F
Flopfoot
Guest
Hi, long time away (since before the forum changed to Discord and lost the back fence), hope to see some familiar faces here. Australia is soon to have a survey on gay marriage so I wrote this post on my facebook, but I wanted somewhere to share it with my family and other interested Catholics. Let me know if this is the wrong subforum or if the post is against the rules - all the links in the guiding threads are dead now so I had no help.
Total reading time: 20 minutes
The court ruled that the postal survey will go ahead, so papers should be arriving from the 12th of September. I’m voting no.
This isn’t part of my philosophy series that I haven’t worked on in some time, though I may touch on some ideas I was planning to talk about later. Mostly I want to write more in a “mind map” style covering lots of ideas and sometimes you might not be entirely sure how what I’m saying has to do with the survey at first, but that’s the nature of text.
/—
Is marriage a right? Or a slightly different question, must the government recognise and record marriages? SSM advocates argue that the government would have the same obligations towards gay couples as towards straight couples. But what if the government was just recognising marriages because it wanted to, and not because it had to? It could have its own reasons for wanting to recognise straight marriage that have nothing to do with love (hence why love isn’t mentioned in the marriage act); Patrick Langrell pointed out some time ago that it’s probably because it’s interested in the welfare of children.
But we can also look at how historically, both de facto relationships and separation were less common. You didn’t have people who were married on paper but not in practice, or the other way around. So it was a pretty simple way of keeping track of people’s situation. In recent times the government has had to copy over most of the things about marriage to apply to de facto relationships.
If the government did say that it wasn’t going to recognise any marriages officially any more and just treat us all as de facto, I think people would still get married. Religious people would probably handle the transition easiest since we care more about the church’s recognition than the government’s anyway. But other people would probably come around to the idea that it’s the commitment between the two people and the recognition by friends and family that makes them married even if they had no official body to recognise it, so they’d still go through the motions.
In a similar way, if gay people knew for sure that the government would never recognise their marriages, but still lived in a time where most people didn’t discriminate against them for being gay (like in the 21st century rather than the 20th), then I think they would just go through with unofficial marriage ceremonies. But since they have seen that a change in the law may be on the horizon, they put aside plans for an unofficial marriage ceremony and wait till they can have an official one.
Another question around rights is whether they can even apply to couples. All rights I can think of apply to individuals. All individuals already have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex, if such a thing is even a right. (Of course, this right is practically useless to someone who is same sex attracted.)
/—
I can think of three main “face value” reasons why someone would want to vote yes on this survey. 1. They’re gay and want to get married (or want it for the sake of a friend who is gay). 2. They want it as a symbol of how gays are equal now. 3. They think it’s necessary to make gays equal now. On this third point, I don’t think it’s necessary. I think gays can be equal without SSM. On the second point, I think the number of straight people who have had gay people’s back over the last 20 years, and the fact that even opponents of SSM always include somewhere in their argument “I don’t hate gays and I believe they are our equals” means any further symbolism is unnecessary. The culture has changed.
I mean yeah there are bullies out there, and that’s bad. But I reckon that campaigns saying “don’t bully someone for reason X” are not really the way, even though they seem easier to implement than campaigns saying “don’t bully anyone, ever”. Bullies look for any difference to justify their choice of target. Having groups that are considered “socially acceptable punching bags” makes their job easier, and we should avoid that, but they can still operate without it.
In the fight against the plebiscite, people pointed out that gays have higher suicide rates than normal, so we shouldn’t do something that might make them want to kill themselves. But even if a group didn’t have that pre-existing problem, we still wouldn’t want to increase the suicide rate of that group. Like in any other situation we balance the needs of a democracy against the emotional needs of individuals. Lately with trigger warnings and stuff the scales have tipped too far towards the latter. Of course we still should not use personal attacks in debates, but also the listeners should be responsible for managing their own emotions.
On the first point, some people want gays to be able to get married, but other people don’t want them to be able to. What makes their wants any different? The pro-SSM side claims over and over than it won’t affect anyone except the gays who are getting married, but the anti-SSM side can decide for themselves if they think it will affect them. This leads to the next couple of questions.
