ESSAY: LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE

Here is a new essay I’ve written about marriage inequality in my home country of Australia.

*********************

The institution of marriage is so much a part of life’s furniture that it is taken for granted by millions of Australians. We cannot imagine an Australia without it, so we do not bother to imagine it at all in a national or political sense. But for more than a million Australians, marriage cannot be taken for granted. It cannot be taken at all.
On the issue of same-sex marriage the Western tendency to deprioritise the social in favour of the economic, and Australian tendency to take good things for granted, collide. The absence of marriage equality from Australian life is harming the prospects of millions, and will end up hurting the institution and the country at large.
While it might be possible to achieve ‘back to the future’ policies in other fields (restricted banking and literacy in the classroom spring to mind) such manoeuvres are less plausible in the social field. One cannot put a life back in a box as though it were a piece of outdated technology. In the same way that women are not about to give up the workplace for the kitchen, gay men and lesbians are not returning to their closets.
This invites us then to ponder what management this progress requires, rather than debate whether we should reverse the progress. While gay rights movements have enjoyed rapid success in Australia – achieving a near legislative volte-face in just two generations – there is much they could not predict and which no social movement could control. In hindsight, Australia has successfully accorded a range of rights – mostly relating to private relations – to homosexuals. What we are yet to do is link them to the sorts of responsibilities that can give a full and balanced meaning to those rights. Like teenagers getting their hands on booze and cars and freedom from parental surveillance for the first time, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have enthusiastically taken up their new rights. But in giving permission to the sex we forgot to find ways to legitimise the relationships and love that usually go with it.
The absence of marriage and, importantly, the prospect of marriage, in these million plus lives, deny gay and lesbian Australians the best social support structure available in our society. For more than 150 years data on the effects of marriage has demonstrated that marriage builds happier, healthier and longer lives in general. While no two marriages are alike, the majority are roughly the same. Being a partner in a marriage indicates a range of astounding tendencies from saving on expensive care costs to steering one away from crime and delivering a sense of security that reduces stress and its ill-effects. Name another institution or government policy that can do all that.
In contrast, consider what the absence of role models, development paths and stability might do for those who cannot marry. Is there no connection between this rocky path and the disproportionate numbers of suicides and risky and addictive behaviours found in gay communities? Are we not denying the very best safety net of all to some of the people who need it most?
Such overwhelming evidence indicates that opponents of marriage equality are enraged not so much by the marriage aspect as the homosexual aspect. But herein lies the key to broad grassroots support for change.
Marriage is an excellent conservative institution, but gays’ getting married is for them the most radical way to express their commitment to each other.  Extending marriage is therefore a unique opportunity to bridge political and cultural divides.
Recognising marriage equality is a response to new facts about how gay men and lesbians lead and want to lead their lives. Adapting to this is the heart of progress in action: the application of new information to an existing problem, that of gay rights. By adding to rather than wrecking an existing institution or building a rival one, marriage equality also meets the core test of conservatism: guarding what works in order to save it from sacrifice at the altar of fashion. Marriage is an appropriate conservative way to channel equal opportunities into a broader moral framework of responsibilities.
All of this fits with the clear pattern of Western liberal history of including people in an institution when a good case is made for them to join. Whether this is the rights of workers to own property; indigenous Australians to be citizens; or women to vote these cases all set the precedents for allowing gays to marry.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
To be part of marriage means to be part of society. Take these simple tests:  were your parents married? Do you think your classmates from high school would have expected to marry?  How many single 40 year olds did you know as a child?  The answers almost certainly illustrate that marriage is a powerful norm.
And yet most gay and lesbian Australians have spent most of their lives believing marriage is not something they will experience. The empty feeling this produces is best captured by the actor Sir Ian MacKellen:
“It never crossed my mind that it’d ever be possible for me (to get married). That’s the scar that I and so many others bear — we believed ourselves to be second-rate citizens for so long, the idea of being able to say ‘This is my husband, these are my children’ was not an option.”
