A friend of mine, who I’ve worked with a couple of times, posted a note on facebook today entitled ‘Same Sex Marriage… The debate, from the conservative view.’

He’d borrowed a blog post from a friend of his, which essentially outlines that the South Australian Parliament will be voting on changing the Marriage Bill on September 13th and that people who are against it should get in touch with their local MP to complain.

The note  itself, nicely written and emphasises the need for respectful, thoughtful, correspondence about this, which I always love to see, but it included a list of 5 things to bear in mind when writing your letter;

1) It’s important that the definition of marriage remains the union of a man and a woman.

2) It’s important that marriage remain an institution centred around the wellbeing of children, not the ‘rights’ of adults.

3) It’s important that children have the chance wherever possible to be brought up by a mum and a dad who are married.

4) It’s important that governments recognise the stability of marriage provides benefits for children, adults and for society.

5) It’s important that governments respect long-standing social institutions that provide for strong families and strong communities.

They’re verbatim, by the way, I just copy/pasted them.

This post isn’t really about them, to be honest. What it’s about is my response. This is the first time I’ve been stirred enough in the equal marriage debate to really stand up and say something. I’ve certainly been vocally supportive in person and I’ve made remarks and observations about it all on here before, but I’ve never written about it… Until this morning.

I’m going to post my responses to the five points, because I was pretty proud of what I came out with and with the Parlimentary vote coming up so soon, I think it’s important to get the debate rolling again. So, here goes…

1. Why? How is the idea of two men or two women getting married so threatening? What could possibly happen to the concept of marriage through the ability of homosexuals to marry that hasn’t already been done by heterosexuals? Marriage is already a jaded concept, many people in Australia and around the world, don’t want to be married already. They’re still in relationships as strong and as long lasting, if not longer lasting, than the multitude of marriages that are created every year, but somehow they’re inferior in the eyes of the law.

That is, in essense, what this is about. It’s not about children (the person who wrote the list isn’t even really arguing for ‘the children’, but using them as a scare tactic) and it’s not even about religion. It’s about equality for all people, no matter where they were born, what they look like, what they believe or how they identify themselves.

How is a marriage between a man and a woman, which is statistically more likely to fail, and/or become emotionally abusive, than succeed, superior to two men or two women sharing their lives for 60 or 70 years? Not all homosexual relationships are loving and stable, no, but trying to claim that heterosexual marriages are and pass homosexuals off as somehow threatening to our way of life or the concept of marriage is wholly facetious.

2. If this argument was really about the wellbeing of children, then you would not be arguing against homosexual marriage. There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, instrinsically better for parenting about a heterosexual, married, couple.
As for the ‘rights’ of adults (I love the quotation marks, making it seem like they’re somehow fake), why isn’t it about that? Everyone, in my view, has the right to be seen as equal in all ways, in the eyes of the law. So, yes, homosexual people getting married is a question of rights. The union of two people should never have levels, particularly when they come with differing levels of acceptance and legal recognition.

3. Why is it so important that children have a married heterosexual couple as parents, as opposed to all the other possibilities?

I’m more of the opinion that it’s important for a child to be raised in a safe, stable, emotionally satisfying environment and, to be honest, I’ve seen more than my fair share of married, heterosexual, parents who do not fit that bill. I don’t want to pass judgment on anyone’s parenting, I’m just trying to say that it’s just plain unfair on the children involved to be denied the possibility of a loving upbringing, just because the couple involved didn’t fit a ridig set of criteria, dictated by religion, and one they may not even believe in.

4. I do hate to pull the statistics card again, but given the rate at which heterosexual, married, couples are breaking apart families already, is it fair to say that homosexual marriage is going to make the concept somehow more fragile? As I’ve already said, I also fail to see how the idea that two men or two women getting married threatens the stability of the very concept.

Marriage doesn’t provide stability, in and of itself, a loving equitable relationship does. There are thousands, if not millions, of perfectly functional families out there made up of people who have never been married and never will, but their children grow up safe, happy and possibly better emotionally and mentally equipped than those of us who came out of a divorced family, no matter how amicable it was.

5. I think it’s very short sighted to think that a government should hold to old social norms simply because they’re old and particularly in the face of changing public opinion. If governments never allowed for societal change to influence governmental progress, think of the things that would never have happened; the ending of slavery, women’s suffrage, the end of child labour. I could certainly go on.

Basically, every major change in the way a society functions is the debunking of an old social norm in the face of pressure from society and every time, there are people who don’t see it as something that needs to be changed, simply because it’s a long standing institution. I can understand and accept personal views on a subject, but not the ‘it’s worked before, why change it?’ argument, because it just feels so thoughtless and, frankly, apathetic.

…

Now, they read slighty weirdly, because I started with #5 and worked back to #1, so I started repeating myself retrospectively, but I’m still pretty happy with that.