/—
What’s with the attacks against people who are opposed to SSM? Before the postal vote got the all clear, there was this argument that having a vote would allow people to bully gay people. It basically gave off the implication that most people opposed to SSM were “closet bullies” just waiting for a legitimate chance to hurt people. Apart from being mean, the argument doesn’t even make sense. If someone wanted to hurt gay people under the disguise of a campaign, they could have started as long ago as those who have been campaigning for SSM started.
The other thing I’ve seen is people claiming that “if you’re opposed to SSM, your only reason could be that you hate gay people”. Or a subtler variant was “if you campaign against SSM specifically and not against other things you are opposed to, then you must hate gay people on top of your usual reasons for being opposed to those things”. I answered the second one by pointing out that it’s normal to talk more about things that everyone else is talking about and that are currently being looked into by the government; it’s not as if the anti-SSM side brought the issue up in the first place.
It hurts a bit to be called a hater when you’re not one. I think equality is important, but I just don’t subscribe to everything (or even most of the things) the Tumblverse tells me to. I try to have my own ideas about things but my friends stereotype me as some ficticious 1950s conservative dude. My best friend at TAFE was gay and I never picked on them about it, though sometimes I wonder if my gay friends won’t want to hang out with me because I disagree with their cause.
But it’s also unfair. By analogy, imagine there was an issue important to me like not imprisoning asylum seekers in Nauru and you disagreed with me. Perhaps your argument is from economics or deaths-at-sea or queue-jumping. I might think your argument is stupid, but it wouldn’t be fair for me to refuse to take your argument at face value and say “that’s not your real reason, you’re actually just a racist”.
Also, if the government (which currently imprisons people on Nauru) offered to let the people vote about it, I’d jump at the chance. I wouldn’t say “no, the government shouldn’t give those opposed to me a say”. The normal thing to do is fight for the things you want to change until they get changed. Not to silence everyone who disagrees with you.
The argument that “you can only be motivated by hate” falls apart pretty easily considering how often I’ve seen it. I mean, someone could simply be going with the status quo. You need a reason to change things, you don’t need a reason to keep them the same (my motto is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). Or someone could believe in absolute morality and believe that the government should legislate based on morality. You probably don’t agree with them, but you have to respect that that is their reasoning.
There’s a weird idea I independently came up with that I’m calling the paradox of immorality. People often expect debaters on both sides to have equal experience on the thing they’re debating. But when you think something is immoral, you usually wouldn’t have any experience with it (with the exception of someone who was previously into it and then reformed). This works against me sometimes with arguments about violent video games - people who want to censor them have usually never played them, which is frustrating because I can’t debate them on the content of video games they’ve never played, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to be in the debate.
So I don’t know what it’s like to be gay. I never had to worry that someone might kill me. I don’t know what their relationships are like (though I’m told they’re pretty similar to straight relationships) etc. But I think it’s worth considering Justice Alito’s warning against politics motivated by revenge: “By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turnabout is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds.”
I wonder if, after the results are collected, some people who voted no would still be afraid to tell people what they voted even if the no vote wins?
/—
Gay marriage will definitely affect people other than the gays getting married. If you really wanted a relationship that didn’t affect anyone else, you’ve already got it. No one other than you would need to know about the commitments you’ve made to each other. One high school I went to was big on the connection between rights and responsibilities. If someone has a right, then others have a responsibility towards them.
Now a lot of the rights involved in marriage are granted to each other. If you want permission to visit someone in hospital, you have to give them permission to visit you in hospital too in this sort of arrangement. In a sense it’s sort of like an insurance contract (especially that bit about “in sickness and in health”) like you’re betting that you will be the one to get sick first and need your partner to stick by you, at the “cost” of you having to stick by them if the situation is reversed.
But there are also rights granted to married couples from people outside the marriage. Being able to get your partner citizenship, services from people working in the bridal industry, or even just the hospital staff recognising that this person is your next of kin. These are sometimes called the incidentals of marriage.
