Marriage is just words

Tony Abbott is looking for a way to get off the hook on gay marriage.

It's not even a first order human rights issue, but it has been portrayed as one, and anyone who opposes it is then wedged as a bigot.

The Irish referendum result shows just how quickly this issue is moving. If erstwhile conservative Catholic Ireland can vote "marriage equality" in, then Australia, which shares a lot of Celtic DNA with that other Old Country, could be close behind.

There is no point in being hit by the bus if it is going to come down the tunnel. Better to get it off the road before the next election if possible, but without losing the Christian right-wing vote.

But the solution to the dilemma is not to legislate for gay marriage, but to take marriage out of the legislation and for government to stop registering marriages of any sort.

For a government that draws its philosophical inspiration from theories of individual liberties and rights, and which boasts of the metres of red tape it has cut, legislatively enshrining what is, and what isn't, marriage is an unnecessary restriction on individuals, and an unnecessary bureaucratic financial burden.

On a reasonable historical perspective, the state has not been registering marriages for very long at all.

When Australia was first settled it is a reasonably safe bet that the number of irregular intimate relationships far exceeded the number of regular ones, and that is just amongst the European colonisers and the sailors that hove into port.

Defining marriage as between a man and a woman was actually only introduced into legislation by John Howard in 2004, although it had a predating common law existence.

The legal consequences of being married, as separate from being in a de facto relationship, of whatever kind, are minimal to non-existent. It doesn't affect property distribution, or access orders to children.

Theologically marriage is a sacrament that the participants actually confer on each other.

Or at least that's what the Anglican priest told my former wife and me when we confessed to being in a de facto relationship at the beginning of our marriage instruction.

According to him the ceremony was merely a post facto recognition of the intention to enter into a lifelong commitment. We were, in effect, already married.

In France you have two marriages – the one in the church and the one in the registry office.

Registering marriages is more an issue of being able to track people and paternity, than anything else.

But these days DNA is a surer way of tracking paternity than marriage registers ever were.

And there's more information about people on social media than there ever was in parish registers, so that genealogists will have a much richer future vein to mine, irrespective of whether marriages are registered or not.

If the state vacated the field, it would allow different concepts of marriage to propagate and bloom. You could even have private marriage registries if there were a demand, just like there are for shares.

I understand, and empathise, with those who want special recognition for their heterosexual relationships, and that the term "marriage" fulfils that need, but they are going to have to find another nomenclature for it.

Even if "marriage equality" is never legislated, you can't stop people referring to their relationship as anything that they want. So, just as "partner" has in some circles supplanted "husband" or "wife" so marriage to mean any cohabiting couples (or probably more than couples) will supplant whatever definition the law applies.

In the end it's not a matter of human rights, but semantics. And when it comes to the English language, it's the law of the jungle, with rampant memes consigning les aggressive ones to the archive of archaisms.

If the current definition of marriage has potency it is in what the institution of what I will call "heterosexual marriage" has to offer. This can't be protected by prescribing the words that people may use to refer to it. It has to be protected through exposition and defence of its substance.

I believe that the traditional family is special and deserves to be defended. Numbers of my gay friends agree.

But the reliance on legislation to try to protect the institution of heterosexual marriage ultimately undermines the institution. Because the defenders rely on the coercion of the legislation and forget to explain to their fellow citizens the benefits that they receive from marriage.

The nuclear family deserves to be defended, but the Marriage Act is functionally defunct.