The present political consensus among the major parties against permitting and recognising same sex marriages is so obviously an intellectual surrender to the religious right that one looks for a single phrase rhetorical demolition of this anti-gay pretence of a position that would show it in all of its hypocrisy.
I do not, for a moment, believe that those politicians (including speakers at the recent Labor Party National Conference) who go on about protecting the “sanctity of marriage” believe the nonsense they espouse. I also fail to believe that they believe that a majority of the Australian people support the continued refusal to recognise single sex marriages.
I believe that the political imperative is to avoid the anger of that noisy minority, the religious right, which, itself, is hardly representative of most people of a religious persuasion in Australia. The political imperative also concerns the possible swing vote of the Family First in the Senate.
Interestingly, the curious passage of proposition 8 by the electors of California on the same first Tuesday in November that saw the election of President Obama has been a catalyst for a rejuvenated movement in the US to assert the right of gay people in that country to have their relationships fully recognised. Demonstrations in support of equal treatment for gay people proliferated across America. Even many normally conservative small towns in the American Bible Belt saw outbreaks of activism.
The Atlantic Monthly’s columnist and blogger, Andrew Sullivan, documented in words and pictures this unexpected result of what appeared to be a set back for the gay rights movement. The demonstrations appear, in the photographs, to be cheerful and good humoured. Among the many witticisms displayed by the demonstrator’s signs is perhaps the rhetorical sledge hammer for which I have been searching: “Against Gay Marriage: Then Don’t Have One”.
The debate between Sullivan and his readers also reveals a deeper truth. Whereas Sullivan had argued that every gay person and their friends and family must come out to ensure recognition of gay rights, the readers argued correctly that the rights of any minority are far too important to be left to the minority to assert and defend. Suppression of minority rights is a challenge to the rights that each of us enjoys as well as a challenge to our sanctimonious world view.
It is too easy for people to feel about same sex marriage that this is just an indulgence. Deep inside, we can hear ourselves thinking: “What will they want next? They are not thrown into jail, anymore. Surely that’s enough.” The reality, however, of the desire for gay marriage is far from an indulgence.
From the blogs, the anecdotes of true suffering emerged. They illustrated the powerless position of a gay partner especially at the time of grieving and loss when a long and deep relationship has been terminated by death of one of the partners. The following account of a hospital scene is truly the appropriate response to those who prattle on about defending the sanctity of marriage:
I remember a story told me during the AIDS epidemic. A man was visiting a friend dying in hospital. It was a grim scene, as it often was in those days. The next bed in the ward had a curtain drawn around it. And from behind that curtain, you could hear someone quietly singing. The man told his friend, “Well, at least that dude is keeping his spirits up, however sick he is.”
And the friend replied: “Oh, that’s not the patient singing. He died this morning. And his family came to collect the body. That voice you hear is the man’s partner. The family didn’t approve of his relationship and they have barred him from coming to the funeral and kicked him out of their shared home. That song he’s singing is the song they called their own. It was playing when they met. He used to sing it to him all the time when he was dying.
“He’s still singing it even though they’ve taken the body away. He’s singing it to an empty bed. I guess it’s the last time he feels he’ll ever be close to the man he loved. They were together twenty years. The hospital staff don’t have the heart to ask him to leave yet.”
Gay rights are human rights. Each of us should stand for the full recognition of same sex marriage.
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