Now the gay marriage debate is different in Australia than it was in the USA because here you can get a lot of the incidentals without needing to be married. For example, your de facto partner can be your next of kin (which is basically what Obergfell v Hodges was about - the Supreme Court case that led to five of the justices somehow discovering that there had been a right to gay marriage in the American constitution all along, excuse the sarcasm).
And I don’t know anyone who wants to stop people from being able to make their de facto partner their next of kin. Though it brings up an interesting issue: if the rights of de facto couples aren’t being respected in Australia (some people say in practice rather than in law) then don’t we have to do something about that rather than the solution just being to give more people the option to marry? How does that help the gay or straight couples who want to remain de facto?
One way legalising gay marriage affects others is that it forces people to recognise those marriages, with whatever responsibilities that recognition confers. Religious people are not going to recognise gay marriages (even if legalised) as much as possible because to them marriage can only be between a man and a woman. This is different to how we treat current civil marriages. One interesting example: If you get civilly married, then divorced, then try to get married in the Catholic Church, they won’t let you because they recognise your first marriage (but they don’t recognise the divorce). However, if your first marriage was to someone of the same sex and you later “turned straight” somehow, then I suspect the Church would consider you to be free to marry. Another example: If you get civilly married (to someone of the opposite sex), even if you’re already a Catholic, you wouldn’t be committing a sin by having sex with your spouse because the Church recognises your marriage.
/—
The religious, social and historical aspects of marriage are still relevant to this debate that is (on its face) about changing the legal definition of marriage. Other things affect the law and the law affects other things. In the early 1800s in Australia, priests needed to be sent from England so that the Irish convicts could (among other things) get married. No one would have expected them to have a civil marriage (if that even existed back then) or to use the Anglican ministers that came with the English soldiers.
Many cultures around the world that never met each other independently came up with the idea of marriage. Now there are some cultures that turned out differently, but most had several things in common: It was between a man and a woman, it was permanent, and it was (partly) about having children together. Later religions showed up and started teaching the same thing. Sex, love, having children, and marriage, are all supposed to go together. Though it doesn’t stop your marriage from being valid if you don’t have children, or even if you’re not “in love” as long as you’re serious about sticking together for life.
When we got around to inventing laws and governments (long after we came up with marriage), they just went along with what people were already doing. The Australian government didn’t invent marriage as a gift to straight people, so it can’t now decide that it feels bad about excluding gay people from the gift and share it with them.
There’s a bit of a Nirvana fallacy when people say that marriage has already strayed from its roots and therefore may be altered further. If anything, it means we should be fighting even harder to restore it. And we have been doing so, but people don’t remember because the fights were in the past or were more difficult than this one.
Divorce, we hear, was a problem even back in Moses’ time. Adultery has probably been a problem ever since people found out that having sex feels good. And that results in people having children out of wedlock. Even today when people ask along the lines of “why haven’t anti-SSM campaigners tried to stop gay couples from having half-biological families?” Think about the practicalities of that. Say a lesbian gets pregnant in whatever way; are we supposed to make a law saying her partner can’t help her raise her child?
And there was possibly an even bigger fight than what’s going on now when Pope Paul VI wrote against using artificial contraceptives in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae”, but it wouldn’t have got as much publicity because it only affected Catholics. Heaps of them rejected the church’s teaching, but it was the price we had to pay for standing up for the truth.
Of course families that aren’t nuclear families are going to exist, and some kids will have to do without a mum or a dad through no one’s fault in particular, but what we are trying to defend is what should be the default, or the ideal.
A lot of the things that have damaged marriage in the past have been seen as unwelcome but inevitable due to humans being imperfect. But this latest assault comes from people who are trying to “improve” marriage, and you have to wonder if they even know the reasons why marriage was made the way it is in the first place.
