I know many of you would assume after my glowing endorsement of Ms Gillard and the opportunity she represents to shape a more inclusive socio-political culture that I’d be the first to denounce her opposition to gay marriage. Well, you’d be wrong.
In fact, I don’t consider the ‘right’ to marry part of any socially progressive agenda and so I say Julia is correct on this issue, but for the wrong reasons.
I guess I’ve always had a romantic, almost Wildean view of homosexuals as somehow more evolved than the rest of us. We all know deep down that stereotypes are true. So you know I’m right when I say that most gays are inherently more civilized and cultured, and are generally superior citizens than the rest of us.
For one, you don’t see them invading the Western suburbs for a bit of straight bashing at the local RSL. Many of them are even welcoming to the yobbos who come to their annual parade for a perv.
And they generally have a sense of community and solidarity that Pauline Hanson would be proud of. Didn’t they start the whole ribbon craze with their AIDS activism? (OK, that’s pretty annoying)
So why, after establishing themselves as a community of committed social progressives, do they want to go and spoil it all by having the State – and God forbid, the Church - authorise their private relationships?
It simply makes no sense. Anyone who has even a cursory understanding of the historical roots of marriage knows that, by its very nature, it’s an anachronistic religious and therefore necessarily heterosexist institution set up for the benefit of only one type of citizen: heterosexual men (that’s why research shows married men live longer than their unwed counterparts).
It helped to promote the traditional socio-political aims of the Church and the State by guaranteeing the separation of the private and public sphere through the ideal of the nuclear family which involved consigning women to the former where they and their children, in law and in practice, were considered the property of men. And it worked as long as women remained economically dependent on their husbands, precisely by being denied access to said public sphere.
As a result, it can’t be legitimately extended to those intrinsically excluded from it just because minority rights are cool. So I reckon after all the time and effort us chicks have spent exposing the tradition for the oppressive, bourgeois – and most significantly, inequitable - con it is that it’s absurd to now campaign to resurrect it for a particular group. Let the archaic institution die the natural death it looks to be doing as women become more emancipated from the private sphere.
I say to homosexuals: use your considerable powers of reason – you know, the ones that allowed you to come out of the closest by accepting that it’s ok to break with banal social conventions such as being heterosexual – and get over the desire to conform. I know you say it’s about equal rights, but these days the right to get married is like the right to wear a beige cardigan – and not in an ironic way.
And to Julia I say, come on, be a true social progressive and do away with state interference in consensual private relationships of any type. Let grown-ups decide what they want to do in their bedrooms and which type of social relations they want to pursue.
And as a non-believer and formerly proud feminist, don’t legitimise practices that reinforce the patriarchal ideology of right-wing Christian dogma – high-and-mighty, hypocritical, ‘family values’ rubbish that less and less people are falling for these days anyway.
In the meantime, I’m going to proudly live in ‘sin’ so long as being gay is considered one.
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