A Persistent Argument – Gay Marriage and "Non-Biological" Family creation.

There is an argument against the removal of gender from Australia’s’ marriage legislation; changes that would permit same-sex couples to be married. This argument usually uses obscure language like “the grammar of society” to make certain dog-whistle points that you either will agree with or not understand. Still it has considerable currency. For example it was recently published on the ABC Religion and Ethics page. It is possibly the second loudest argument against gay marriage after just quoting religious texts out of context.

I’ve attempted to improve the arguments’ clarity and have identified it as having three steps;

1. Reserving marriage as a rite for heterosexual couples maintains “biological” family creation as normal over other forms,

2. This is a positive effect.

3. Therefore marriage legislation should continue to prevent same-sex couples from being married.

My goal is to lay out what in the real world the argument is actually describing and whether it makes any case for reserving marriage as a rite for heterosexual couples in Australia.

To discuss point one we need to recognize that there are many ways in which an adult can be in the parenting role with a child. A man and a woman can “love each other very much” as we like to tell children and their horizontal dance in bed can summon a stork in the traditional manner. These two people can maintain a relationship together in which they fairly exclusively co-parent the child. In lieu of a better term I’ll call this “biological family creation”.

Foster care and adoption are obvious alternatives to this. Blended families are even more common and can produce situations where a child has more than two adults who play some kind of parenting role, and where clear definitions of what mum and dad means and who holds those roles, don’t hold up. It can be up to the children as they age to say who their “real” parents are based on who does the parenting. They may nominate more than two.

In a much smaller number of cases people enlist IVF technology to assist in reproduction. Some of these technologies through the use of donor sperm mean that one genetic parent is never involved at all in parenting or legally defined as a parent even before conception. There is also the use of surrogate mothers where women bear children for other couples to raise. Sometimes the child is genetically unrelated to the woman who bears them, through artificial insemination, but it is also possible that the woman’s own eggs are fertilized by one of the parents-to-be.

All of these forms of family creation, from the most common of blended families to the least common use of surrogacy, can occur in opposite-sex parent families. However, heterosexual relationships can mimic successfully the mum-dad-stork situation regardless of how they came to parent (foster, IVF, blended families). Outsiders are able to simply assume that the mother of a child born in another woman’s womb, or the father of an adopted child are in fact biological parents. This is not disrupted by single-parent situations either. Biological family creation can be assumed whether or not it has occurred.

Same-sex-parent families are different. They can’t successfully mimic families that are “biologically created”. (Note: I am really disliking this term but struggling to come up with an alternative). It’s obvious that a child with two parents of the same sex is part of a family that has been created through foster care or adoption, or as a blended family or with some form of assisted reproduction. This means that same-sex-parent families oblige schools, other institutions and the general public to recognize non-biological families in a way that all the heterosexual versions never did.

The particular role that gay marriage plays is that it makes same-sex-parent families public and undeniable. The last defense for people who wish to minimize acknowledging families created by non-biological means (after reading heterosexual parents as biological parents regardless) is to simply deny the homosexual family. The mothers’ partner is not accepted as the child’s parent - as their mother - but merely as the mother’s partner. This can be done even despite gay marriage but it’s harder to do with it. Certainly there is some obstacle that has been removed – at an institutional level – when gay parents can use the word marriage in terms of the recognition of their families.

Now that we’ve drawn the long bow between gay marriage and the normalization of non-biological family creation we have to ask the question, is this a bad thing? The answer to this lies partly in separating out two meanings of normalization.

On the one hand normal is a label and a description that justifies certain default privileges. This is generally a sucky situation for anyone who lies outside of the norm. For the children of non-biologically created families being treated as ab-normal is not great.

On this level if extending marriage to same-sex-parents does something to normalize and oblige the celebration of the non-biologically created family it would do a good thing for those families. This will be of benefit to heterosexual parents and their children of non-biologically created families too. Furthermore, the cost for biologically created families will only be the loss of bullying privileges, not an “ab-normalisation” of their own situation. It’s a win – win for the children because normal is being broadened not merely shifted.

On the other hand, normalisation is the establishing of norms – the limits of our usual choices. (Where the first type of normal is descriptive, the second is prescriptive.) Norms can be simply such matters as talking in turn or how much of the human body can be seen in public. We have successfully “normed” breastfeeding in public from a previous norm of huddling in change rooms. People can still make choices outside of norms – it’s just harder to do because you have to confront a tide of expectation and surprise. It also simply doesn’t occur to many people to go against norms. At their strongest norms are internalized and assumed. 

At the moment it is a norm in Australia for people to biologically create their families.  By this I mean that most people assume that to have a family they will have heterosexual sex with someone else and subsequently co-parent with them. Some people anticipate fostering or adoption rather than having their own kids but most don’t. Gay men and lesbians often assume that they will not have kids because this “normal” option is not open to them.

Changing what is considered normal in terms of family creation will potentially change people’s expectations and thus their choices. The increasing normalization of foster care hopefully means more people consider this an option when starting their own families. That’s the explicit intent of the advertising by foster care agencies. Given the terrible shortage of parents prepared to foster compared to kids in need this must be considered a great thing.

But could it go too far? To an extent the stolen generations or the historic forced adoptions placed on unwed mothers in this country are cases of fostering / adoption becoming a greater default than is desirable. However, to a greater extent those tragedies are borne of the racism and lack of consent that polluted them. Still they affect our imagination when we consider what an increased trend towards fostering and adoption as means of family creation might look like.

And what about IVF and surrogacy? Could that become increasingly popular if norms privelaging biological family creation were relaxed? The economic conditions for such a situation are there given that the best age biologically for pregnancy is currently the worst financial time for it. Economically it might make sense if women paid their way through higher education by bearing children for people like themselves with a decade of post graduation income to raise the child with.

Most of us would not be comfortable with these kinds of situations becoming more normal however. Whether a child’s separation from their genetic parents is due to fostering, or IVF or surrogacy we recognize this includes issues for children. This may just be in such a simple matter of access to medical history, but also for some people in terms of identity. Surrogacy raises additional concerns about the commodification of pregnancy and the exploitation of the poor. IVF technology has its own unique bio-ethics concerns.

