One of the intriguing aspects of the current debate about gay marriage is that although many are stridently wishing to give the impression that gay marriage is a fait accompli, there is little to suggest that this really is the case. In a recent article in The Age newspaper, there appeared an article on the topic, and it is one that conveys a very typical example of how people argue in favour of gay marriage. Anecdotal stories are often told, as was the case in this article, to present one person’s verdict as authoritative, and begging the question why other people (like you and I, the readers) take the same stance:
VERNON Routley leans back on a bench in Ringwood, rubs his chin and ponders a question lately vexing our parliamentarians: same-sex marriage, for or against? ”If you’d asked me 30 years ago, I suppose I’d have said I was against it,” admits the 85-year-old. ”Now though, neutral.”
Of course, he adds, 30 years or more back an old gentleman taking a break from his shopping wouldn’t likely be interrupted by a stranger raising such a topic. ”Anyone asking that particular question 60 years ago probably would have wound up in jail on some charge – of indecent something-or-other,” he says with a smile. ”But things have changed markedly in my time. The social environment, the social changes in the last 60 years have been fantastic.” And, he says, his views have had to change with the times too, if ”sometimes reluctantly”. But on this particular issue he admits, after some thought, there’s not a lot of reluctance. ”It just comes down to live and let live.”
The article also quoted research suggesting hints of the inevitability of gay marriage: Significantly, [one] Galaxy poll (commissioned by Australian Marriage Equality) found three-quarters of its respondents believed that same-sex marriage was inevitable.
Yet this was juxtaposed in the article with a strawpoll conducted by one Federal M.P. in the constituency of Deakin that “excluding lobbyists and unverified emails, only 6.02 per cent of Deakin constituents were in favour of gay marriage while an overwhelming 93.98 per cent were against. He added that a large portion of those supported civil unions – and that is his personal view”.
Surveys and numbers are very often unreliable things- usually because they’re arrived at and used by fallen people who use figures for fallen purposes- but if anything can be said about the research figures in this article is that although many Australians see gay marriage as inevitable, that does not mean that they are comfortable with it, desire it, or see it as a positive social change. And this is particularly the case when the debate has been stilted in one particular direction with little opportunity for others to challenge the position of the gay lobby and the media.
Sadly, the man at the beginning of the article represents the problem when people have no moral anchor and simply go with the flow. In my mind, this is not prescriptive of what others should do, and nor is it a stable, foolproof way of considering ethical ways to make decisions, and particularly decisions of such an important topic as marriage and family! People will often base their thinking on social changes and go with the flow because they have not been given shown how to ground their morality and ethics in anything concrete and stable. However, more often the case is that people don’t want to do the hard work of carefully thinking through what they do, think, and feel because it’s in the ‘too hard’ basket and raises all the problem that their ‘blissful’ ignorance is trying to mask. That is not honest or helpful. While it is hard for people to do this in the current environment of public debate on gay marriage, the world is not ignorant, because for more than 25 years people have written on these issues.
Yet this Vernon Routley has admitted what many people are thinking- but not necessarily saying- about same-sex marriage: that although they are shifting their positions on the topic, they are doing it reluctantly.
It unnerves people still. And while the gay community may think it will achieve its ends with this by getting what it wants regardless of whether people give it to them willingly or reluctantly, this could be the very thing that will prevent the gay lobby from making progress. Even more: it could even unravel the ‘progress’ that it makes because they have failed to deal with the community’s fundamental unease about homosexuality in its midst. Demanding rights from society does not expunge homophobia and discrimination: it merely drives it underground and causes it to rear its head in other ways.
So ignorance is not a defence, and neither is a passivity that judges the ‘rightness’ of others’ actions on the basis of going with the flow. But does this mean that the Australian public necessarily wants gay marriage? No. But what it does demonstrate is that the current debate is not truly informative and that decisions are being made on very shaky philosophical grounds. And that often leads to shaky decisions. The public is not behind gay marriage, although articles like the one in the Age are applying a soft manipulative pressure on people to do so for fear of being out of the crowd. This does not represent an argument: it represents a lack of one and a desperation to resort to other means. Not a good way to get a social change.