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”.