Perhaps it is the parents of gay children who are perhaps best placed to see that marriage is often the best shot their children will have at happiness. In hoping for happy children it is hard to see why one should get this chance and not the other. As the fears of gay parents shift from questions like ‘what will the neighbours think?’ and ‘I pray he doesn’t get AIDS’ – the question of marriage keeps rising to the surface. Why would any parent want to condemn their child – as the writer Jonathan Rauch describes it – to “a partnerless life in a sexual underworld.”
No families and couples I have interviewed want this insecure existence. I have spoken to couples from Brisbane who saved for scrimped for a year to fly to Canada to be married alone in a registry office; others who have left Australia because it was the only way to be with the one they loved. I’ve listened to mothers from Wollongong talk about the pain of seeing one daughter marry while the other is left in limbo. I have watched the frantic balancing act of gay politicians pushing uphill to change the law while desperately trying to keep their own personal lives together.  And across the board I found couples who feel the burden and responsibility of being public role models; fearing that if their relationship or marriage founders they will contribute to ruining the future for everyone. Most marriages struggle to stay in working order in the best of conditions. Nearly half of all opposite-sex marriages fail despite their total anonymity. So imagine how hard it is for same-sex relationships to survive this public pressure without the sophisticated social endorsement that opposite-sex marriages enjoy.
It makes it easy to wonder whether the walls of privacy around the likes of Penny Wong and Bob Brown tell us more about their own nature, or the nature of  Australia’s political atmosphere. Is it just a co-incidence that we know next to nothing about the family lives of our gay politicians? It is certainly a stark contrast with Tony Abbott putting his family life at the centre of his political pitch. The Rudds are not camera-shy, and the Obamas have made their marriage the centre of a global political brand.
Our tear-em-apart political culture seems to be indicative of a general lowest common denominator approach to public debates in Australia. Where the people who don’t gravitate to an easy centre are spun off like space debris, in this case implying to a wider audience that same-sex relationships are neither normal nor equal. Whatever the case, our leaders are certainly challenged rarely to stand up for marriage equality – which is not incidentally the majority view of Australians.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
The punters are racing ahead of the law, if opinion polls are to be believed: 55 to 60 percent of Australians now regularly tell pollsters they support marriage equality. The strength of this support remains unclear. Will it dissipate like support for euthanasia in the face of aggressive opposition, or founder when the choice is not about a general principle but a specific model as with an Australian Republic?
For the medium-term these are hypothetical questions. No major political party supports marriage equality and this quarantines discussion to the fringes of politics – Senate Inquiries, web petitions and queer magazines. The advantage of this political cul-de-sac is that it gives equality supporters time to mobilise the growing list of supportive data and hone arguments that engage the ‘middle Australians’ our politicians so fear. A longer debate also forces Australians to confront their own fears and prejudices. Would you be happy to take your kids to a wedding with two blokes walking down the aisle? What if one of the blokes is your brother? Do you really think gay relationships are as meaningful as your own?
Naturally, some Australians will take time to adjust to such ideas. With the elaborate sets of support and understanding for opposite-sex marriage having taken thousands of years to settle, it may take much longer than the 21 years since Denmark introduced the first gay weddings for same-sex marriage to catch up. But in taking time, campaigners may be giving Australia something much better. As the philosopher Alain de Botton writes: “you can’t legislate for humanity.” You can’t legislate for the feeling that you are OK as a person, the feeling that you and your relationship matter.  Only a supportive community can provide that, and only a full debate can guide Australia to that outcome.
>>>>>
Gay and lesbian Australians now enjoy tolerance, but not acceptance. What approval of same sex marriage would mean is acceptance by the rest of Australia. Such a view may surprise the many liberal Australians who now have gay friends and family at the core of their daily lives. Yet beyond geographical pockets, and the millions of individuals who do accept gays and lesbians for who they are and what they aspire to be, it cannot be said that acceptance is the social norm or the legal standard.  Once-a-year extravaganzas like the Sydney Mardi Gras are not a norm; a norm is what goes on in public every day when the cameras aren’t looking. And it is perhaps only the very ongoing public nature of a marriage that would bring Australians to a general state of acceptance, and best indicate to gay Australians that they are wanted.