Fostering and adoption can also move children from poor to rich families when a more just solution would be to address people’s poverty. Given the overlay of class and race in Australia, fostering and adoption can have implications for indigenous self-determination in particular. The national rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care in 2012 was 10 times the rate for non-Indigenous children (AIHW, 2012). This is only partly remedied by a focus on kinship care where children are placed by priority with extended family members.

Whether or not a ballooning in other methods of family creation would eventuate from the de-norming of biological family creation involves huge speculation. What can be said is that the norming of biological family creation may be part of what restricts these kind of scenarios. Of course numerous other restricting norms can be imagined including ones specific to surrogacy for example, or to some fostering situations but not others for example. Overall norming non-biological family creation may be a good thing (making many more kids feel normal), but we can imagine it could have some negative effects we will need to address.

This brings us to the final point. If gay marriage has some correlation (albeit a weak one) to norming non-biological family creation and norming non-biological families might have some negative effects is this sufficient to oppose gay marriage? I think the answer to that is no based not only on the gaps and stretches in the steps taken so far but on the fact that this last step is not a necessary conclusion.

Firstly it is disingenuous, in the context of arguing against gay marriage, to suggest that marriage is only about family creation. Marriage is a public measure of commitment and “seriousness” for any relationship. Marriage, as a commitment to one’s partner for life, has historically legitimised sexual activity and you only have to consider the use of contraception in married relationships to realize that most everybody knows sex is about more than making babies. It should be clear that restricting marriage to heterosexual people is entirely consistent with some group’s expectation of celibacy for homosexual people. This shouldn’t be something that the state gets involved in. Churches can use their own specific marriage rites to legitimize sexuality according to their religion.

Furthermore marriage is a public act which communicates to the wider community your relationship status and thus draws on community support for that relationship. It’s taking yourself and partner off the market by “putting a ring on it.” If same sex relationships, their communities and their children will benefit from greater social support for permanence in relationships then we should enlist marriage as way to provide this.

The reality is that the big drivers for non-biologically created families are not gay and lesbian couples wanting to marry. Denying same-sex marriage because we anticipate some dystopian future in which the problems of non-biologically created families overwhelm us – like something out of Brave New World – strikes me as simply making lesbians and gay men the scapegoats of society’s direction. We have created an economy that requires study and work through ones easiest childbearing years just in order to think about home ownership. We have created the often racially based inter-generational poverty that partly drives kids into fostering and adoption situations. It is heterosexual couples who first sought the technologies of IVF and for whom they have been developed. None of this is affected by withholding a potential benefit to same-sex couples, their families and their communities.

Personally I think we went wrong when we normalized nuclear families and made an idol of parents’ rights. This model of raising kids requires people to have their “own” kids to be in the child-raising game. That’s a tragic loss of the gifts of many people unless they create their own families, non-biologically if necessary. It seems stupid that we have created this forced choice though to be fair we were encouraged by marketers to do so. Nothing consumes like a society in nuclear families.

Ultimately I think gay marriage has become inevitable because too many high profile people have compared same-sex relationships to dog fucking for people to accept anything less. The debate has been almost entirely framed by what people think about homosexual sex, in the nastiest of terms. Now too much “face” is affected by the issue for a continued restriction of marriage to be heard (by either side) as anything other than a win for homophobia.

When we consider the issue from a direction other than a disapproval of homosexuality as this argument tries to do I’m still unconvinced. Although this argument gets a lot of airplay I don’t think it shows that we shouldn’t remove gender from Australia marriage legislation. We should address our concerns about non-biological family creation in other ways. I’m certainly open to the opinion that we should remove all marriage from the state all together –some congregations of different faiths will choose to marry gay people and some wont - but keeping gendered marriage preserved in our legislation and preventing gay marriage is something I hope will soon end. 

Gay rights for Straights!

O.k., the last post tried to address a question; “Why do Christians receive very little flack for their negative views of sex before marriage, and a much greater and more virulent amount for their disapproval of homosexuality?” 

I never really could get stuck into answering it. The problem was that the question contained too many assumptions and prejudices. I spent the whole post deconstructing the question. It turned out to be the wrong approach to the topic that I want to address, namely that the conversation over whether gay people should have sex (Are you paying close attention gay people? Or are you over it?) is actually a question in which people who aren't gay are attempting to resolve arguments that don’t particularly have anything to do with gay peoples lives. Gay sex is the site over which non-gay specific battles are being fought (hence the title of this post).

Firstly we should recognize that the question as to whether or not gay people should have sex is in fact a transformation of another question; whether or not people should have gay sex. (You may have to read them closely to notice the difference). What has caused this transformation is that we have a concept of gay people not just gay sex now. We have such a concept largely because we have a concept of heterosexual people. Men and women do not generally view their relationships as an obligation to come together and commit the gross indecency of sex for the purposes of procreation according to their parents’ wishes, except perhaps if they’re royals. Instead heterosexual relationships are viewed as consequences of deep attraction by people seeking life partners. That attraction is not just physical. It is a type of love that while different to the love of parent to child is no less love. One aspect that distinguishes that love from others is the appropriateness of its physical expression in sex. The experience of that love for people of the opposite gender is what we understand by heterosexuality.

The Christian bible was written long before any common concept of heterosexuality permeated society. In fact a darn good case can be made for blaming the Bible for our concept of sexuality (particularly Paul) and the whole modern relationship between sex and love – but it’s a complicated one and it took several centuries for it to bear fruit. I won’t go into it here. It’s sufficient to say that in Christendom until relatively recently sexual expression of any kind was not generally treated as the consequence of sexuality. Homosexuality has been historically understood as just the pursuit of a base pleasure that anyone might enjoy, or as an act of deliberate rebellion.

Sexuality and its benefits is the first subtext of the conversation about gay sex. People in sex-less heterosexual marriages (and there are many of them) for example find an expression of their pain in the language of sexuality. These people do not feel that they are just missing out on some pleasure like a good wank, they feel like they are living out a diminished life. They feel like an important part of their self-hood is denied them. This is a new articulation; that sexual expression belongs to a part of our self-hood called sexuality. When people argue over whether gay people can be expected to be celibate, these people in sex-less heterosexual marriages find themselves answering no because it is the answer which respects the concept of sexuality and therefore their own story and suffering.

