Wedding Cake Topper by http://www.magicmud.com
I have been in a civil partnership for nearly seven years. It’s my second ‘marital’ relationship. I was first married in my late twenties. It lasted for 25 years and I have a lovely adult daughter. So my approach to the gay marriage issue is nuanced. I haven’t always seen things in the way that I see them today.
I’d like to say that this puts me in a special position to understand the different points of view in the gay marriage debate. But that’s the problem. It isn’t a debate; there is very little thinking going on, or if there is, it is hardly ever expressed.
I have only the vaguest idea about why being ‘married’ (again) is going to make me better off than being in a civil partnership, and even less of an idea why people think that my changing my status to ‘married’ is going to undermine the special nature of the relationship they already have with a partner of the opposite sex.
For some years in the UK we have been moving towards a position where same sex relationships are normalised. Now we have a situation where some people are trying to fight a rearguard action to reassert their idea of normal. You might call their values ‘conservative with a small c’ or reactionary.
What alarms me is that they are in danger of giving legitimacy to those people in society who aren’t very articulate, don’t feel they have much power and actively seek out others that they can depict as inferior to themselves, and then subject them to abuse and violence. There really are swivel-eyed loons out there who have nothing better to do than pick on other people and are looking for an excuse to do so.
Even worse, there must be many gay people, who spend much of their time in the rather dull and sometimes worthy suburb of Enfield instead of the self-referential world of gay bars and clubs, who begin to feel isolated when intellectual pygmies like David Burrowes MP (SEL) can get time on the BBC Today programme to spout unthinking drivel.
There are people who think there should be a place for a centre-right political party in this UK (even if they might not vote for it). It is now clear that Mrs Thatcher attracted entirely the wrong kind of person to the Conservatives; people who rightly belong on the fringe in UKIP.
If we are subjected to much more of their nonsense, politicians like Burrowes might suddenly discover that there are more than a few gay men in this country who can express opinions much more intelligently and attractively than they are able to. It wouldn’t take much to divest fearful fools like him of any legitimacy they cling on to in the eyes of the mainstream electorate.
Articulate gay men of a certain age would not need to be aggressive. The vicissitudes of life will have taught them to be assertive. And they would be heard.
As I finished writing this the BBC announced: Gay Marriage: Commons passes Cameron’s plan. But I don’t think I’ll be going back to sleep.
en3ponderings 