The word 'marriage' is not for you. Not if you intend to legally
cement your union with the one you love, if the one you love has
the same stuff between their legs as you. In a sense, this is not
something I give a crap about. Although finding someone that you
want always and forever, forsaking all others, is lovely, to want
to set that in stone is, to my thinking, a little naïve. That's
because I know what I'm like and I know what other people are like.
The most heartfelt conviction is still liable to change. Not that
everyone is the same as me but it's worth bearing in mind that the
rate of failure for legally bonded couples is alarmingly high.
Love, sex and general compatibility should be the recipe for
commitment, not legality. But in another sense; fuck what I think.
Fundamentally I dislike marriage, gay or straight, what I don't
dislike is equality and in that sense I do care, I care an awful
lot.
The philosopher Wittgenstein once claimed that 'the limits of my
language mean the limits of my world' and it's of that sentiment
I'm reminded when opponents of marriage argue that as the legal
implications of a civil partnership are the same as that of a civil
marriage, same sex couples have no substantial case. Really it's
just a minor quibble over a word. And that's where they're grossly
wrong because semantic equality is not trivial. That's really
important, so I'm going to say it again: Semantic Equality is Not
Trivial. Language is the means by which we understand the world,
it's the framework to which we pin our experience and if we allow
for such asymmetry between relationships based on gender then we're
vindicating inequality in our thinking. Essentially if there's a
bias in our language there'll be a bias in our heads.
Of course you might think that asymmetrical descriptions don't
equate to inequality. Football teams score goals, rugby teams score
tries. One is not considered better than the other. But that's
because each sport had its own evolution, in which it developed its
own terms organically, one wasn't squealing at the other that
certain linguistic practices weren't for them on account of some
metaphysical blessing. The impulse to block same sex marriage is
the belief that same sex relationships aren't special enough for
the description and that is thoroughly repulsive.
There will be some factions of society that see homosexuality as
radical and a departure from the mainstream and indeed, there will
be some of us who embrace that notion but some of us do want to be
conservative and traditional and it's the job of a government that
represents everyone, irrespective of sexual persuasion, to
encompass that.
