Moving forward to same sex marriage

US federal Judge Vaughan Walker has recently ruled that California’s ban on same sex marriage, known as “Proposition 8,” is discriminatory, and violates the US constitution.

Canada, USA, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

All these countries offer marriage or civil unions for same sex couples.

All these countries identify as Christian countries.

One of Julia Gillard’s first conviction statements was that she did not believe in same sex marriage. Marriage, Gillard stated only hours after assuming the prime ministership, is only for men and women. She must have had an urgent need to set the country straight on these personal beliefs, because at the time it wasn’t a big public issue. It seemed an odd topic for the new PM to choose to put upfront first off.

Perhaps Gillard felt she needed to reassure the electorate that she wasn’t going to have any disturbing and confrontational changes going down on her watch, apart from the completely unanticipated replacement of our PM, of course.

A cynic would claim it was a pre-emptive move to reassure the Australian Christian Lobby that even though Gillard is an atheist, and even if she has personally eschewed some traditional Christian values, she intends to uphold their religious opposition to same sex marriage.

This might be a good moment to remind Ms Gillard that in my lifetime and I think, hers, women who co-habited with men without the benefit of marriage were shunned, and their children regarded as “illegitimate” and “bastards”.

Ms Gillard would not have been allowed to enter politics, let alone become PM, without formalising her relationship with her partner. The idea of a de facto couple “living in sin” in the Lodge was just plain shocking and would never have been countenanced.

And not only that: after Ms Gillard had been forced by public opinion to marry her partner, she would then have been forced by public opinion to produce children, on pain of being ostracised and regarded askance as either barren, poor thing, or selfishly bizarre. Either way, she would have been humiliated and pitied.

Ms Gillard has the choice to live as she currently lives because there have been enough people in Australia to “move forward” from discriminatory practices such as forcing women into marriage as a condition of entering public life, or forcing them to conceal their relationship with their lovers.

Ms Gillard has not achieved this all by herself. The country’s attitudes have shifted and they have shifted because people fought against the conservatism and ignorance that for so long had a stranglehold on so-called “morality”.

During these same recent dark ages, women also relinquished babies who were born “out of wedlock,” causing untold anguish to these mothers, and frequently to those babies who grew up in a state of genealogical confusion as a consequence of not knowing their origins. Those women were hidden away from society, in shame and disgrace.

These cruel and discriminatory practices were driven in this country by Christian moral values.

This ignorant mindset is still at work, and these days it expresses itself as homophobia. It is a mindset that seeks to control the circumstances in which adult human love is lived out in Australia. It is a mindset that is anti-love. It is a mindset that insists that adult love can only be “real” and of value to a society when it manifests in the relationship between a woman and a man. The people who seek to keep it this way are to be pitied for their narrow vision and their closed hearts, and they need to be gently and politely ignored.

Time to bring out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16:

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

The UDHR does not say men and women must only marry each other. The article does not state that families can be founded only by heterosexual couples. The article speaks to the institution of marriage, and not to the genders of the spouses.

I challenge anyone to get up a campaign to rewrite this article so that it restricts marriage and the foundation of a family to heterosexuals, and see what happens then.

The idea of such a campaign in 2010 is ridiculous, and it would be doomed to failure.

The reforms of 2008 give cohabiting ("de facto") same-sex couples access to the same federal rights that cohabiting opposite-sex couples have. The Rudd government with Gillard as Deputy PM was responsible for these reforms.

Marriage still matters. People still deeply desire that commitment. I’ve known people who’ve lived in de facto relationships for years, and then got married. If that opportunity is available only to heterosexual couples, then same sex couples are still living with unacceptable discrimination, in spite of the 2008 reforms. One has to wonder why, because in the light of those reforms such discrimination makes no sense.

I would appreciate some acknowledgement from Ms Gillard that she is able to choose not to marry, and to choose to refrain from having children, only because women and men have fought ferociously over the last 50 years for acceptance of life choices that do not conform to the narrow Christian moralities that governed us for so long.

I would like to see Ms Gillard acknowledge her debt to these cultural warriors by continuing this practice of acceptance of difference that has so favoured her. She can do this by leading Australians to embrace same sex marriage, as has been done in so many other Christian countries. In these countries the injustice of the religious position has been recognised, and governments have had the courage and humanity to refuse to support this injustice.

Ms Gillard owes this to all of us who have fought for human rights, decent behaviour towards others, and the acceptance of difference, and in so doing have made it possible for her to hold the position she holds today and to choose the life she wants to go with it.

To discriminate against anyone because of their religious beliefs is abhorrent. It is equally abhorrent for any religious movement to prevent citizens who do not hold their beliefs from expressing their love for one another in the same way as is afforded to everyone else.