Now of course it is not just people in sex-less (love-less to use a more common term) marriages who are using gay rights arguments to represent their own sexual situation. Obviously gay people are doing it too. But gay people form a minority of the population and gay rights is increasingly a majority concern. It is for all of us that sexuality has become about much more than just having sex because we ought to. Sexuality is a part of an expectation of quality of life and significance for our feelings that is becoming more and more universal.

Are arranged marriages wrong for example? If your answer to that is generally yes then you are possibly relying on a human right to a sexuality that is going to decide your opinion on gay marriage as well. It is the concept of sexuality as being the good expression of our own attractions that both condemns arranged marriages and supports gay ones. Note that this expression is not limitless. No-one gets to marry whoever they want to – you have to woo them first. There are also matters of consent and cruelty and probably even the carbon footprint of it all will become relevant. It’s not a free for all. However there is still within those limits a right to sexual expression according to this idea called sexuality.

This is why the limits to sexuality can’t just be arbitrarily set. Any limits to sexuality have to take the value of sexuality into account. That’s part and parcel of treating our sexuality with respect. We need to balance respect for our sexuality with other respects (such as for other peoples sexuality)  but there’s a default healthiness and goodness to our desires that ought to see the light of day in some manner. This is the positive personal script for straights that is expressed by supporting gay relationships.

Another subtext to straight peoples support for gay and lesbian relationships is around a redefinition of their own relationships. What does it mean to be distinctly heterosexual – to see your relationship as remarkably different to a gay relationship? One the one hand it is merely noticing the sex category of the partners. It may even be noticing the socially privileged status of your relationship. On the other hand though, to be distinctly heterosexual is to elevate the heterosexual aspect of your relationship to one of primary moral or health importance. It is to say that each person’s gender in the relationship should have significance. Putting that personally it would mean that I as a guy think my own guyness and my partners womanhood ought to be important in how we interact with each other and with others.

It doesn't necessarily follow that if a person feels distinctly heterosexual in this way that they have to be opposed to gay relationships. They can simply imagine that different boats float differently. However it is impossible to hold a strong opposition to gay relationships without believing in such a distinct heterosexuality. This is why even the more benign organizations which have problems with same sex attraction believe in the notion of people fundamentally and spiritually divided into men and women. Meanwhile the less subtle an organizations disapproval of homosexuality, the more patriarchal their politics. There is a relationship between calling gay relationships sinful and a belief in such ideas as male-headship and women’s special roles of submission.

The relationship between the two is partly governed by the biblical fundamentalism which supports both. However the rejection of the two isn't anything to do with biblicism. It’s to do with feminism. I would be genuinely offended if someone at the bank or the ballot box for example treated my partner differently to me on the basis of her gender. Although gender might well matter to us erotically our practice of it is a matter for our own selves. It’s a role-play to which nobody else is invited. We don’t want our genders to be political or social categories.

This belief broadly held in Australia by all ages but especially the young, means that politically and socially we are all in gay relationships. That is to say that where gender is understood as a political and social category we want to belong to the same one as our partners. The conservative detractors were right that feminism could ultimately lead to universal lesbianism – they just didn't see that some of those lesbians would be men.

The above is a bit of hyperbole; this is still a pretty straight world. Most people are still presuming opposite-sex attraction of most other people most of the time, certainly in Bendigo where I live. However we are increasingly presuming that gender roles in families have no common definition. This makes it a private matter for a relationship to be gay even in the midst of straight cultures. Consider the following much-tweeted quote from Ellen DeGeneres;

“Asking who's "the man" and who's "the woman" in a same sex relationship is like asking which chopstick is the fork.”Couldn't a similar claim be made for every modern relationship? Who is the fork or knife in your relationship?

These are two ways in which the opposition some have towards homosexuality runs foul of matters important to straight peoples own agendas. We oppose the politicization of our genders in our straight relationships in the way that is necessary to disapprove of gay relationships. We don’t want to be distinctly heterosexual. We also want to live out our own sexuality fully – treating our romantic and sexual feelings with respect. We see our best chance to do that tied to the rights of gay people to do the same.

There is another big battle that is being fought out over gay people’s lives I've yet to mention. It has to do with how we allow morality and God to be defined. It particularly has to do with whether we tolerate inexplicable morals and victim-less crimes as the will of God. I won’t touch it in this post but I may get to this point next. Because it is a battle that especially interests myself and others of a theological bent we possibly overstate it's influence anyway.

Truth is we're not grappling with theology so much as we're just looking for someone to love.

A decent argument against legalising gay marriage.

Critical thinking is not about being the biggest, baddest arguer on the block. Critical thinking is actually about robustly attacking one’s own presumptions, more so than those of others. As part of that, critical thinking involves putting in the effort to strengthen those opinions you disagree with so that you’re not just preserving your opinion because your opponent made some silly mistake.

To give an example I like shopping at markets rather than supermarkets. If someone who disagrees with me says that they like supermarkets for their convenience of everything in one place I could point out that supermarkets are consciously designed to make you wander back and forth across the whole store finding three items (while rows of stuff is at grabbing height for children!).  Across a large supermarket with the floor space of a small market your shopping items may be under one roof but are hardly in the one place. I may have won that argument however I haven’t done my own thinking a lot of favours. It would be better if I paused and thought is there any convenience benefit to shopping at a supermarket that does stand up (such as a single point of sale which is probably what was meant by “one place”). Then I could contend with such a benefit. That’s improving your opponents’ argument first.

In the spirit of critical thinking then I have been trying to ponder what would be a decent argument that access to the legal rite of marriage should remain restricted to heterosexual adult partnerships and continue to exclude homosexual adult partnerships.* This to me is the best way to write out the question posed by the “gay marriage debate”. The question isn’t whether or not gay people should be married. That could equally be answered by the statement that nobody should get married.

I haven’t come up with anything very solid at all. What I’ve been able to do is figure out what we can safely exclude when looking for such a decent argument. This post is a walkthrough those exclusions.

Firstly it doesn’t matter what homosexual people are generally like.