Not So Private Lives , a recent research project by the University of Queensland shows more than 80% of 2,300 gay and lesbian Australians surveryed at length want the right to marry. The majority, including those in committed relationships, aspire to marriage in their own lives.  That means around one million of Australia’s estimated 1.3 million gays and lesbian supports marriage equality. And more than half a million of them want to marry. Imagine arbitrarily telling all of Canberra or the northern suburbs of Perth that they will never be allowed to marry.  Imagine telling the several hundred thousand children of same sex couples (whether from previous relationships, adoption, surrogacy, or an alternative arrangement) that you think their parents don’t deserve to marry like their friend’s parents.
Such gay exceptionalism is bizarre even by historical standards. While for decades governments refused to count indigenous Australians as people they still allowed them to marry in many circumstances.  Indeed, it is only children and gays who have been forbidden to marry in Australia. But unlike children, whose rights and choices are restricted in many areas for established legal reasons, gays are singled out in their inability to marry. Gays can buy cigarettes and alcohol, run companies, trade shares, and act as guardians to children; unlike children themselves. It is only marriage we bar them from.  And even though our churches do not propose to ban atheists from marriage, for example, they mostly oppose the idea of gay Christians from marrying. Indeed instead of opposing people living in sin as they claim, these churches are condemning gays to that fate. It is a curious country where this state of affairs reigns. It is a case of the law being used to punish good people.
>>>>>>>>
For gay men and lesbians, the prospect of marriage is tantalising – the opposite of the hidden lives that have been lived throughout Australia’s modern history. Above all, marriage is something that everyone understands, just as every gay man or lesbian yearns to be understood. Unlike a ‘civil union’ or ‘registered partnership’ or ‘deed of relationship’ no one needs to have the meaning of marriage explained to them.
But as with all forms of discrimination the type that surrounds gay relationships is corrosive on the victims. It’s rarely one personal act or one law that cements the inequality – it builds slowly over time. Personally, I realised early in discovering my sexuality that honesty meant I could not have a married future. It made me worry about disappointing my family. Having no personal experience to go by and no common language to draw on, my family in turn had no words with which to raise in conversation the relationships I did have. Very quickly, I went from a person shy of discussing private life with family to being unable to talk about it all. It cut me off from my parents right when they wanted to reach out most; it disabled my relationship with a gay sibling who dealt differently with their situation. And I cannot believe it would have been like this if I lived in a country where gay marriage and a language for gay relationships existed. Multiply that frustration and pain a million times over, and you get a sketch of what the status quo is doing to Australian families.
Would the creation of a rival to marriage through some kind of ‘civil union’ system be a compromise solution? No. This is not a case where one can become ‘more equal.’ One is either equal or not. And what would it mean for marriages made overseas? Would they finally gain recognition or will Australia continue to refuse to recognise them, courting a PR disaster to follow-up our new Indian predicament? Imagine if you were to suddenly become single in the eyes of the law while visiting Europe with your husband of 20 years.  It happens every day to foreigners visiting Australia where you must leave your same-sex marriage at the border along with your fruit and the soil on your shoes.
These scenarios are not the fair go we have all been taught to believe in. Indeed, in opposing marriage equality one is inherently opposing a fair go. You cannot support a ‘separate but equal’ stance, and pick and choose which marriages you recognise, and still claim to support a fair go. The positions are fundamentally incompatible.
‘Separate but equal’ and ‘We don’t like your foreign marriage’ is a class system of relationships where gays can never be part of the upper class. It is akin to telling a woman she is welcome to work at a certain company but telling her she is banned from promotion to management. It is akin to  telling an Indigenous Australian that he can only fly in economy or must stay on the mission.
Keeping prizes like marriage away from deserving and interested couples is the political version of ‘mean girl’ behaviour. It is unbecoming of a responsible middle power, and in contrast to our peers and closest allies. From Mexico City to Malmo; Lisbon to Lillehammer; Buenos Aires to Brussels and Boston and Birmingham our partners in the most advanced nations and leading economies have all introduced marriage equality.  All of our main Commonwealth peers have reformed their laws to offer marriage or marriage in all but name – leaving Australia in the company of the likes of Nigeria rather than Canada.
