Earlier
this week the ACT Legislative Assembly passed a Marriage Equality Bill, making
it the first Australian jurisdiction to give same sex couples the right to
marry. I took a keen interest in the
coverage of this bill because I lived in Canberra for many years and came out
there. In some strange way I still think
of it as ‘home’. One of the women who
was interviewed in the news coverage was someone I shared a house with twenty
years ago. I was not surprised. She was what you might call the ‘marrying
kind’. She wanted nothing more than a
quiet life and a home and someone to love her.
Last I heard she’d found all of those things.
Because
I’ve never found someone to love me on anything more than a short-term basis,
the whole marriage debate has always seemed a little remote. It’s like the financial crisis in Iceland: it’s
important and there are real issues involved, but it doesn’t affect me
personally.
Five years
ago, the other dyke in the office asked me, ‘what do you think about gay
marriage?’ I had to stop and think about
it, because I hadn’t before that – not really.
‘I think it would be nice,’ I said finally, ‘If poof and dykes who want to get married,
could.’
Nice. That
word sticks in my memory. I didn’t think
of it as a human right issue. I didn’t
think it was important. I didn’t think
it would become the defining gay rights issue of the decade, and I certainly
didn’t think it was possible in my lifetime.
I was
wrong. I’ve been wrong about a lot of
political issues, usually because I’m pessimistic. Gay marriage is a case in point, because the last
five years have seen a major shift in attitudes towards it. Many of the more progressive states in the US
have legislated to allow it. Earlier
this year it became legal in New Zealand, and it’s now legal in the ACT. According to some polls, as many as 60% of
Australians are in favour of it. This
moved even my cranky old radical mother – now in her 70s – to ask, ‘Why are
they in favour of it? Do you think they
just want gays to shut up and leave them alone?’
‘No, I
don’t.’ I answered. ‘I think they think
it’s fair.’
Many Australians
– possibly most – now support marriage equality. They might not be gay rights advocates and
they might not be people I want to have over to dinner, but in their own way
they have heard the arguments about love and commitment and equality and they
think that marriage equality is fair enough.
Not
everybody, obviously. Not the 30,000
people and organisations that made submissions opposing marriage equality to a
Senate Inquiry last year (over 40,000 made submissions in favour of it). Or, more importantly, the former Prime
Minister, the Honourable Julia Gillard. Gillard
did not enforce a bloc vote in the Labor Party on the Marriage Equality
Amendment Bill in the federal parliament last year. Instead, she allowed a conscience vote, and
the bill failed. She herself voted
against it.
Gillard
does not have a reputation as a homophobe (in contrast to the then Leader of
the Opposition, now Prime Minister, Tony Abbott). Nonetheless, she made her opposition to gay
marriage known. In her recent
post-election interview with Anne Summers, this is what she had to say on the
issue:
‘If someone
had said to me, as a twenty year old, “what about you get into a white dress to
symbolise virginity and you get your father to walk you down an aisle and give
you away to a man who’s waiting at the end of the aisle,” I would have looked
with puzzlement, like, “What on earth would I do that for?” I’m conscious that maybe these views have
dated and maybe the way that people interpret marriage now is different to the
kinds of interpretations that I had. I
think that marriage in our society could play its traditional role and we could
come up with other institutions which value partnerships, which value love,
which value lifetime commitment. I have
a lifetime commitment and haven’t felt the need at any point to make that into
a marriage so, I know that’s a really different reasoning to most people come
at these issues but that’s my reasoning.’
To be sure,
her reasoning is very different to that of the former Leader of the Opposition
and now PM, Tony Abbott, but the effect is the same. Like many other people on the progressive
side of politics, I have a lot of respect for Gillard. She got a shitty deal as Prime Minister. She was treated disgracefully, and yet she
achieved a great deal. This, though, is
pure hypocrisy. Gillard doesn’t believe
in marriage? What did she do to
de-construct the institution of marriage that she has such issues with? Nothing, except to stop gay people from
getting married too. Gillard spent much of that interview telling us all how
equality of opportunity was what motivated her to go into politics, yet she
wants to deny gays and lesbians the same opportunities that she has. If she doesn’t want to get married, that’s
her right and her choice. But she has no right to force that choice on others.
