I was having a quick glance at Facebook earlier today, and came across this little gem of picture:
Disclaimer – if you are one of the 4 people who contributed to the discussion about this on Facebook, the below is basically a rehash of what was there. Feel free to stop reading now. Go and have a cup of tea or something. I won’t be offended, really! Similarly if I appear to have nicked a point off your Facebook comment and seem to be presenting it as my own idea then, er, take it as a compliment!
I haven’t written a pro equal marriage post in a while, and this seems like the perfect chance to write another.
So: this is a list of the perils which will befall the Good, Honest, Hardworking Families of Great Britain if The Gays are allowed to marry. As it is presented as such, as opposed to a list of Why Being Gay is Evil, I will presume that their objections are specifically against Equal Marriage. After all, homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK in 1967 by the Sexual Offences Act, and the age of consent for homosexual acts was bought in line with legislation covering heterosexual acts in an amendment to the same act in 2000. This list purports to show why Same Sex Marriage will damage families. Presumably therefore these potential dangers which the Exchange of Gay Vows will engender are dangers over and above those posed by just being gay and having gay sex.
Point 1: Children and Teenagers at school will quickly learn about “gay marriage” as teachers will have to teach them the new definition of marriage.
Well, yes, if Same Sex marriage is legalised in the UK, then axiomatically the definition of marriage will change. But I don’t remember anyone at school teaching me the definition of marriage. Even if they had I don’t think this is a particularly tricky concept to explain: that-thing-that-previously-only-a-man-and-woman-could-do-well-now-a-man-and-another-man-or-a-woman-and-another-woman-can-do-it-too. Easy.
Point 2: Gay relationships will be promoted to primary school children via storybooks.
I would sincerely hope that would be the case. Having decriminalised gay relationships, and taken further strides (or, in some cases, painfully slow baby steps) to equalise gay and straight relationships, the next stage is to normalise them. However on this point I am pessimistically of the belief that the authors of this list don’t have that much to worry about. Next time you find yourself looking at primary level story books, look how many inter-racial couples there are, or men and women in non standard-gender roles, or heaven forfend, someone transgendered. If lack of progress in other areas blighted by bigotry are anything to go by, legalising same sex marriage and comfortably showcasing the diversity of relationships in educational tools are likely be a long way apart.
Point 3: NHS-Endorsed Websites, which promote high-risk sexual practices, will be mainstreamed in secondary schools.
Now this may come as a shock, but attitudes to sexual relationships and the potential medical pitfalls which may occur (including conceiving a child) have come a long way since Marie Stopes wrote Married Love in 1918. Sex Education in the UK is predominantly focussed on teaching young people about the risks of pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and the emotional upheaval which usually accompanies one’s first forays into Carnal Knowledge. As such, NHS-Endorsed websites which might be reasonably used as resources during Sex Ed classes, do not focus on the legal definition of marriage. They focus on the act of having sex. Because, and this may have escaped the authors’ notice, having sex out of wedlock isn’t illegal here. Consequently this point has sod-all to do with whether same-sex marriage is legal, and is solely concerned with gay sex, which has been legal for over 4 and a half decades.
Point 4: Being Male or Female will be meaningless if any combination can get married.
Having wrestled through early childhood, puberty and my later teenage years with the inescapable fact of Having a Vagina, I can testify that what being female means to me is…being legally allowed to marry a man. Yep, turns out that my entire gendered identity is solely related to the fact I can be legally joined in matrimony with one of the penis-bearing brigade. All those years of reading Judy Blume, Cosmopolitan & Simone de Beauvoir (full disclosure – I never actually made it all the way through The Second Sex) taught me that I am a Woman by dint of my relationships to men and nothing else.
Of course, there is another way to view this: If we legalise same sex marriage, they’ll be no more sexism! No more glass ceiling, no more gendered toys, no more casual harassment. We will all just be people. Sounds marvellous!
Point 5: Marriage won’t be about commitment to bearing and raising children.