In the same week that Anthony Albanese tried and failed to win Australian Labor Party support for equality in June 2009, Albania cemented it’s transformation from backwater to beacon as marriage equality laws sailed through their parliament. If Nepal passes its widely-advertised marriage equality law in late 2010 as expected, Australia will be the only inhabited continent without marriage equality.
In that case we will literally be a fortress holding out against equality – not only in the face of our national tradition as an open and egalitarian land, but in the face of rationality itself.  We live in a world of crumbling borders, a world where our children are rightly told that they must work hard to improve themselves and seize the limited opportunities that exist to build a life equal to or better than that of their parents.  In such a world of a levelling playing field, how can it be that that we tell a million or more Australians that no matter what you do, you can never be acceptable to the institution of marriage? In doing so we tell these people that they can’t ever be good enough for us, their fellow Australians.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In a time when we all need to take on more responsibility to secure the future it seems odd that we would tell a million people to live for the minute and forget responsibility and family. At a time when many despair at fragmenting communities, and at a lack of leadership, it seems absurd that we would explicitly prevent the strengthening of those communities and allow our politicians to cower in front of a minority opposed to marriage equality.
In starker terms: let us all reflect on the fact that we would gag at news that a celebrant or priest had refused to marry an indigenous couple in 2010. We should be no less embarrassed by the fact that those Australians in same-sex relationships face this every day. The damage from this social exclusion is not limited to gays and lesbians. It affects their children, their wider families and their ability to participate fully in a productive Australian future.
It also affects everyone else in a marriage. Marriage has a special status partly because it helps to connect us all. Unlike other exclusive goods or clubs, if marriage is not ubiquitous amongst those who want it then it starts to lose meaning and cache. Denying marriage to this new group who want to join the club therefore degrades the status of every married person – it disconnects them.
When we think of the legacy we will leave to future generations, we must think of our families and well as our bank accounts. Our social capital is part of our wealth, and the strength of our families is the bedrock of future life chances. This can’t be separated from the need for marriage equality; the goals are one and the same. We cannot continue to Advance Australia Fair while leaving so many good Australians in our wake.
**
Ryan Heath is an Australian writer and Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

The institution of marriage is so much a part of life’s furniture that is taken for granted by millions of Australians. We cannot imagine an Australia without it, so we do not bother to imagine it at all in a national or political sense. But for more than a million Australians, marriage cannot be taken for granted. It cannot be taken at all.
On the issue of same-sex marriage the Western tendency to deprioritise the social in favour of the economic, and Australian tendency to take good things for granted, collide. The absence of marriage equality from Australian life is harming the prospects of millions, and will end up hurting the institution and the country at large.

While it might be possible to achieve ‘back to the future’ policies in other fields (restricted banking and literacy in the classroom spring to mind) such manoeuvres are less plausible in the social field. One cannot put a life back in a box as though it were a piece of outdated technology. In the same way that women are not about to give up the workplace for the kitchen, gay men and lesbians are not returning to their closets.
This invites us then to ponder what management this progress requires, rather than debate whether we should reverse the progress. While gay rights movements have enjoyed rapid success in Australia – achieving a near legislative volte-face in just two generations – there is much they could not predict and which no social movement could control. In hindsight, Australia has successfully accorded a range of rights – mostly relating to private relations – to homosexuals. What we are yet to do is link them to the sorts of responsibilities that can give a full and balanced meaning to those rights. Like teenagers getting their hands on booze and cars and freedom from parental surveillance for the first time, Australia’s gay and lesbian communities have enthusiastically taken up their new rights. But in giving permission to the sex we forgot to find ways to legitimise the relationships and love that usually go with it.
The absence of marriage and, importantly, the prospect of marriage, in these million plus lives, deny gay and lesbian Australians the best social support structure available in our society. For more than 150 years data on the effects of marriage has demonstrated that marriage builds happier, healthier and longer lives in general. While no two marriages are alike, the majority are roughly the same. Being a partner in a marriage indicates a range of astounding tendencies from saving on expensive care costs to steering one away from crime and delivering a sense of security that reduces stress and its ill-effects. Name another institution or government policy that can do all that.