/—
When people see the good that marriage and family is doing in society, they want to imitate it. A sad thing is that with gay marriage comes gay divorces, but I think that anyone entering into marriage at least intends for it to last forever. But still its curious how some people who aren’t religious and who know they could have the same life just being de facto, and who worry that ‘forever’ is too hard to commit to, still want to turn their relationships into marriages just because they see others doing it. Or how while some straight couples wish they could have as much sex as they want without risking getting pregnant, gay couples who don’t have that risk are going out of their way to get pregnant. Though there are certainly reasons to want children of your own apart from social imitation, especially in a country where it’s so hard to adopt.
But the flip side of this is people who don’t take marriage seriously. For these people, marriage is an easy way of getting things. One issue that has been quietly raised by the pro-SSM side is that even if you can get the same incidentals by becoming de facto, it’s easier to get them by marriage (you don’t even have to move in together). But before we say that the government should share this life hack with gay people, we should ask if it’s even a good thing for such a life hack to exist?
If you need your relationship recognised by the government for whatever reason, it’s much more difficult if you’re not married. They’ll look for evidence, not just that you are living together, but on what your personal relationship with each other is like. Whereas if you go to another country and get married, you can bring your spouse here and they get a bunch of rights with fewer hoops to jump through. The government trusts the meaning that the other country has given to marriage and/or that the fact you’ve given each other next of kin rights means you must be serious.
Now legalising gay marriage would make scams a bit more flexible, but the scams are going to exist either way. I’m more saying that we need to decide whether marriage should be something that’s easy to enter into or something that you have to prove you’re ready for - I think the latter is better (and it’s currently the practice of the church - your priest can make you go to pre-marriage classes etc. before you can get married).
/—
I want to take a quick look at the political history leading up to this survey. 2013: Labor promises SSM if elected. They lose. 2016: Labor promises SSM if elected. They lose again. Some people have accused the survey of being undemocratic, but they’re ignoring the democracy of how we got to it in the first place. The Liberal party is not really a party that brings about social change, regardless of how people in the party personally feel about it or whether it’s a good idea. You normally have to wait for Labor to get into power to process all your desired changes in a batch. So why are people demanding that the Liberal party legalise gay marriage directly? Don’t people deserve to get the party they voted for?
Tony Abbott promised a plebiscite if he won in 2016. Now considering he was personally opposed to SSM and that at the time the polls showed that a plebiscite probably would have resulted in a yes vote, I assumed he was planning to ignore the result just to buy himself three more years (he wasn’t our most honest prime minister). But then when Turnbull took over and kept Abbott’s plan, I assumed he would stick to the result and it was just a way of washing the Liberal party’s hands after all their Christian voters got mad about gay marriage being legalised. And when Labor decided to block the plebiscite, I wondered if it was more about trying to get the Liberals stuck in a dilemma than about protecting gay people from getting bullied.
But even if I thought we were going to lose a plebiscite, I still thought it would be good to have one. For one thing, it would show our politicians just how many of us were opposed to it; they’d be more willing to consider us in related legislation. Also, if someone was caught refusing to recognise gay marriage like in the USA, people wouldn’t say “you’re violating someone’s constitutional rights that they’ve retroactively always had”, they’d say “you’re violating a right that 60% of Australians recently decided they should have”. But people would probably be less inclined to fight it in such self-destructive ways anyway because they’d feel that losing the fight was more fair if it came from the people.
Now that the survey has almost arrived though, I can’t keep being pessimistic and saying this is just a convenient way to lose. People are seeing things like the petition to deregister a doctor and deciding that’s not the side they want to be on. Australia could be the country that halts the SSM momentum even after supposedly Catholic countries like Ireland and Malta legalised it.
A lot of advocates for SSM want to strip away all the context from the survey and say it’s just about the majority of gay couples who just want to live like everyone else and have no interest in the new social movements. In some ways it’s unfortunate for these people that the survey is happening now when we can’t help but see the issue in the context of several others, but there was never really a good time - a decade ago, Australia was more religious and there wouldn’t have been majority support.