Sometimes you hear arguments against gay marriage which are really just a grab bag of insults against gay people. Certain images of gay culture are derogatorily referred to (like gay male bathhouse culture) to falsely insinuate that gay people are not the marrying kind anyway. This argument largely works because gay people and their supporters get so annoyed when they hear it that they lose their cool. That looks bad and thus reinforces that the speaker was right. “See, gay people get so easily offended by just straightforward facts about gayness how could they possibly make a go at marriage where such offence is par for the course.**”

If we can stay calm in the face of vitriol however this argument is a push over. Why? I know gay people for whom I have a far more sexually permissive history. But my legal access to marriage with my partner is clear. Meanwhile these gay friends of mine (guys and girls) are all about having a mom and mom or pop and pop apple pie relationship till death parts them, God bless their gay hearts. And they are the ones who want to get married. 

It really doesn’t matter if the average or even most common homosexual is a hedonistic sensualist with a death wish, a porn addiction and a scatological fetish.  It really doesn’t. Firstly, because they probably aren’t the ones who want to get married. Secondly, because even if marriage becomes available for homosexual couples we can still say that any homosexual couple who meets those descriptions oughtn’t get married. Same as we might for a straight couple who does. The argument of what gay people are generally like would only ever contribute anything if we were arguing whether or not all gay couples should get married (right now). But we are not arguing that, any more than the current situation is that all heterosexual couples ought to be married (including all the abusive ones for example). We are merely arguing whether or not it should be a legal option for both types of couples.

Restricting marriage to heterosexual couples does not even say people with a supposed range of character flaws can’t marry. It just says they can’t marry people of the same sex. We really have lost our original topic by this point, which may have been the intent of this kind of argument. Any argument based on an alleged nature of the average gay person is basically the rhetorical equivalent of throwing sand in the face of your opponent. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny but as it evokes a hostile reaction it can sometimes look like a win.

Secondly we can’t argue from authority.

To “argue from authority” is (in rhetorical jargon) to make a case based on someone else saying our conclusion rather than any reasons for that conclusion. So for example an argument from authority would be to say that Albert Einstein (who we all might agree is a pretty smart guy) says that time travel is impossible (or possible, I’m not sure what he said actually).

In this particular debate two kinds of arguments from authority are brought into play. One is that a particular magic book supposedly says something that means marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples. In this post I showed how arguments about the authority of magic books are generally fruitless. There’s never a test a magic book can fail that disproves its authority. This kind of argument can drag us into this fruitless territory.

However we don’t need to disprove the authority of a magic book (or argue that it doesn’t say what is being claimed) to show this type of argument is irrelevant. We only need to show that whatever the magic book says, it still needs to be argued that all the opinions of that magic book should be enshrined in law. Given that the basis for law in this country oughtn't be the opinions of any particular magic book that’s the end of that argument.

The second common argument from authority regarding this question is to say that so-and-so gay person doesn’t think we should allow gay marriage. If a gay person thinks so then it can’t be homophobic and if it isn’t homophobic it must be true, seems to be the logic. For that to be a valid argument we would have to accept that if a gay person thinks we should allow gay marriage that that is a compelling argument too. It’s nonsensical.

Arguments from authority are not decent arguments in any situation anyway. Even Einstein had to provide reasons for his opinions.

Thirdly it is not enough to argue that there is a purpose to marriage that only makes sense for heterosexual couples.

At first this can seem like a strange exclusion. Surely if marriage serves a purpose that only makes sense for heterosexual couples, then it makes sense to exclude homosexual couples from access to marriage?

However what we haven’t done with these kinds of arguments is to show how allowing homosexual couples to legally marry prevents or endangers the exclusive purposes it might serve for heterosexual couples.

For example I can think of a fairly obvious purpose for straight couples to marry that only applies to them. Straight couples can accidentally have kids when they have sex. Obliging straight couples to make a commitment to each other before they have sex consequently provides a means of preparing their relationship for those accidental kids. Gay relationships don’t produce accidental kids so this purpose of marriage doesn’t apply to them.

However if gay people get married to express a commitment to their relationship even though they won’t have accidental kids this doesn’t do anything at all to prevent or hinder straight people getting married to express a commitment to their relationship because they might have accidental kids.  The former doesn’t preclude the latter at all.

For some people their marriage is a very religious affair. It is absolutely important to them that their legal marriage is also “in the eyes of their God”. It may even be a way of praising their God for them. It would be peculiar to suggest that in order to protect their ability to do this we have to prevent the legal marriages of people for whom this purpose doesn’t apply (non-theists and worshippers of other Gods). People currently are able to get married for all sorts of reasons, some of which are relevant to only some and not others.

What’s left?

Now having excluded the above three categories of argument I am at a loss to think of anything else that supports the restriction of access to legal marriage to only heterosexual couples. I can think of many reasons why the state shouldn’t get involved in marriage at all. I can think of arguments why marriage is all round not a good idea even. But I can’t think of a single decent argument that legal marriage ought to be restricted to heterosexual couples.

That surprises me. I am actually suspicious that my own opinion is preventing me from making the effort to come up with decent counter arguments. After all most opinions I have would be a consequence of my balance of for or against arguments. I can usually recognise a few good counter arguments to a even my strongly held views. In this case... perhaps someone else has some ideas?

_________________________________________________________________________

* The members of the partnership can both be gay as but the partnership is still “heterosexual” if one is a woman and one is a man.

** If you marry Pat Robertson.

A clearing of my heart on religious freedom.

The ALP national conference recently changed their platform to support marriage equality for same-sex couples. A part of that motion was the following; These amendments should ensure that nothing in the marriage act imposes an obligation on a minister of religion to solemnise any marriage.

I’ve been trying to write about the moral responsibility we have to defend others’ freedom of religion. I want to discuss why the above quote in the motion should have been included, not just as a sop to opponents of gay marriage to get the motion through but for its own good reasons.

The reason I want to write this is very specific. I want to write against an ugliness that is in my own heart. It’s a drying up of sympathy and a simmering anger. It’s a frustration with those who have been in power for so long and only now are having to share it. Even now they are refusing to let go of that privilege. We have to tear it from their hands pulling each finger back at a time. We have to do this while listening to them whine about their oppression, about how it’s so unfair that they might have to acknowledge gay relationships or at least not refuse them service. All this while they’ve never seemed to notice how much their own relationship celebrations along with all their religious concerns about our relationships overwhelm the rest of us.

