Seeing red: why John Pilger is wrong on marriage equality

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.