In contrast, consider what the absence of role models, development paths and stability might do for those who cannot marry. Is there no connection between this rocky path and the disproportionate numbers of suicides and risky and addictive behaviours found in gay communities? Are we not denying the very best safety net of all to some of the people who need it most?
Such overwhelming evidence indicates that opponents of marriage equality are enraged not so much by the marriage aspect as the homosexual aspect. But herein lies the key to broad grassroots support for change.
Marriage is an excellent conservative institution, but gays’ getting married is for them the most radical way to express their commitment to each other.  Extending marriage is therefore a unique opportunity to bridge political and cultural divides. Recognising marriage equality is a response to new facts about how gay men and lesbians lead and want to lead their lives. Adapting to this is the heart of progress in action: the application of new information to an existing problem, that of gay rights. By adding to rather than wrecking an existing institution or building a rival one, marriage equality also meets the core test of conservatism: guarding what works in order to save it from sacrifice at the altar of fashion. Marriage is an appropriate conservative way to channel equal opportunities into a broader moral framework of responsibilities.
All of this fits with the clear pattern of Western liberal history of including people in an institution when a good case is made for them to join. Whether this is the rights of workers to own property; indigenous Australians to be citizens; or women to vote these cases all set the precedents for allowing gays to marry.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
To be part of marriage means to be part of society. Take these simple tests:  were your parents married? Do you think your classmates from high school would have expected to marry?  How many single 40 year olds did you know as a child?  The answers almost certainly illustrate that marriage is a powerful norm.
And yet most gay and lesbian Australians have spent most of their lives believing marriage is not something they will experience. The empty feeling this produces is best captured by the actor Sir Ian MacKellen: ”It never crossed my mind that it’d ever be possible for me (to get married). That’s the scar that I and so many others bear — we believed ourselves to be second-rate citizens for so long, the idea of being able to say ‘This is my husband, these are my children’ was not an option.”
Perhaps it is the parents of gay children who are perhaps best placed to see that marriage is often the best shot their children will have at happiness. In hoping for happy children it is hard to see why one should get this chance and not the other. As the fears of gay parents shift from questions like ‘what will the neighbours think?’ and ‘I pray he doesn’t get AIDS’ – the question of marriage keeps rising to the surface. Why would any parent want to condemn their child – as the writer Jonathan Rauch describes it – to “a partnerless life in a sexual underworld.”

No families and couples I have interviewed want this insecure existence. I have spoken to couples from Brisbane who saved for scrimped for a year to fly to Canada to be married alone in a registry office; others who have left Australia because it was the only way to be with the one they loved. I’ve listened to mothers from Wollongong talk about the pain of seeing one daughter marry while the other is left in limbo. I have watched the frantic balancing act of gay politicians pushing uphill to change the law while desperately trying to keep their own personal lives together.  And across the board I found couples who feel the burden and responsibility of being public role models; fearing that if their relationship or marriage founders they will contribute to ruining the future for everyone. Most marriages struggle to stay in working order in the best of conditions. Nearly half of all opposite-sex marriages fail despite their total anonymity. So imagine how hard it is for same-sex relationships to survive this public pressure without the sophisticated social endorsement that opposite-sex marriages enjoy.

It makes it easy to wonder whether the walls of privacy around the likes of Penny Wong and Bob Brown tell us more about their own nature, or the nature of  Australia’s political atmosphere. Is it just a co-incidence that we know next to nothing about the family lives of our gay politicians? It is certainly a stark contrast with Tony Abbott putting his family life at the centre of his political pitch. The Rudds are not camera-shy, and the Obamas have made their marriage the centre of a global political brand.
Our tear-em-apart political culture seems to be indicative of a general lowest common denominator approach to public debates in Australia. Where the people who don’t gravitate to an easy centre are spun off like space debris, in this case implying to a wider audience that same-sex relationships are neither normal nor equal. Whatever the case, our leaders are certainly challenged rarely to stand up for marriage equality – which is not incidentally the majority view of Australians.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
The punters are racing ahead of the law, if opinion polls are to be believed: 55 to 60 percent of Australians now regularly tell pollsters they support marriage equality. The strength of this support remains unclear. Will it dissipate like support for euthanasia in the face of aggressive opposition, or founder when the choice is not about a general principle but a specific model as with an Australian Republic?