Unfortunately the size of this ugliness inside me is so large I can’t write past it. I certainly can’t write over it. In the words of the song “Going on a Bear Hunt” we have to go through it. I need to look directly at what’s bothering me about discussions of religious freedom before I can address my question.

To be clear; I’m not bothered by the idea that gay marriage is wrong. I may disagree with that idea but I’m happy to engage with it and know good hearted people who hold it. It’s the idea that conservative Christians are victims in our society, with gay marriage the latest attack on them that I’m over. I was once at a dinner party entirely of conservative Christians and me. When I said “I see the recognition of gay relationships by the state as freedom of religion” I copped a screeching “They’re taking our rights.” Yet it’s only the right to exclude others from a special status for your enjoyment that’s being taken away. If this feels like a loss of rights to you, you must think a disproportionate amount of respect and power is your right. It’s because you’ve grown fat and sleek and round on other people’s deference. Any discussion of religious freedom is plagued by that expectation of deference.

There’s a great piece of advice in the Bible though. It’s that we should remove the plank from our own eye before the splinter in another’s. Nobody recognises their own privilege and I like the average conservative Christian am often whining on my throne. When I was a kid I liked to believe I was oppressed as a left hander. When I was older I briefly occupied bisexuality as the site of my oppression. Seriously I am a pretty lucky man in a wealthy country and the rest is largely indulgent crap. I am not oppressed in any significant way – not as a non-theist in a theistic family either. Having to argue your opinions is not oppression. I do have crap teeth though so you know, woe is me.

Even acknowledging all this there are probably still privileges and power I hold and don’t see. I know that I feel the concessions I am obliged to make towards religious people and assume I never ask the same of them. One way that “secularists” do this is through the very definition of secularism as a sort of non-religion and non-philosophy. Secularism as a non-biased basic social language that allows all religions and the irreligious to thrive is a fantasy. Of course there are religions such as the church of the randomly violent or the fellowship of drunken crane operators that we don’t allow to practice. Saying that all churches can operate freely within the law just dodges that the law is how we restrict religion. Nowhere is this more apparent than with discrimination legislation.

Within half a century Conservative Christians in the UK, the U.S. and Australia have gone from being able to close down any establishment that allowed same-sex dancing to being unable to refuse service to unrepentant homosexuals in their own establishments and to being sued for promoting homophobia in the workplace. Back then many peoples’ careers were forfeit if their homosexuality was known with imprisonment or forced psychiatric treatment real possibilities. Now there are almost challenges to the rights of conservative Christians to try and cure their own gay children. Certainly there would be publicly funded services that would support any child who refused such treatment.

It should be obvious that these changes restrict the religious freedom of Conservative Christians. To say otherwise is to play word games with either freedom or religion. However that doesn’t mean that these changes restrict religious freedom overall. The religious freedom of gay dancers is massively increased. This isn’t a war on religion or freedom – if that were so there would universally be more regulation whereas same-sex dancers (let alone conjugators) will assure you for them there is less.

Furthermore it should be obvious that this isn’t any kind of attack on conservative Christians except an inadvertent one. The end point of these cultural and legislative changes is not to oppress Christians but to enable those who want to, to disregard them. The motive of the Queer politic within secularism is to ensure people can live as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender without obstruction and harassment. From a queer perspective if this crosses conservative Christianity that’s conservative Christianity’s fault. It certainly isn’t the queer activist’s objective. This isn’t just playing with words. The second half of the ALP motion is really just stating the obvious.

Despite this conservative Christians do claim that there is a war against them and their beliefs. The reasons for this go beyond just being used to having their way with other people’s lives. As a “born-again” myself I witnessed a church culture of nostalgia for those days when their forebears were being fed to lions. There’s a knowledge that power and privilege are fundamentally at odds with Jesus’ own life and the life of the apostles. Some Christians respond to this by giving up power and privilege. Those people are amazing and I am in awe of them. Most however are as soft in the middle as me. Many can’t sit with the feeling of being a bad Christian and so resolve the contradiction by denial. They ignore that Christianity is a requirement of the most powerful political office in the world and instead identify with the oppression of Chinese Christians. The conservative Christian worries that some people are taking the Christ out of Christmas without wondering if the very ubiquity of Christmas is something that non-Christians might be a little tired of.  There’s an overstatement of cultural loss and personal alienation in order to imagine they are carrying a cross up Calvary even as they are planning a second multi-lane freeway of privilege to get there.

This sense of oppression is helped along by the tension between conservative Christians and science. When the entirety of peer reviewed science tends to support evolution then Creationists are in the same position as climate change deniers – either they’re wrong or there’s a conspiracy against them. But Creationism isn’t the only way conservative Christians can bang up against science. You can’t find a credible peer reviewed piece of psychology that says homosexuals are sick anymore, not since Evelyn Hooker forced the American establishment to look at its biases. Sure you still get crank research put out by “Family” Associations but nobody will publish it. The reason why is that it fails basic standards of research (often taking correlation for causality and failing to use a proper control). From the conservative Christian perspective though, this research is “buried” by an agenda driven scientific establishment. 

This false sense of oppression becomes collective wisdom; disputing it threatens your belonging to the group. Consequently I can wake up to my privileges a whole lot easier than someone inside a conservative Christian church. This does actually mean that I have some sympathy for conservative Christian whining, at least initially. By the umpteenth manifestation of the persecution complex with the next must-read piece of dodgy research my patience wears thin. I start to feel that maybe the kindest thing I could do is a swift whack up the side of the head to wake them up to themselves.  I want to scream that this is not a debate about whether everyone’s out to get you. This is us witnessing the slow maturing of the Conservative Christian’s perspective half a lifetime later than it should have happened.

None of this frustration has any logical relation to the question of how defending religious freedom is a moral responsibility. It’s just a huge emotional cloud covering my thinking and blocking my writing. My brother recently commented that while he can see that gay marriage possibly should be legal he’s overall leaning is towards the opinion it shouldn’t be. I’m not just leaning towards the belief that conservative Christians should have the legal right to not officiate a gay marriage. I feel fairly convinced of it. I’m also leaning slightly towards the belief that schools which teach that homosexuality is an abomination should lose their licence to teach. I find it immensely difficult to articulate exactly why in both cases. I still feel that’s something I should try to do but I had to get this off my chest first.