In reality, SSM is in the middle of several big issues facing the world today. I’m gonna talk about religion, free speech, and the sociology of differences, and then I’m done (I promise).
/—
(continued in next comment due to post length)
Total reading time: 20 minutes
The court ruled that the postal survey will go ahead, so papers should be arriving from the 12th of September. I’m voting no.
This isn’t part of my philosophy series that I haven’t worked on in some time, though I may touch on some ideas I was planning to talk about later. Mostly I want to write more in a “mind map” style covering lots of ideas and sometimes you might not be entirely sure how what I’m saying has to do with the survey at first, but that’s the nature of text.
/—
Is marriage a right? Or a slightly different question, must the government recognise and record marriages? SSM advocates argue that the government would have the same obligations towards gay couples as towards straight couples. But what if the government was just recognising marriages because it wanted to, and not because it had to? It could have its own reasons for wanting to recognise straight marriage that have nothing to do with love (hence why love isn’t mentioned in the marriage act); Patrick Langrell pointed out some time ago that it’s probably because it’s interested in the welfare of children.
But we can also look at how historically, both de facto relationships and separation were less common. You didn’t have people who were married on paper but not in practice, or the other way around. So it was a pretty simple way of keeping track of people’s situation. In recent times the government has had to copy over most of the things about marriage to apply to de facto relationships.
If the government did say that it wasn’t going to recognise any marriages officially any more and just treat us all as de facto, I think people would still get married. Religious people would probably handle the transition easiest since we care more about the church’s recognition than the government’s anyway. But other people would probably come around to the idea that it’s the commitment between the two people and the recognition by friends and family that makes them married even if they had no official body to recognise it, so they’d still go through the motions.
In a similar way, if gay people knew for sure that the government would never recognise their marriages, but still lived in a time where most people didn’t discriminate against them for being gay (like in the 21st century rather than the 20th), then I think they would just go through with unofficial marriage ceremonies. But since they have seen that a change in the law may be on the horizon, they put aside plans for an unofficial marriage ceremony and wait till they can have an official one.
Another question around rights is whether they can even apply to couples. All rights I can think of apply to individuals. All individuals already have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex, if such a thing is even a right. (Of course, this right is practically useless to someone who is same sex attracted.)
/—
I can think of three main “face value” reasons why someone would want to vote yes on this survey. 1. They’re gay and want to get married (or want it for the sake of a friend who is gay). 2. They want it as a symbol of how gays are equal now. 3. They think it’s necessary to make gays equal now. On this third point, I don’t think it’s necessary. I think gays can be equal without SSM. On the second point, I think the number of straight people who have had gay people’s back over the last 20 years, and the fact that even opponents of SSM always include somewhere in their argument “I don’t hate gays and I believe they are our equals” means any further symbolism is unnecessary. The culture has changed.
I mean yeah there are bullies out there, and that’s bad. But I reckon that campaigns saying “don’t bully someone for reason X” are not really the way, even though they seem easier to implement than campaigns saying “don’t bully anyone, ever”. Bullies look for any difference to justify their choice of target. Having groups that are considered “socially acceptable punching bags” makes their job easier, and we should avoid that, but they can still operate without it.
In the fight against the plebiscite, people pointed out that gays have higher suicide rates than normal, so we shouldn’t do something that might make them want to kill themselves. But even if a group didn’t have that pre-existing problem, we still wouldn’t want to increase the suicide rate of that group. Like in any other situation we balance the needs of a democracy against the emotional needs of individuals. Lately with trigger warnings and stuff the scales have tipped too far towards the latter. Of course we still should not use personal attacks in debates, but also the listeners should be responsible for managing their own emotions.
On the first point, some people want gays to be able to get married, but other people don’t want them to be able to. What makes their wants any different? The pro-SSM side claims over and over than it won’t affect anyone except the gays who are getting married, but the anti-SSM side can decide for themselves if they think it will affect them. This leads to the next couple of questions.
