We’ve all heard about the African gay couple jailed for 14 years for their engagement ceremony. It’s an awful situation – but beyond the tragic personal consequences for this couple, what else does it tell us about our condition, and about the need for marriage equality? Will gay marriage ever spread beyond South Africa?
1. We must fight for the right to be who we are publicly. That is why it is so important to fight the Malawi verdict and attacks on gay pride marches. Making people accept us publicly is so much harder and so much more valuable that asking to be allowed to live our lives in secret or behind closed doors
2. The judge and the politicians know how crap their arguments are. They know that change will come, no matter how ‘unAfrican’ they think this couple is today (and they clearly also realise that the leading African nation, South Africa, already has equality – so it’s not an African thing!).
3. By trying to climb immediately to the gay rights summit, this couple’s sacrifice has done us all a service. Demanding the most fundamental and public right – the right to marry – has done much more to advance this debate, to expose millions to this debate, than if they had hidden their love or asked only for the right to be left in peace in private. Marriage is an insititution and a right everyone can relate to. When it is attacked and when individuals are attacked in this way it makes the attempts of the Malawi authorities to decide what Malawians need to be saved from so much more insulting. It makes it obvious to others that they are being insulted too.
4. This extreme case also alerts Westerners and others in similarly repressed countries to the basic fairness of the equality case. Even hard-core religious believers would find it hard to justify this court attack and in doing so they admit to themselves the reasonableness of the equality argument. If it is wrong to jail people for their love, how can it also be right to leave them in limbo? It can’t be.