What just happened? The political game that was the ALP gay marriage vote.

The Labor Party of Australia just changed their party platform to allow same-sex marriage. The exact wording of the motion was;

“Labor will amend the Marriage Act to ensure equal access to marriage under statute for all couples irrespective of sex who have a mutual commitment to a shared life. These amendments should ensure that nothing in the marriage act imposes an obligation on a minister of religion to solemnise any marriage.”

An amendment was passed to this motion allowing Labor party parliamentary members a conscience vote on this issue. This was passed by 208 to 184 votes.

The amended motion was then put to the floor and passed without a counting of specific votes. Clearly the ayes had it.

All of this is being presented as democracy in motion; however, the exact outcome is so precisely what Labor would want to do strategically that I have my doubts it wasn’t planned to turn out exactly this way.

Same sex marriage has always been a difficult issue for Labor electorally. More so than any other party their voting base is divided on this issue. As momentum for change has grown, Labor’s “do nothing” stance has lost it voters to the Greens. Party strategists however have been concerned that supporting change will lose it more votes to the Coalition.

To allay that concern advocates of change have pointed to the polls which indicate consistently a majority of support for gay marriage in almost every sector of the community. However those polls miss the point. Although most people support gay marriage, Labor party strategists fear that supporters include only a few who would change their vote over the issue. Opponents of gay marriage however may be more likely to vote accordingly. This is the difference between soft and hard support. While hard support (which decides voting intention) is growing amongst supporters of same-sex marriage, soft support is probably still much larger amongst potential Labor voters. Hard supporters of same-sex marriage may have long ago left for the Greens. Some would come back if Labor supported gay marriage unequivocally but many wouldn’t for other reasons.

Meanwhile opponents of gay marriage are almost always motivated by religious conviction. This tends to lead to hard support (although like any personal politic that gets drawn in different directions by the party system). If more opponents than supporters of gay marriage let this issue decide their vote Labor could be following the majority of people on this issue and still pay a penalty electorally.

Further complicating matters is that particular feature of the lower house – the electorate. Seats in the lower house are won and lost on votes in a particular geographical area. The impact on votes of gay marriage is very different in different areas. So the Labor party candidate in a rural Queensland seat faces a higher risk of losing their seat if they support gay marriage while an inner city Melbourne candidate will probably lose their seat if they don’t. Remember even if a majority of people in an area support gay marriage the issue (for the party) is how much hard support and opposition there is amongst potential Labor voters in their electorate.

The absolute perfect political solution to these problems would be to bring the party platform into line with the majority opinion but without running afoul of the hard opposition to change. This would be enough for the soft supporters of Gay marriage who want to vote Labor. Further it will stymie the flow of votes being lost over the issue. So long as Labor can present itself as generally supportive of gay marriage even if it is unable to change legislation (that darn obstructionist opposition!) the Greens will have a hard time using this issue to draw votes to themselves. The Greens can’t say they are the only party (with an electoral chance) to support gay marriage any more. They need to use much more complex language to differentiate their party on this issue. At election time complexity is not rewarded.

The conscience vote amendment allows candidates to loudly or quietly support or distance themselves from the party line if it is useful in their seats. Candidates had previously done this by stating their support for gay marriage in conflict with the then party platform. They were never going to be sanctioned for this when to do otherwise would have been political suicide in suburbs like Brunswick or Glebe. Similarly the party won’t mind a member who votes against gay marriage in line with hard opposition in their electorate. In fact with a leader who is on record as saying she doesn’t support gay marriage it is going to be a very safe environment for such transgression if it can even be called that. 

It is important that, for this strategy to work, people who need to differentiate themselves from the party line be able to do so publicly and heroically. Having a count of votes on the amendment does that. It is also helpful that the party adopt the change to their platform without forcing all those supporting it to be visible. This was achieved by not having a counted vote on that. All in all Labor achieved exactly what it might need to neutralise this as an election negative for them while capturing the positives from it.

There are risks to this strategy. It’s unsure exactly how it will play out once a same-sex marriage bill is actually made law or rejected. It’s possible that the conscience vote will be forgotten should the bill pass and the opponents of same sex marriage will punish the party who broadly supported it. Alternatively if gay marriage is blocked its supporters might move from soft to hard just by the issue having been given a higher profile. No one really remembers a party’s official platform over their policy achievements so Labor could expect to lose some votes from such an outcome. I imagine the party hacks will be trying to figure out if it’s best to introduce a bill after the next election or before. It’s hard to see how Labor can keep this issue on a backburner for much longer though given its growing representation and support.

The Liberal party face far less significant challenges in regard to this issue. The Howard years have purged the party of many supporters of gay marriage. Obviously the hardest supporters couldn’t stay in the fold when Howard passed his Defence of Marriage bill. There’s not much more to lose by keeping that line and while there might be votes to gain by changing, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Still when polls show the majority of people are in support of gay marriage this is not an issue the Liberal party will want to emphasise at a general election. To do so would ensure the soft support from the majority hardens into something threatening. This means they need to control their angry conservatives. We can expect one Liberal message for the general public and another playing to communities where same-sex marriage is opposed. The first will say that this same-sex marriage debate isn’t important, the second will emphasise the need to vote in regard to this matter.

The Liberals need to decide whether their party will allow a conscience vote on any bill that comes before the house and whether they will revisit the issue (if it passes) should they gain government. Regardless of ideology, electoral strategy will play a big part in these decisions. Just making a call I’d say they’ll decide “no” to both.

A Liberal sinking of the gay marriage bill is too disruptive to the governments agenda to not tempt Abbott to impose a binding vote. It will leave the ALP with open divisions and forces them to make another decision on the issue; Do they resubmit the bill triggering a double dissolution and having an election on this issue? Although the Liberals don’t want to make the election about same-sex marriage they won’t be upset if Labor does. They can be completely on message that this is an unimportant issue, an obsession for the government when other matters are more pressing. When Labor doesn’t resubmit the bill it will disappoint its strongest same-sex marriage supporting members.

Only if Abbott is going to be publicly defied by high profile members would he allow a conscience vote. Abbotts control is weak and he can’t afford to expose that. Allowing a conscience vote would definitely be preferably to having one anyway against his will.