/—
What’s with the attacks against people who are opposed to SSM? Before the postal vote got the all clear, there was this argument that having a vote would allow people to bully gay people. It basically gave off the implication that most people opposed to SSM were “closet bullies” just waiting for a legitimate chance to hurt people. Apart from being mean, the argument doesn’t even make sense. If someone wanted to hurt gay people under the disguise of a campaign, they could have started as long ago as those who have been campaigning for SSM started.
The other thing I’ve seen is people claiming that “if you’re opposed to SSM, your only reason could be that you hate gay people”. Or a subtler variant was “if you campaign against SSM specifically and not against other things you are opposed to, then you must hate gay people on top of your usual reasons for being opposed to those things”. I answered the second one by pointing out that it’s normal to talk more about things that everyone else is talking about and that are currently being looked into by the government; it’s not as if the anti-SSM side brought the issue up in the first place.
It hurts a bit to be called a hater when you’re not one. I think equality is important, but I just don’t subscribe to everything (or even most of the things) the Tumblverse tells me to. I try to have my own ideas about things but my friends stereotype me as some ficticious 1950s conservative dude. My best friend at TAFE was gay and I never picked on them about it, though sometimes I wonder if my gay friends won’t want to hang out with me because I disagree with their cause.
But it’s also unfair. By analogy, imagine there was an issue important to me like not imprisoning asylum seekers in Nauru and you disagreed with me. Perhaps your argument is from economics or deaths-at-sea or queue-jumping. I might think your argument is stupid, but it wouldn’t be fair for me to refuse to take your argument at face value and say “that’s not your real reason, you’re actually just a racist”.
Also, if the government (which currently imprisons people on Nauru) offered to let the people vote about it, I’d jump at the chance. I wouldn’t say “no, the government shouldn’t give those opposed to me a say”. The normal thing to do is fight for the things you want to change until they get changed. Not to silence everyone who disagrees with you.
The argument that “you can only be motivated by hate” falls apart pretty easily considering how often I’ve seen it. I mean, someone could simply be going with the status quo. You need a reason to change things, you don’t need a reason to keep them the same (my motto is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). Or someone could believe in absolute morality and believe that the government should legislate based on morality. You probably don’t agree with them, but you have to respect that that is their reasoning.
There’s a weird idea I independently came up with that I’m calling the paradox of immorality. People often expect debaters on both sides to have equal experience on the thing they’re debating. But when you think something is immoral, you usually wouldn’t have any experience with it (with the exception of someone who was previously into it and then reformed). This works against me sometimes with arguments about violent video games - people who want to censor them have usually never played them, which is frustrating because I can’t debate them on the content of video games they’ve never played, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to be in the debate.
So I don’t know what it’s like to be gay. I never had to worry that someone might kill me. I don’t know what their relationships are like (though I’m told they’re pretty similar to straight relationships) etc. But I think it’s worth considering Justice Alito’s warning against politics motivated by revenge: “By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas. Recalling the harsh treatment of gays and lesbians in the past, some may think that turnabout is fair play. But if that sentiment prevails, the Nation will experience bitter and lasting wounds.”
I wonder if, after the results are collected, some people who voted no would still be afraid to tell people what they voted even if the no vote wins?
/—
Gay marriage will definitely affect people other than the gays getting married. If you really wanted a relationship that didn’t affect anyone else, you’ve already got it. No one other than you would need to know about the commitments you’ve made to each other. One high school I went to was big on the connection between rights and responsibilities. If someone has a right, then others have a responsibility towards them.
Now a lot of the rights involved in marriage are granted to each other. If you want permission to visit someone in hospital, you have to give them permission to visit you in hospital too in this sort of arrangement. In a sense it’s sort of like an insurance contract (especially that bit about “in sickness and in health”) like you’re betting that you will be the one to get sick first and need your partner to stick by you, at the “cost” of you having to stick by them if the situation is reversed.
But there are also rights granted to married couples from people outside the marriage. Being able to get your partner citizenship, services from people working in the bridal industry, or even just the hospital staff recognising that this person is your next of kin. These are sometimes called the incidentals of marriage.
