Seeing red: why John Pilger is wrong on marriage equality

The American civil rights movement was a colourful but hollow distraction from the far more important issue of America's war in Vietnam, and that is why presidents Kennedy and Johnson supported it.

If you find this statement trite, offensive and wrong then you may react the same way when you read John Pilger's analysis of Barack Obama's support for same-sex marriage.

Pilger believes the Obama administration is attempting to divert attention from wars abroad and wealth disparity at home, and raise more money from Hollywood, by endorsing marriage equality.

He has no evidence for these links. His analysis also doesn't explain why Obama took so long to "evolve" on the issue and seems to have been moved to act by an unscripted endorsement of the issue by Joe Biden. 

Nor does Pilger allow for the fact that a cause can be right even if the motives of some of its supporters are less than pure, or just not the same as his. 

Pilger would probably respond by saying my comparison between black civil rights and same-sex marriage is unfair because in his words the latter is about "lifestyle liberalism". 

Such a casual dismissal of marriage equality is not just because Pilger doesn't believe marriage matters much. 

He believes marriage is part of the problem: "the rights historically associated with marriage are those of property: capitalism itself", he writes. "Bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right."

Pilger's same-sex marriage blind spot is not uncommon among left-wingers his age. 

Many older lefties retain an outdated view of marriage as an instrument of male domination over women, the middle class's domination over workers and God's domination over us all.

They refuse to see that the institution has been reformed, at least in the west, so that women, workers and non-believers now have much more autonomy to decide how, when and if they wed, how they conduct their marriage (including whether or not they have kids), and if and when their marriage will end.

They refuse to acknowledge that it is precisely this change which has made same-sex marriage an issue: now marriage is a choice for the majority it makes sense to ask why isn't it a choice for the minority.

Most of all older left-wingers seem to have forgotten how the aspiration to marry free from state interference drove both the African-American and Aboriginal-Australian civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s.

One of the key victories of the American civil rights movement was the Supreme Court decision to overturn laws against interracial marriages in 1967. 

Aboriginal Australians also placed a high value on the right to “bourgeois acceptability”. Freedom to marry regardless of race was near the top of their list of demands in the lead up to the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights, above child custody and access to traditional lands and second only to the right to vote.  

The philosopher Hannah Arndt explained why freedom to marry was so pivotal to black civil rights movements: “The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which 'the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin color or race' are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

It is one thing for John Pilger to ignore both the evolution of marriage and its pivotal role in the great human rights movements of the late 20th century.

But it is even worse for him to misunderstand what marriage equality means to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Marriage equality is about much more than two guys walking down the aisle together. 

The international research shows allowing same-sex marriages equality reduces levels of anxiety and depression among same-sex attracted people, and strengthens our relationships and families, not least because it gives us a stronger sense of belonging and inclusion in a traditionally hostile world.

On top of this, marriage equality clearly establishes the boundary between church and state. It confirms that none of us should be judged and entitled according to our gender. As with the movement for interracial marriage, it removes unnecessary state meddling from our lives.

One of the few Australian intellectuals to come to grips with the deeper meaning of marriage equality is Raymond Gaita. He writes: “When gays ask to be granted the right to marry, they are not asking for something that can be adequately conceptualised by an ideal of equality that demands equal access to good and opportunities for all citizens of a polity. Nor do they ask for something that can adequately be expressed in classical liberal ideals. They ask, I believe, for the recognition, by their fellow citizens, of the depth and dignity of their sexuality; and they ask it from those of their fellow citizens who appear to believe that gay sexuality does not have the kind of depth that deserves to be celebrated in marriage.”

I would go further. The freedom to marry has traditionally been denied to all those people – women, servants, prisoners, native people, people with disabilities, and now gays – who were considered too infantile and morally irresponsible to make such an important life decision themselves. 

In equal measure, the granting to these people of the freedom to marry sent out the most powerful message possible that they are capable of morally responsible decisions, and by virtue of this are fully adult, fully citizens and fully human. 

Why can’t John Pilger see any of this? Is it just his distaste for marriage?

In his use of the phrases like “lifestyle liberalism” and “bourgeois acceptability” I hear echoes of the old left’s suspicion of homosexuals.

To those who held this suspicion, gays were too prone to being flippant sentimentalists, fawning courtiers and fascist closet-cases. We were too soft, too easily co-opted or just too different to be part of a movement that demanded solidarity. 

Suspicion of gays paralleled a similar, older suspicion of Jews, and it saw members of both groups being accepted within the left only if they showed extraordinary commitment (Pilger’s Wikileaking hero, Bradley Manning, being a case in point). 

Pilger isn’t the only contemporary leftist to echo the old refrain that gays are not on the side of real change.

Plenty of people on the left blamed the demand for marriage equality for the anti-gay backlash that saw George Bush’s re-elected in 2004. 

Guy Rundle even links marriage equality to the individualised, entitlement culture created by market fundamentalism, as if there is equivalence between the real freedom of two loving partners to marry and the faux freedom of an individual worker to negotiate wages and conditions with a multinational.

Is this just their gay problem or is it a symptom of something deeper?

It’s the result, I believe, of reducing the multi-faceted struggle for human freedom and dignity to one core demand.

Pilger is quite clear that demand is for economic equity: “The truth is that what matters to those who aspire to control our lives is not skin pigment or gender, or whether or not we are gay, but the class we serve.”

This is nonsense. Those who would control the lives of others are offended by any demand for freedom, dignity and equality, including those demands centred on love, sex and family. 

Until the left whole-heartedly accepts this, people like John Pilger will continue to misjudge the important role marriage equality has to play in creating a better world.