For the medium-term these are hypothetical questions. No major political party supports marriage equality and this quarantines discussion to the fringes of politics – Senate Inquiries, web petitions and queer magazines. The advantage of this political cul-de-sac is that it gives equality supporters time to mobilise the growing list of supportive data and hone arguments that engage the ‘middle Australians’ our politicians so fear. A longer debate also forces Australians to confront their own fears and prejudices. Would you be happy to take your kids to a wedding with two blokes walking down the aisle? What if one of the blokes is your brother? Do you really think gay relationships are as meaningful as your own?
Naturally, some Australians will take time to adjust to such ideas. With the elaborate sets of support and understanding for opposite-sex marriage having taken thousands of years to settle, it may take much longer than the 21 years since Denmark introduced the first gay weddings for same-sex marriage to catch up. But in taking time, campaigners may be giving Australia something much better. As the philosopher Alain de Botton writes: “you can’t legislate for humanity.” You can’t legislate for the feeling that you are OK as a person, the feeling that you and your relationship matter.  Only a supportive community can provide that, and only a full debate can guide Australia to that outcome.

>>>>>
Gay and lesbian Australians now enjoy tolerance, but not acceptance. What approval of same sex marriage would mean is acceptance by the rest of Australia. Such a view may surprise the many liberal Australians who now have gay friends and family at the core of their daily lives. Yet beyond geographical pockets, and the millions of individuals who do accept gays and lesbians for who they are and what they aspire to be, it cannot be said that acceptance is the social norm or the legal standard.  Once-a-year extravaganzas like the Sydney Mardi Gras are not a norm; a norm is what goes on in public every day when the cameras aren’t looking. And it is perhaps only the very ongoing public nature of a marriage that would bring Australians to a general state of acceptance, and best indicate to gay Australians that they are wanted.

Not So Private Lives , a recent research project by the University of Queensland shows more than 80% of 2,300 gay and lesbian Australians surveryed at length want the right to marry. The majority, including those in committed relationships, aspire to marriage in their own lives.  That means around one million of Australia’s estimated 1.3 million gays and lesbian supports marriage equality. And more than half a million of them want to marry. Imagine arbitrarily telling all of Canberra or the northern suburbs of Perth that they will never be allowed to marry.  Imagine telling the several hundred thousand children of same sex couples (whether from previous relationships, adoption, surrogacy, or an alternative arrangement) that you think their parents don’t deserve to marry like their friend’s parents.
Such gay exceptionalism is bizarre even by historical standards. While for decades governments refused to count indigenous Australians as people they still allowed them to marry in many circumstances.  Indeed, it is only children and gays who have been forbidden to marry in Australia. But unlike children, whose rights and choices are restricted in many areas for established legal reasons, gays are singled out in their inability to marry. Gays can buy cigarettes and alcohol, run companies, trade shares, and act as guardians to children; unlike children themselves. It is only marriage we bar them from.  And even though our churches do not propose to ban atheists from marriage, for example, they mostly oppose the idea of gay Christians from marrying. Indeed instead of opposing people living in sin as they claim, these churches are condemning gays to that fate. It is a curious country where this state of affairs reigns. It is a case of the law being used to punish good people.

>>>>>>>>
For gay men and lesbians, the prospect of marriage is tantalising – the opposite of the hidden lives that have been lived throughout Australia’s modern history. Above all, marriage is something that everyone understands, just as every gay man or lesbian yearns to be understood. Unlike a ‘civil union’ or ‘registered partnership’ or ‘deed of relationship’ no one needs to have the meaning of marriage explained to them.
But as with all forms of discrimination the type that surrounds gay relationships is corrosive on the victims. It’s rarely one personal act or one law that cements the inequality – it builds slowly over time. Personally, I realised early in discovering my sexuality that honesty meant I could not have a married future. It made me worry about disappointing my family. Having no personal experience to go by and no common language to draw on, my family in turn had no words with which to raise in conversation the relationships I did have. Very quickly, I went from a person shy of discussing private life with family to being unable to talk about it all. It cut me off from my parents right when they wanted to reach out most; it disabled my relationship with a gay sibling who dealt differently with their situation. And I cannot believe it would have been like this if I lived in a country where gay marriage and a language for gay relationships existed. Multiply that frustration and pain a million times over, and you get a sketch of what the status quo is doing to Australian families.
