless they chose to. Until relatively recently, women teachers could expect to be sacked if they got married.
Another group of people simply couldn’t afford to get married, because they didn’t have the wherewithal to find a place to live and set up an independent household. In many cases, families were unable to provide marriage portions for younger children who had perforce to remain unmarried. The death of a whole generation of young men in the First World War created a surplus of maiden aunts who lived their whole lives as poor relations (and unpaid servants) of their married kin. That was in the days when marriage made a kind of sense. Now it makes no sense at all.
Marriage is supposed to be a contract, but its terms are unknown. There is no document that sets out terms and conditions. Nobody knows what constitutes fulfilment or what could be alleged as breach of contract. Does either party undertake to keep a tidy house, to be sexually stimulating, to provide funds for the household and the rearing of children? There is no liability, no provision for damages, no commitment to the ongoing needs of any children of the union. Marriage is talked of as if it were lifelong, and yet as many as half of all marriages end in divorce, mostly acrimonious, often costly and destructive.
A sacrament requires a sign; all marriage requires to become actual in the sight of God is the saying of the words in the present tense ”I take thee … ” by bride and groom, followed by consummation, that is, insertion of the penis of one party into the vagina of the other. According to canon law, anal penetration does not constitute consummation, being rather a denial of the bride’s right and a ground for immediate annulment.
Our ancestors were not as muddled as we are about all this. Most marriages were preceded by negotiations with ”friends” (i.e. agents) of both parties and the drawing up of a settlement, which stipulated who brought what property to the match, and what should happen in the event of the death of either party. What happened in the church was merely the ”solemnisation” of the spouses’ compact, which was otherwise brass-bound by the law, duly witnessed and notarised. Which is not to say it was unproblematic; matrimonial cases occupied the courts for years, sometimes for generations.
Gay and lesbian people would find it hard to believe that less than 50 years ago heterosexuals who tried to live together would find themselves summarily evicted, the locks changed and their property dumped in the street by the landlord, their deposit forfeited, because they had used the premises for an immoral purpose. We pushed as hard then for the right to remain unmarried as they are fighting now for the right to be married.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/gay-or-not-nuptials-are-now-divorced-from-sense-20130418-2i14o.html#ixzz2QzGGwqNf
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And also this (hilarious!) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8oKO7BAuU
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