Now the gay marriage debate is different in Australia than it was in the USA because here you can get a lot of the incidentals without needing to be married. For example, your de facto partner can be your next of kin (which is basically what Obergfell v Hodges was about - the Supreme Court case that led to five of the justices somehow discovering that there had been a right to gay marriage in the American constitution all along, excuse the sarcasm).
And I don’t know anyone who wants to stop people from being able to make their de facto partner their next of kin. Though it brings up an interesting issue: if the rights of de facto couples aren’t being respected in Australia (some people say in practice rather than in law) then don’t we have to do something about that rather than the solution just being to give more people the option to marry? How does that help the gay or straight couples who want to remain de facto?
One way legalising gay marriage affects others is that it forces people to recognise those marriages, with whatever responsibilities that recognition confers. Religious people are not going to recognise gay marriages (even if legalised) as much as possible because to them marriage can only be between a man and a woman. This is different to how we treat current civil marriages. One interesting example: If you get civilly married, then divorced, then try to get married in the Catholic Church, they won’t let you because they recognise your first marriage (but they don’t recognise the divorce). However, if your first marriage was to someone of the same sex and you later “turned straight” somehow, then I suspect the Church would consider you to be free to marry. Another example: If you get civilly married (to someone of the opposite sex), even if you’re already a Catholic, you wouldn’t be committing a sin by having sex with your spouse because the Church recognises your marriage.
/—
The religious, social and historical aspects of marriage are still relevant to this debate that is (on its face) about changing the legal definition of marriage. Other things affect the law and the law affects other things. In the early 1800s in Australia, priests needed to be sent from England so that the Irish convicts could (among other things) get married. No one would have expected them to have a civil marriage (if that even existed back then) or to use the Anglican ministers that came with the English soldiers.
Many cultures around the world that never met each other independently came up with the idea of marriage. Now there are some cultures that turned out differently, but most had several things in common: It was between a man and a woman, it was permanent, and it was (partly) about having children together. Later religions showed up and started teaching the same thing. Sex, love, having children, and marriage, are all supposed to go together. Though it doesn’t stop your marriage from being valid if you don’t have children, or even if you’re not “in love” as long as you’re serious about sticking together for life.
When we got around to inventing laws and governments (long after we came up with marriage), they just went along with what people were already doing. The Australian government didn’t invent marriage as a gift to straight people, so it can’t now decide that it feels bad about excluding gay people from the gift and share it with them.
There’s a bit of a Nirvana fallacy when people say that marriage has already strayed from its roots and therefore may be altered further. If anything, it means we should be fighting even harder to restore it. And we have been doing so, but people don’t remember because the fights were in the past or were more difficult than this one.
Divorce, we hear, was a problem even back in Moses’ time. Adultery has probably been a problem ever since people found out that having sex feels good. And that results in people having children out of wedlock. Even today when people ask along the lines of “why haven’t anti-SSM campaigners tried to stop gay couples from having half-biological families?” Think about the practicalities of that. Say a lesbian gets pregnant in whatever way; are we supposed to make a law saying her partner can’t help her raise her child?
And there was possibly an even bigger fight than what’s going on now when Pope Paul VI wrote against using artificial contraceptives in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae”, but it wouldn’t have got as much publicity because it only affected Catholics. Heaps of them rejected the church’s teaching, but it was the price we had to pay for standing up for the truth.
Of course families that aren’t nuclear families are going to exist, and some kids will have to do without a mum or a dad through no one’s fault in particular, but what we are trying to defend is what should be the default, or the ideal.
A lot of the things that have damaged marriage in the past have been seen as unwelcome but inevitable due to humans being imperfect. But this latest assault comes from people who are trying to “improve” marriage, and you have to wonder if they even know the reasons why marriage was made the way it is in the first place.