Would the creation of a rival to marriage through some kind of ‘civil union’ system be a compromise solution? No. This is not a case where one can become ‘more equal.’ One is either equal or not. And what would it mean for marriages made overseas? Would they finally gain recognition or will Australia continue to refuse to recognise them, courting a PR disaster to follow-up our new Indian predicament? Imagine if you were to suddenly become single in the eyes of the law while visiting Europe with your husband of 20 years.  It happens every day to foreigners visiting Australia where you must leave your same-sex marriage at the border along with your fruit and the soil on your shoes.
These scenarios are not the fair go we have all been taught to believe in. Indeed, in opposing marriage equality one is inherently opposing a fair go. You cannot support a ‘separate but equal’ stance, and pick and choose which marriages you recognise, and still claim to support a fair go. The positions are fundamentally incompatible.
‘Separate but equal’ and ‘We don’t like your foreign marriage’ is a class system of relationships where gays can never be part of the upper class. It is akin to telling a woman she is welcome to work at a certain company but telling her she is banned from promotion to management. It is akin to  telling an Indigenous Australian that he can only fly in economy or must stay on the mission.
Keeping prizes like marriage away from deserving and interested couples is the political version of ‘mean girl’ behaviour. It is unbecoming of a responsible middle power, and in contrast to our peers and closest allies. From Mexico City to Malmo; Lisbon to Lillehammer; Buenos Aires to Brussels and Boston and Birmingham our partners in the most advanced nations and leading economies have all introduced marriage equality.  All of our main Commonwealth peers have reformed their laws to offer marriage or marriage in all but name – leaving Australia in the company of the likes of Nigeria rather than Canada.
In the same week that Anthony Albanese tried and failed to win Australian Labor Party support for equality in June 2009, Albania cemented it’s transformation from backwater to beacon as marriage equality laws sailed through their parliament. If Nepal passes its widely-advertised marriage equality law in late 2010 as expected, Australia will be the only inhabited continent without marriage equality.
In that case we will literally be a fortress holding out against equality – not only in the face of our national tradition as an open and egalitarian land, but in the face of rationality itself.  We live in a world of crumbling borders, a world where our children are rightly told that they must work hard to improve themselves and seize the limited opportunities that exist to build a life equal to or better than that of their parents.  In such a world of a levelling playing field, how can it be that that we tell a million or more Australians that no matter what you do, you can never be acceptable to the institution of marriage? In doing so we tell these people that they can’t ever be good enough for us, their fellow Australians.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In a time when we all need to take on more responsibility to secure the future it seems odd that we would tell a million people to live for the minute and forget responsibility and family. At a time when many despair at fragmenting communities, and at a lack of leadership, it seems absurd that we would explicitly prevent the strengthening of those communities and allow our politicians to cower in front of a minority opposed to marriage equality.
In starker terms: let us all reflect on the fact that we would gag at news that a celebrant or priest had refused to marry an indigenous couple in 2010. We should be no less embarrassed by the fact that those Australians in same-sex relationships face this every day. The damage from this social exclusion is not limited to gays and lesbians. It affects their children, their wider families and their ability to participate fully in a productive Australian future.
It also affects everyone else in a marriage. Marriage has a special status partly because it helps to connect us all. Unlike other exclusive goods or clubs, if marriage is not ubiquitous amongst those who want it then it starts to lose meaning and cache. Denying marriage to this new group who want to join the club therefore degrades the status of every married person – it disconnects them.
When we think of the legacy we will leave to future generations, we must think of our families and well as our bank accounts. Our social capital is part of our wealth, and the strength of our families is the bedrock of future life chances. This can’t be separated from the need for marriage equality; the goals are one and the same. We cannot continue to Advance Australia Fair while leaving so many good Australians in our wake.
**

Ryan Heath is an Australian writer and Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Australia, Marriage, Personal Stories. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a comment