Following the publication yesterday of the Lib-Con
government’s proposals for introducing gay
marriage, there has been
a frenetic debate about whether religious freedom will be harmed by allowing
homosexuals to get hitched. The government has given assurances that religious
institutions will not be forced to carry out same-sex weddings (and has
actually banned the Church of England from doing so), yet still the eye of this
stormy debate has focused on whether religious groups’ rights to uphold and
celebrate only traditional marriage will be dented by the government’s fervent
promotion of same-sex marriage.
What
a massive red herring. What an enormous distraction from the real authoritarian
instinct motoring the Conservative Party’s and others’ conversion to the cause
of gay marriage. The central problem with the gay marriage agenda is not that
at some point in the future an unwilling man of the cloth might be strong-armed
into giving his blessing to a gay union, but rather that it allows the state to
do something that was traditionally considered beyond its purview: to redefine
the meaning of marriage and, by extension, the meaning of the marital home, the
family, and our most intimate relationships. Some have sought to depict the
drive for gay marriage as a continuation of the struggle for civil rights that
exploded in the mid-twentieth century; it’s better understood as a
continuation, and intensification, of the modern state’s desire to get a foot
in the door of our private lives and to assume sovereignty over our
relationships.
From
the get-go, the depiction of the campaign for gay marriage as a liberty-tinged
movement for greater equality was questionable to say the least. For a start,
grassroots public protesting for the right of homosexuals to marry was notable
by its absence. Instead, this has been a movement led by lawyers and
professional activists, backed by the CEOs of hedge-fund corporations and
newspapers of record such as The
Times, and it has actively sought to insulate itself from engagement with
the prejudicial public. As one gay writer has observed, gay-marriage advocates
are obsessed with protecting homosexuals and their allegedly fragile rights
from ‘the tyranny of the majority’, and have thus come to believe that ‘the
courts are the place to go for the redress of grievances’ (1). A
Tory-supporting columnist for the Telegraph counselled PM
David Cameron to ignore ‘majoritarian opinion’ - which apparently doesn’t
appreciate how important gay marriage is - and press ahead with his
equal-marriage plans on the basis that ‘a government enacts civilising measures
because they are the right thing to do, not because they are mentioned
frequently in focus groups’. Here, as across the pro-gay marriage spectrum, a
distinction is made between the ‘civilised’ elites who know the historic import
of gay marriage and the public, with its tyrannical passions, who do not.
Moreover,
gay marriage was elevated to the top of the political agenda by a party that
doesn’t even know how to spell the words liberty or choice: the Tories. It was
hilarious to watch various commentators yesterday denounce those ‘out of touch Tories’ who
are considering opposing gay marriage; these people have a problematic
‘attitude to gay people’, we were told, revealing that their party is behind
the times and ‘doesn’t reflect the reality of
the world’. What this outburst of Tory-bashing
candidly refused to mention is that the issue of gay marriage is almost
entirely a Tory invention; certainly it was propelled to the forefront of
political life by Cameron and other party bigwigs, including Boris Johnson and
John Major. Far from emerging from a civil rights-like, bottom-up demand for
equality, the idea of gay marriage has been constructed by Tory leaders in
association with what the Guardian described as ‘campaign groups, family lawyers
and sex experts’ (whatever they might be). Yesterday’s
commentariat railing against the relatively small number of Tories who have a
problem with gay marriage was a see-through attempt to prop up the flailing
notion that gay marriage is a radical or leftish demand, when in truth it is
fundamentally a Tory initiative, drawn up far from the madding crowd by
‘experts’ who apparently understand matters of family and sex better than the
rest of us.
The
elitist nature of the gay-marriage campaign can also be seen in the way it is
treated as something that shouldn’t be publicly debated, an issue on which no
dissent can be brooked. As aGuardian editorial
put it yesterday, gay marriage is ‘beyond argument’. There is no
‘countervailing argument’, it said, echoing other observers who have decreed that ‘there are some
subjects that should be discussed in shades of grey, with acknowledgement of
subtleties and cultural differences - same-sex marriage is not one of them’.
Some argue that debating gay marriage is ‘futile’ because the idea that
same-sex couples should be allowed to marry has become ‘utterly conventional’ -
except to a tiny few who ‘aren’t wholly onboard
as the train of change comes whistling through’. Gay marriage backers talk about the ‘inevitability’ of gay marriage;
it’s a ‘social juggernaut’, they say. This
suggests that what is really being hammered out here is not a political, social
policy, open to discussion, but rather a new convention, and an ‘utterly
conventional’ one at that, which you reject at your peril because no ‘cultural
differences’ are permitted. Those who remain stubbornly unconventional in relation to
gay marriage are branded dinosaurs, bigots, ‘knuckle-draggers’.
