The Marriage Act in Australia } The Humanity of Gay Marriage is The Same as Straight Marriage

ADVOCATES of gay marriage usually argue that, in its present form, the Marriage Act denies gays justice conceived as equal access to goods and opportunities. This can obscure the deepest reasons why the act should be revised.  

 

 Seen as a demand for equal access to goods and opportunities, gay marriage is not a high priority for most politicians, especially as Julia Gillard has promised to increase their availability to gay couples. From that perspective on justice, graver wrongs cry out for our attention. It is therefore understandable that many politicians would not risk alienating parts of the electorate where gay marriage is strongly opposed. Perhaps that is why Kristina Keneally, who spoke eloquently in support of gay marriage onQ&A a couple of months ago, and who, as a Catholic, presumably believes marriage is a great spiritual good, believes it is not a "core issue".

People have different reasons for opposing gay marriage. Some find gay sex disgusting. Others do not, but believe it is immoral. Whatever else marriage is, it is a celebration of a union to which sexuality is intrinsic. Anyone who is a classical liberal can support laws that permit something they find immoral and even disgusting. But they cannot support laws that celebrate it

  

Same-sex relationships legal   Same-sex marriage   Other type of partnership (or unregistered cohabitation)   Same-sex marriage recognized, but not performed   Homosexuality legal but same-sex unions not recognized

Same-sex relationships illegal   Minimal penalty   Large penalty   Life in prison   Death penalty   by Wikipedia

---

There are also opponents of gay marriage who argue it would have bad social consequences, especially for children. Their case stands or falls on facts that are disputed. But although people who do not object in principle to gay marriage can advance this case, it is almost always pressed by people who soon make it clear they would oppose gay marriage even if the evidence turned out to be overwhelmingly against them. In one way or another - often by the way they appeal to what is natural - it becomes evident they believe that gay sex is immoral.

Children, of course, come into the argument in a more fundamental way. Love, it is argued, that is conditioned through and through by the wonder and miracle of bringing children into the world, has potentialities for depth that other forms of sexual love do not. Leave aside the difficulties that infertile couples make for this claim and grant it for the present. Why, though, should it be reason for doubting that love between gays can be vitally responsive to a full understanding of what it means for love to be transformed by the marriage vow, for love worthily to become married love? To put it crudely - why is the best construed as the enemy of the good?

The answer, I think, is that many opponents of gay marriage do not see depth at all in gay sexuality. They think gay relationships are, at best, loving friendship plus sex. The sex and the loving friendship, they believe, can never be integrated in a way marriage requires them to be. Implicit in the marriage vow is a requirement to seek an ever-deepening understanding of the way love and sexuality enrich one another. It is an understanding of the place of sexuality in our sense of what it is to be human, and the requirement to seek it has no end. ''Marriage'', one might say, is a verb rather than a noun.

Obviously people who find gay sex disgusting or immoral do not think gay sexuality can rise to that requirement. But the kind of blindness to the meaning of gay sexuality that I have just described is pervasive, I believe. It lies behind the emphatic ''is'' when people say marriage is between a man and woman - by definition, they are tempted to say. For them ''gay marriage'' is an oxymoron.

That is a more radical position than the one that judges gay sex to be immoral. Even the most severe moral condemnation of anal sex cannot make ''anal sex'' an oxymoron. But the belief that gay sex, of its very nature, cannot have the depth that would enable it to rise to the marriage vow, implies that nothing the state can do can make a marriage out of a gay relationship.

From this perspective, even if the law were to permit gay marriages, these would be marriages in inverted commas only. The state cannot do what is, so to speak, conceptually impossible. If it were to try, this thought continues, it would degrade the concept of marriage. After a time, even heterosexual married couples would no longer understand what it means to be married.

Gays who ask their fellow citizens to insist that they be permitted to marry, ask that the laws that bind them in the same polity are not based on a denial of the depth and the dignity of their sexual being.

Our sense of a common humanity is premised on seeing in all human beings their capacity to make meaning that we respect of the big facts that define the human condition - our mortality, our vulnerability to misfortune and, of course, our sexuality. To be blind to that in others is to be partially blind to their humanity.

Laws premised on blindness to the full humanity of our fellow citizens wrong them more profoundly than can be conveyed by the complaint that they deny them access to goods and opportunities. For that reason even people who see no good in marriage, including gays who are hostile to it because they believe it distorts the radical potentialities of their sexuality, should view revision of the Marriage Act as an urgent political imperative.

Raimond Gaita is a professorial fellow at Melbourne University and emeritus professor of moral philosophy at King's College London.

Raimond Gaita

  .brisbanetimes.com.au/

OPINION