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When people see the good that marriage and family is doing in society, they want to imitate it. A sad thing is that with gay marriage comes gay divorces, but I think that anyone entering into marriage at least intends for it to last forever. But still its curious how some people who aren’t religious and who know they could have the same life just being de facto, and who worry that ‘forever’ is too hard to commit to, still want to turn their relationships into marriages just because they see others doing it. Or how while some straight couples wish they could have as much sex as they want without risking getting pregnant, gay couples who don’t have that risk are going out of their way to get pregnant. Though there are certainly reasons to want children of your own apart from social imitation, especially in a country where it’s so hard to adopt.
But the flip side of this is people who don’t take marriage seriously. For these people, marriage is an easy way of getting things. One issue that has been quietly raised by the pro-SSM side is that even if you can get the same incidentals by becoming de facto, it’s easier to get them by marriage (you don’t even have to move in together). But before we say that the government should share this life hack with gay people, we should ask if it’s even a good thing for such a life hack to exist?
If you need your relationship recognised by the government for whatever reason, it’s much more difficult if you’re not married. They’ll look for evidence, not just that you are living together, but on what your personal relationship with each other is like. Whereas if you go to another country and get married, you can bring your spouse here and they get a bunch of rights with fewer hoops to jump through. The government trusts the meaning that the other country has given to marriage and/or that the fact you’ve given each other next of kin rights means you must be serious.
Now legalising gay marriage would make scams a bit more flexible, but the scams are going to exist either way. I’m more saying that we need to decide whether marriage should be something that’s easy to enter into or something that you have to prove you’re ready for - I think the latter is better (and it’s currently the practice of the church - your priest can make you go to pre-marriage classes etc. before you can get married).
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I want to take a quick look at the political history leading up to this survey. 2013: Labor promises SSM if elected. They lose. 2016: Labor promises SSM if elected. They lose again. Some people have accused the survey of being undemocratic, but they’re ignoring the democracy of how we got to it in the first place. The Liberal party is not really a party that brings about social change, regardless of how people in the party personally feel about it or whether it’s a good idea. You normally have to wait for Labor to get into power to process all your desired changes in a batch. So why are people demanding that the Liberal party legalise gay marriage directly? Don’t people deserve to get the party they voted for?
Tony Abbott promised a plebiscite if he won in 2016. Now considering he was personally opposed to SSM and that at the time the polls showed that a plebiscite probably would have resulted in a yes vote, I assumed he was planning to ignore the result just to buy himself three more years (he wasn’t our most honest prime minister). But then when Turnbull took over and kept Abbott’s plan, I assumed he would stick to the result and it was just a way of washing the Liberal party’s hands after all their Christian voters got mad about gay marriage being legalised. And when Labor decided to block the plebiscite, I wondered if it was more about trying to get the Liberals stuck in a dilemma than about protecting gay people from getting bullied.
But even if I thought we were going to lose a plebiscite, I still thought it would be good to have one. For one thing, it would show our politicians just how many of us were opposed to it; they’d be more willing to consider us in related legislation. Also, if someone was caught refusing to recognise gay marriage like in the USA, people wouldn’t say “you’re violating someone’s constitutional rights that they’ve retroactively always had”, they’d say “you’re violating a right that 60% of Australians recently decided they should have”. But people would probably be less inclined to fight it in such self-destructive ways anyway because they’d feel that losing the fight was more fair if it came from the people.
Now that the survey has almost arrived though, I can’t keep being pessimistic and saying this is just a convenient way to lose. People are seeing things like the petition to deregister a doctor and deciding that’s not the side they want to be on. Australia could be the country that halts the SSM momentum even after supposedly Catholic countries like Ireland and Malta legalised it.
A lot of advocates for SSM want to strip away all the context from the survey and say it’s just about the majority of gay couples who just want to live like everyone else and have no interest in the new social movements. In some ways it’s unfortunate for these people that the survey is happening now when we can’t help but see the issue in the context of several others, but there was never really a good time - a decade ago, Australia was more religious and there wouldn’t have been majority support.
In reality, SSM is in the middle of several big issues facing the world today. I’m gonna talk about religion, free speech, and the sociology of differences, and then I’m done (I promise).
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