My husband and I aren’t having children. We got married because we wanted to, but having kids was never on our agenda. We know lots of married couples who have similarly decided to remain child-free. Marriage isn’t about a commitment to bearing and raising children now. Legalising same sex marriage makes no difference to this.
Point 6: Marriage will be reduced to gratifying your own personal desires.
In a lot of cases, marriage is about gratifying your own desires: the desire to tick the Married box on forms, the desire to have a big white wedding, even, in my opinion, the above commitment to bearing and raising children is a personal desire to be gratified (although not necessarily in partnership with a spouse). Less cynically, the desire to make a public declaration of love for your soulmate is also a personal desire, and that was the one and only reason I got married. In fact the only times I can think of where marriage is not about gratifying one’s own personal desires, is when it is about gratifying someone else’s. For money, power, reputation, honour, prestige or protection. Out of fear, out of jealousy, out of laziness, out of spite. Or simply to keep someone else happy. Marriage, along with the rest of all conceivable human actions, is always about gratifying some desire on some level.
Point 7: Children will lose out, because society will no longer prioritise their main need, which is to be brought up by the people who conceive them.
As stated above, I have no intention to ever have children, which is just as well, as I’ve been labouring under the delusion that the main need of children is to be raised by a person or persons who love them, and make them feel safe, secure and happy. Clearly that is secondary to the fact of whether or not the parents are genetically linked to the child.
Gay couples can’t have children anyway without some kind of intervention, typically adoption, artificial insemination or surrogacy. The process for a gay couple proving themselves worthy of parenthood, particularly regarding adoption is rigorous (although really not my area of expertise so sincere apologies for any misconceptions here – no pun intended!!) On the other hand the most casual of heterosexual encounters can result in an unintended bun in the oven (perhaps as a result of neglecting those NHS-endorsed websites!) Yet ‘society’ tends not to intervene in these pregnancies except in very extreme situations.
Gay couples already can, and do, adopt or by other means start a family. So how would legalising gay marriage change this?
Point 8: Traditional family networks, which bind society together, will be fractured.
Er, what? Seriously, what does that actually mean? I mean I get that for most people their immediate family are among the most important people to them: partners, parents, siblings, children, possibly Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles and cousins etc. I understand that these ‘loved ones’ tend to be at the heart of our most precious relationships. But I’m not sure that I’d describe such as dynamic as ‘binding society together.’ I mean after all, isn’t that ‘blood is thicker than water’ crap basically about dividing society up into Us and Them. Family and Not Family. The societal expectation is that at times of difficulty one will prioritise one’s own kin ahead of strangers. I’m not saying that’s a necessarily a bad thing, but surely that’s not binding the whole of society together. Binding the whole of society together would be treating everyone equally, regardless of your personal connection. Let’s say there was an earthquake: a truly bound-together society would be populated with people who would rescue the first person they came across, trusting that another stranger would do the same for them or their family. Not clamber over the bodies of dead and dying human beings they didn’t know, looking for their wife, or child, or brother.
I’m not saying family isn’t important. As above I believe that raising children in loving, secure, happy homes is the paramount responsibility of parents, and family can play an important role in that endeavour. But our society teaches us to stratify our relationships, and so we learn to regard certain people, such as those related to us, as more precious than others.
So having entirely rejected the premise that family relationships bind society together I am unconcerned as to how same sex marriage might fracture these non-existent bonds.
Point 9: Motherless and Fatherless families will be institutionalised.
Given the tone of this whole piece, I am deeply concerned that this is actually a threat, as opposed to a warning of what may come to pass. But even as a threat it is entirely incoherent. Straight, ‘nuclear’ families can be rendered either Mother or Fatherless through tragedy, irreconcilable differences or something else. Yet again, legalising same sex marriage seems to have no discernible impact on this situation.
The whole point about gay marriage is that two people of the same sex who love each other can, if they wish, formalise that love the same way straight people do. Ultimately the objections all come to down to the entirely irrational fear that by redefining marriage to include same sex relationships, somehow existing straight relationships will be devalued. If your relationship is really that fragile, perhaps your time would be better put to use trying to strengthen it.