Gillard
isn’t the only person who holds this view.
Indeed, many gays and lesbians hold some version of this view. I’ve heard it a lot, in the inner-city queer
circles that I move in: that marriage is an oppressive patriarchal institution
that poofs and dykes should not aspire to.
They could be right. One says, ‘I
learned about politics from a lesbian feminism that was critical of marriage,
and from a queer Stonewall rebellion whose street kids and drag queens look
nothing like today's new normals’.
A related
view is that the whole campaign for marriage equality is essentially misguided:
an expression of the increasing assimilation of the gay and lesbian community. Here’s an example: ‘gay marriage lobbyists misguidedly claim
they have majority support; that marriage is a right; and that gay marriage is
about equality. Their demand for gay marriage is anything but radical or
progressive, but rather conservative,’ one man writes. ‘It is about politics and conformity. It
relies on the presumption that marriage is virtuous: a standard to which we all
should aspire, a respectable status symbol and thus a desirable thing. The real
question that should be debated is not whether gay marriage should be allowed,
but rather, is marriage really something we need anymore? Perhaps we ought to
celebrate difference, rather than conformity’. [1]
Another expression
of the same sentiment goes something like this: ‘marriage is ok, but there are
more important things for queers to be worrying about’. For example, Dennis Altman, scion of the
Australian gay rights movement, wrote, ‘the marriage debate has opened up a
strange generational gap, where a few aging liberationists are uneasy with what
a younger generation of activists, often irrespective of their own sexuality,
see as a matter of basic human rights. We used to worry about being beaten up …
Young queers now worry about the cost of wedding receptions’.
Altman is
showing his age - and his ageism - in this.
Plenty of young queers are also opposed to gay marriage, just as plenty
of older ones support it, but Altman’s unease is not directed toward them. It reminds me of the resentment that some
older feminists show toward younger women who ‘don’t care’ about feminism. I can’t help wondering...isn’t that a good
thing? Isn’t it a good thing that many
gays and lesbians are thinking about celebrating their love rather than getting
beaten up? Isn’t that precisely what
those gay liberation struggles were trying to achieve?
More
importantly, I’m struck by how out of touch these arguments are. The marriage debate has galvanised a whole
generation of gays and lesbians, many of whom have never been engaged in
politics in their lives. That includes many
older ones too, who, despite Altman’s representation of the halcyon days of gay
rights, were never engaged. It’s engaged
straight people too, who are thinking and talking about a gay issue in a way
that they haven’t since AIDS came along, except that this time, many more of
them are on our side. The radicals don’t
care about any of that. The ‘people’,
the ‘normals’ – they are misguided. They
are victims of false consciousness. We know what’s best for them. We
know what’s really important and what you should care about. Sound familiar?
They could
be right, of course. Marriage equality
won’t stop people being beaten up. It
won’t cure homophobia. It won’t cure
inequality or discrimination. It might
help, or it might not. It might even
make things worse. We don’t know.
But here’s
a thought. It’s a hundred years this
year since Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under the King’s horse at the Derby in
England.
She was campaigning
for votes for women. This took decades to
achieve, as women’s suffrage was widely
opposed: by conservative men, by conservative women, and by some radical women
and men. Emma Goldman, heroine of the
left, was one who opposed it. ‘Woman's demand for equal suffrage is based
largely on the contention that woman must have the equal right in all affairs
of society,’ she wrote. ‘No one could,
possibly, refute that, if suffrage were a right. Alas, for the ignorance
of the human mind, which can see a right in an imposition’.[2]
Goldman
believed that voting is an imposition.
This is the very same argument that is made against marriage: that is a
burden rather than a right. Goldman
didn’t think voting would change anything.
She didn’t think it would really help women, or the poor, or the
oppressed. And some would still argue
that she was right, because it didn’t produce equality for women. It didn’t lead to social revolution. But who, today, would argue that women should
not have the vote?
[1] David Vakalis, ‘Marriage Rights?’, Arena, 2012
[2] Emma Goldman, ‘Woman suffrage,’ Anarchism
and other essays, 1917
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