It
seems clear that the radical civil rights imagery cynically wheeled out by gay
marriage advocates disguises that this is in truth a highly elitist,
debate-allergic campaign. That is because, fundamentally, gay marriage speaks
to, not any public thirst for the overhaul of marriage, but rather the narrow
needs of some of the most elitist strata in our society. The benefit of the gay
marriage issue for our rulers and betters is twofold. First, it allows them to
pose as enlightened and cosmopolitan, as bravely willing to to enact ‘civilising measures’,
in contrast with the bigots who make up the more traditional, religious or
lumpen sections of society. As one observer said yesterday, gay marriage has
become a ‘red line’ in politics, determining one’s goodness or
badness. Supporting gay marriage has become a key cultural signifier, primarily
of moral rectitude, among everyone from politicians to the media classes to
bankers: that is, members of an elite who have increasingly few opportunities
for moral posturing in these relativistic times. And second, and crucially, gay
marriage satisfies the instinct of the authorities to meddle in marital and
family life; it throws open to state intervention previously no-go zones,
including the very meaning of our most intimate relationships.
Consider
the Lib-Con consultation report: it represents, at
root, an elite rewriting of the meaning of marriage. It elbows aside the
central role marriage played for centuries - as an institution through which
not only a couple but communities themselves managed the socialisation of
children and intergenerational relationships - in favour of decreeing that
marriage is simply and definitively ‘about two people who love each other making
a formal commitment to each other’. The communal, social, generational import
of marriage, its role as an institution which bound individuals into a broader
community and even into process of history through their assumption of the
responsibilities of procreation, has been demoted, replaced by the contemporary
bourgeois view that marriage is simply about companionship, ‘two people’. What
we’re witnessing here is the state determination that the role of marriage that
has been carved out by numerous communities over immensely long periods of
time, free of state guidance, no longer has any relevance or cultural worth,
since now, by state decree, marriage is about ‘love and commitment’ rather than
having the ‘distinguishing purpose [of] having and raising children’.
It
is striking that the report doesn’t once mention the creation of families and
that every one of its eight mentions of the world ‘children’ is in response to,
and criticism of, groups that petitioned the government to recognise the
importance of marriage as an institution for the bearing and socialisation of
the next generation. ‘Procreation’, ‘reproduction’, even ‘community’ - none of
these appear in this new state ruling on what marriage is (though it does twice
mention the needs of the ‘transgender community’). What is happening here is a
naked redefinition of marriage by the state, the diminution of the social,
generational role played by marriage in communities, and its replacement by a
highly individualised, companionship-based conception of marriage that speaks
to the narrow needs of gay campaigners and the prejudices of modern bourgeois
elites. In essence, all marriages are being redefined in order
to massage the identity needs of small numbers of homosexuals who wish to
define their relationships as marriages. The report makes great play of the
fact that it isn’t true that officials will start referring to mothers and
fathers as ‘Progenitor A’ and ‘Progenitor B’, as some critics claimed; but that
assurance rings hollow indeed in a long report that doesn’t once mention
mothers or fathers, or family or community. The state’s demotion of the role of
marriage as a fundamentally social, generational institution is implicit, and
powerful, requiring no need for the explicit ditching of words like ‘mother’ or
‘father’; they’re simply not used rather than rewritten.
There
is something spectacularly disingenuous about this report. It continually seeks
to assure us that the state is not overhauling marriage - ‘the
administrative processes will remain the same for marriage’, it says, with
words like ‘husband and wife’ still being used ‘for legal purposes’. Yet while
the administrative aspects of marriage might remain intact, the moral meaning of this institution for great swathes
of the population and for communities throughout history is being radically
rewritten; the purpose of marriage, its definition, is being overhauled. It has
in fact been long accepted that the state has the authority to oversee the
‘administration’ and legal aspects of marriage, to broker marriage; but it has
never been accepted that the state can tell individuals, community and society
itself what marriage should mean to us. Until now. Now, the state has colonised
the very meaning of marriage, which is ‘about two people’.
The
state’s determination to interfere in marriage and re-determine its content and
import and relationships reveals what is really motoring the gay marriage issue
- not a desire to complete the drive for civil rights that kicked off 50 years
ago, but rather a thirst for further expanding state authority over our private
lives and relationships. In this sense, the Tories’ seemingly strange interest
in an issue like gay marriage is in fact entirely in keeping with their, and
the broader political elite’s, powerful instinct to meddle in and micromanage
the worlds of parenting, the home, family, domestic relationships and
inter-generational interaction today. ‘Gay marriage’ is merely a radical gloss
attached to the continuing encroachment of the state upon our private, intimate
lives. If unquestioned, and unquestionable, conventions make you uncomfortable,
especially those forged by the elite above the heads and the alleged prejudices
of the public with the aim of increasing the power of the state over
communities, then you too should be freaked out by gay marriage.
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