Same-sex marriage: coercion dolled up as civil rights

Elsewhere, there has been a strong strain of Orwellianism in the advance of gay marriage. States have been busy rewriting official documents to reflect their elevation of a new form of marriage to replace the old one. In France, Canada and elsewhere, words like husband and wife, even mother and father, are being replaced with what officials call more 'gender-neutral' - translation: utterly soulless - terms such as 'partner' or 'parent'. Some campaigners claim this is merely a practical step to reflect a new reality, but as Orwell knew only too well, language itself can be used to shape reality. In gay marriage's great rewriting and renaming of various communal identities that have been a core part of our societies for generations - from mother to wife to child - we can see the implicit diminishing of the value of a certain, more traditional way of life, with the old-style family unit itself being robbed of moral meaning and reduced to a business-like collection of partners and 'Parent 1' and 'Parent 2'. Here, too, there's a coercive component, an attempted top-down refashioning of identities that emerged from within communities over a great period of time.

Anyone who over the past few years has paid attention to the moral delegitimation of critics of gay marriage, to the state attacks on anti-gay marriage protesters, to the social ostracism of those who favour traditional marriage, to the attempt to force religious schools to teach about gay marriage, and to the Orwellian airbrushing from history of the words and identities cleaved to by the already married, cannot have been surprised by what happened to Eich. His fate wasn't the product of a handful of zealous campaigners going too far on Twitter - it was the end result of an intolerant culture, sometimes mob-like, sometimes state-enforced, that has been gaining ground for years, and which showed long before the elbowing aside of Eich that it was more than happy to ostracise, punish, criminalise and censor anyone who dared raised a peep of opposition to gay marriage. Coercion is built into gay marriage. They used to say love and marriage went together - in the gay-marriage movement, it's authoritarianism and marriage that are bedfellows.

The question is: why? Why has the gay-marriage issue been such a shrill and intolerant affair? It isn't because some campaigners are overly keen and a bit hotheaded; it's because gay marriage is not actually a campaign to expand equality, far less freedom, but is better seen as the main mechanism through which modern society now challenges traditional cultural norms, through which society expresses its dislocation from, and its growing disdain for, the old-world values of family life, family sovereignty, long-term commitment, loyalty, and so on.

Gay marriage has emerged as the perfect means through which our post-traditional, relativistic elites can both subtly denigrate older values and also impose a set of whole new values, related to viewing traditional married life and family integrity as problematic, and therefore more individuated, changeable forms of human relationships as good. And because this is fundamentally about eradicating old moral values and enforcing new ones, it constantly verges on being coercive, expressing a hostility towards its opponents that tends to treat them, not simply as wrong or pesky, but as actual blocks, as 'ideological enemies', to the elite's attempted enforcement of a new moral outlook.

One of the most striking developments in Western societies in recent years has been the sacralisation of homosexuality, the transformation of sexuality from a simple matter of who you have sex with into a set of values and behaviours. In a very short period of time, historically speaking, homosexuality has gone from being a crime to being possibly the most celebrated way of life in modern Western nations. Indeed, such has been the sacralisation of homosexuality, everywhere from popular culture to the political sphere, that the criminals are now those who criticise gay sex, not those who have it - as witnessed in such acts of authoritarianism as the imposing of a one-month prison sentence on a Swedish pastor who preached against homosexuality, the arrest of a preacher in Dundee for saying homosexuality was a sin, the banning of an advert in London that offended gays, the sending of American experts to Africa to preach about the virtues of homosexuality (in a similar way that Christian colonialists used to preach to Africans about the virtues of the Bible, including, er, anti-homosexual views), and so on. Gay-friendliness has become probably the key barometer of decency in the modern West; and those who fail the test can expect censorship or some other form of punishment.

There are various reasons for this move from decriminalising homosexuality, which was a very good thing, to the sanctification of homosexuality, which is just weird. But the main one is that over the past two decades, the gay issue has evolved as the perfect way for the new elites to distance themselves from values that have fallen out of their favour. We have seen the weaponisation of homosexuality, the transformation of it by sections of the political and media classes into the focal point for the expression of hostility to the straight world – which means not just people who are sexually straight, but also so-called straight culture and straight values, straightlacedness itself, ways of life that are based on commitment, privacy, familial sovereignty, things that tend to be viewed by the modern cultural clerisy as outdated or, worse, dangerous and destructive. The sacralisation of homosexuality corresponds precisely with the growing denigration by the state and others of the sphere of the family and the ideals of lifelong commitment, because celebrating gayness has become the main and most PC means through which traditional values might be dented and traditional identities called into question, even thrown open to heightened official scrutiny.

This is what explains both the peculiarly speedy and strikingly authoritarian way in which gay marriage has been adopted by governments across the West who otherwise care little for freedom and choice - because officials recognise in it the opportunity to push further their instinctive hostility towards traditional communal and familial ideals that to a large extent exist outside of the purview of the state. Understanding the impulse behind Western officialdom's feverish adoption of gay marriage is key to understanding what makes this new institution so illiberal and intolerant. Its great driving force is not any commitment to civil rights but rather an urge to coerce, a desire to reshape the views and ideals and habits of the public, to enforce a new morality that elevates individuation over family life, risk-awareness over commitment, and an openness to being guided through life by experts over loyalty to one's family unit or community.

So when you criticise gay marriage, you're not just criticising gay marriage, you're challenging a new moral framework carved out by those who apparently know better than us what our private lives and relationships should and shouldn't look like. You're not just an opponent of gay marriage - you're a moral heretic whose very thoughts and behaviour are seen as deviant, as running counter to a new, apparently better kind of morality. And that, as Eich's treatment and everything else that preceded it has shown us, simply will not be tolerated.