It would be complete madness for the Liberals to promise to repeal same-sex marriage after an election. Any promise of this sort would need to be downplayed to the general public while amped up in the anti-gay marriage pockets with a failure to control that being disastrous. The majority of people have soft support for gay marriage and the Liberals need to tell them this issue doesn’t matter. Revisiting the issue will be, according to the Liberals own message, a spiteful further waste of time.

Mind you anything is possible. Abbott is not the shrewdest political operator and often speaks before consultation with wiser party members. The ALP themselves have made mistakes but under Gillard they work together better and as a team they are a lot more careful than Abbott. They are always planning the next election.

Saying there is a tactical sensibleness to the outcome of the ALP conference doesn’t mean that there aren’t people of integrity making what they believe is the right call – on all sides of this debate. There were 184 delegates who rejected the amendment to allow a conscience vote despite this reducing Labor’s political flexibility. However let’s not kid ourselves that democracy ran riot here either. The outcome of the ALP conference was so tactically perfect that I suspect this was a debate that was permitted to happen because its outcome could be foreseen.

That’s politics.

Marriage discrimination: Not in our name.

To the extent that opposite sex couples are stakeholders in the same sex marriage debate we just arent being well represented.

The official Christian lobby groups would have the government believe the majority of opposite sex couples see their relationships as radically different from loving same-sex relationships and under threat from marriage equality. I see my relationship as fundamentally the same as a loving same sex relationship (as do many Christians in fact).

Please add your name to the comments section below if you are a) in a heterosexual relationship b) married or contemplating marriage and c) in agreeance with the statement (obviously).
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Our marriage happens to be (or will be) heterosexual but that's not the point of our marriage.
What really defines (or will define) our marriage is love and committment not being man and woman.
You won't be defending our marriages definition by excluding same sex couples from marriage.
In fact marriage equality allows our definition of marriage to be finally fully recognized alongside others. In a multicultural society that should be our right and the right of same sex couples.

Sermons I would like to hear - On Marriage as a Sacred Institution.

This may be part of a series. I like to sermonise in the shower. To get the full effect you need to read this with a Desmond Tutu accent.
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Marriage is a sacred institution. Perhaps this is so. However those who say this in order to exclude people from marriage by their unfitness have forgotten what the sacred is for.

We do not utilise sacred institutions because we are eligible for them. We enter into them because we are inelligible for what lies beyond it. Sacred institutions are the means of approach given to us so that in our unholliness we can come closer to that which they point to. Were we already holy we would have no need for sacred institutions. Or rather the sacred would be paths leading to us.

Who can say that of themself? Who can say that they in their holiness are what the sacred points to?

Equally who stands before marriage and says “I am fit”. Who says before marriage our relationship is perfect and so deservedly we claim marriage as our right? Actually we are what marriage is about?”

I reply, “Then what do you need marriage for? Marriage is not for you who are already perfect. Marriage is for the rest of us to approach such perfection.”

I am not saying that Marriage perfects us. We long for that to happen. We want our vows to ensure we live up to them. They won’t. They are not magic words. We must ensure we keep our vows ourselves each day.

And we will probably fail. Most marriages fail. Most people don’t keep their vows. Marriage is just not that kind of magic unfortunately.

However maybe Marriage can improve us. There is something ideal in our hearts; the old couple who only grow more and more in love with each other; the one who has the others back even past death to ensure that their final wishes are served. If Marriage is a sacred institution, an institution of Gods design, then it is perhaps the best means we have to approach this ideal.

 But we only ever approach Marriage unfit for what it points to. We come to it deficient, distorted, looking nothing like the ideal beyond it. We try to feed on its sustenance without teeth, gummily draw what we can of it into a stomach riddled with tapeworms. We get distracted by its least sustaining qualities; the circus of the wedding. Time and time again we misunderstand it.

We misunderstand it most of all when we think it is a reward for being already sufficiently marriage-like. A wedding veil is not a homecoming queens crown. We do not fit it. In fact wedding attire should be several sizes too big to remind us we need to grow into it.

How foolish is it therefore to claim that a person mustn’t be gay if they want to enter into it, that gay people can’t fit this sacred institution – as if others did. I think if any of us are walking upright into it we are definitely going to bump our head. That’s the other thing that sacred institutions should do. They should take us to our knees.

Get Messy- Gay marriage and Empathy.

I'm throwing this up without the usual edit. I've been feeling a little safe in my writing. This is a little less safe. Hope it makes sense.
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(Not actually Rick and Bob)

I recently read about as great a conservative Christian blog post on the “issue” of Gay marriage as I’m ever likely to read. (I put issue in inverted commas because as far as I’m concerned there’s no issue at all. If you don’t like Gay marriage don’t have one.) It’s here.

I am not going to get into attacking the arguments against same-sex marriage in this post. The arguments tend to pull us back from our real world into logic land or worse scripturesville – alternative realities of words, words, words. Instead of crawling up into our heads through our arses I want to show a different way of thinking about Gay marriage which is also a different way of being. It’s a way to stay in the world while being ethical. I’m calling it empathy led ethics.

To begin lets undefine our topic rather than define it. Let’s think of the relationships we know. Starting with our own – why did we enter them, why did they end? How gently do we treat their memory? Why? Seriously take a moment and absorb those feelings.

And then other people. Like your parents. Your best friend. Real people you know. Imagine an invite to their twentieth wedding anniversary. Is it a celebration? Excruciating? A distasteful hipocricy? A joyful or painful reminder of your own relationships? Something you wouldn’t miss or something you wondered why you were invited to? Now we’re really discussing marriage.

Notice how this real thing called marriage is massively messy. As a first step to being ethical it feels like a step backwards; nothing is clarified. Isn’t philosophy supposed to proceed from clarity? Maybe you thought you knew what marriage gay or otherwise was but all these real details have confused the picture. That’s just it if you want an ethical discussion of something real you don’t get to keep it neat.

Discussions of Gay marriage often try to retain this neatness. They cease to be about Rick and Bob getting hitched instead of just unceremoniously fornicating. It’s not really about gayishness or marriageness anymore. It’s about “the institution of marriage”, its about homosexuality and heterosexuality as eternal categories.  It’s about Gods plan for human sexuality.

The very moment we start thinking about Gods plan for human sexuality it breeds an arrogance in us. Get in touch with your own body - you may feel it in your chest. Notice the swelling. Walk around talking about God’s plan for human sexuality. Notice the swagger. You’re thinking big for your boots. It’s intoxicating – a heady drug. Real peoples lives are best kept out of your sermonising though. This isn’t really about silver haired Rick and the new lover whose making his eyes sparkle. This is about absolutes.

But lets think instead about Gods plan for Rick and Bob. Really think about Rick and Bob. All of a sudden humility rushes in. You don’t even know Bob do you. Sure you’ve been kinda friends with Rick for a while but all you know about Bob is what Rick has told you. And now you think about it you don’t know what Ricks like outside of a few interests. You wouldn’t presume to steer him away from a large investment in painting as a hobby. Or from a holiday in North Queensland. Allow yourself to reflect on Ricks full personhood. Messy them up like we just did for marriage. Blow your mind and do the same for Bob.  Now consider the proportion of what you know of them. Shut’s you up, eh.  

Now this is not a general shut down of ethical discussion. If we were discussing Rick beating Bob or sleeping around on him– even if that was in a consensual pollyamorous bdsm way you might have an empathy attack that overrides your humility. Rightly or wrongly you can imagine Bobs reaction (relief perhaps?) to your intervention (maybe confronting Rick) and your imagination could guide your intervention. Notice that empathy encourages intervention – it’s not anywhere as good for just mouthing off - because empathy is concerned about the people involved not abstractions.

Now the effectiveness of empathy is that it self-corrects continuously. As you get closer to Rick and Bob you get feedback about your intervention. Keep putting yourself in their position, keep learning about their position. If Bob seems happy your humility may override your empathy again. That’s your message to back off. The default position is humility. The first thing you know is how little you know.

The real awesomeness of empathy though is that there is no leaving your body. You’re not required to spend long periods of time (in your head) wandering around the very ancient Middle East with Moses ,ancient Greece with Aristotle or even ancient Rome with Jesus. You can stay right where you are living your life. How cool is that?

For me there just isn’t any empathy attack when I consider Rick and Bob getting married. I tend to think marriage may kill the spontaneity in a relationship but without a clear sense that Rick and Bob are at risk of this I would let humility rule. I might be concerned if I thought Rick really loved Pete or Jenny instead but assuming he and Bob were likely to be happy [1]  I'd have no motivation for any intervention. Certainly there’s not enough empathic concern to override humility.

What about those people who believe Rick and Bob are going to be unhappy for deviating from Gods plan? What about those friends and family who honestly believe that Rick and Bobs relationship will be fraught with tragedy because Gods plan is good for us? Can they claim empathy as a motivating force to break Rick and Bob up and to oppose a marriage which might make such a break up harder? In my opinion, yes.

There’s no real escaping that we have to base our initial empathy attack on prejudice – that is on a pre-judgement of the situation based on how we think the world works. Even Scripture can be a source of that pre-judgement. The beauty of empathy is that it corrects because it learns from the subjects of our concern. Approaching Rick and Bob, with the default position of humility riding shotgun, we check and re-check to see if they really need our help. If they don’t we slide over and give the wheel back to humility.

Now if your eyes never leave the gospel page to look at Rick and Bob then you’re not practicising an empathy led ethics. You’re claiming to be led by empathy by asserting that Rick and Bob need your help but you’re not living by it. You’re not staying in the world. You’re off touring the Meditteranean with St. Paul instead.  

What if though the source of your concern for Rick and Bob is not visible in this world? What if it’s their afterlife you’re really worried about but there’s no way to discern why Rick and Bob are heading for hell from approaching them in this life? Quite frankly, then you’re stuffed. The idea of an afterlife which rewards without observable rhyme or reason is profoundly counter-empathic. “Rick and Bob are happy and healthy and will spread happiness and healthiness but they should stop it anyway or they’ll end up in a hell I can’t see” is about as anti-empathic a statement as you can make. Meditating on such an arbitrary afterlife rips you out of this world, disconnects you from other people and in my opinion renders your contribution to an ethical conversation unintelligible. If you think its’ a reason to bother Rick and Bob let alone sensible basis for government policy you’ve lost touch with the real.

Opposition to homosexuality (and let’s not pretend opposition to Gay marriage can be based on anything else) used to be about its real world implications. Lesbians were kleptomaniacs, Gay men were suicidal, and bisexuals were vampires. Now only a small number of people believe these have anything to do with sexuality itself rather than clinical sampling, homophobic environments and media bias. That was inevitable as more and more happy and healthy same-sex-loving lives were lived out in the mainstream. Now opposition to homosexuality has to be based on a retreat from empathy.

Often arguments “for” Gay marriage also avoid empathy. Partly this is because they meet their opponents on their opponents’ playing field. One you often hear is how weak the scriptural basis against homosexuality is. That’s true but surely that’s an argument “for” scripture not “for” homosexuality –unless we’re conceding that if a lost gospel emerges that explicitly says no to same-sex marriage we’d submit to it. I wouldn’t.

I used to be involved with Queer politics and one of the great dangers of queer politics is how many young people lead it. The danger here is that a lot of these young people haven’t had much sex. Falling in love was maybe more common  – however the love you feel at 19 is (lets be honest) often self-love with company. All that might be changing now that Queer youth events are more common but in my day there wasn’t a lot of opportunities for young same-sex dating. This produced a queer politic that was very theoretical. There were more attempts to change language, curriculums and library collections than there was to walk down the main street hand in hand with someone you loved of any gender. We demanded the publication of queer stories but we didn’t actually have a lot to write about. Sometimes I thought we had imported a general cultural homophobia into our politics, as if our preferred queer political subjects were celibate. The reality is we were just inexperienced.

Back then I thought we were doing Queer politics wrong. Somehow semiotics had become more important than love and sex. Now I’m a helluva lot older and I’m even more certain that I want to live MY life, not someone elses manifesto. And I want my ethics to be based in this world as I learn with humility as my default and empathy as my guide.

Have fun messing it up.

[1] Lest anyone think I’m pushing for a simple pleasure basis for good there’s A LOT of complexity behind this simple word “happiness”. There are physical aspects but also character aspects (dignity for example). Rather than define it let’s undefine it so as to keep it both messy and real.

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