Locked out of happiness
RYAN HEATH
July 24, 2010
Gay marriage is not about symbolism, politics or taking a stand. It is about letting more than 1 million Australians join an institution that makes people happier.
IN AN ever more populous and competitive world nothing can be taken for granted.
While Australia takes pride in its tradition of adapting with the times, of embracing and accepting difference if it is clear we might benefit, it is not inevitable that we will continue to prosper from change. Australia may have been an innovator in social policy, from pensions to "populate or perish" immigration and difficult economic reform to cope with globalisation, but it seems to be falling away from mainstream progress on 21st-century issues of social capital. Piecemeal support for childcare is one example, but the most glaring and easily fixable problem is the lack of marriage equality in Australia.
The institution of marriage is so much a part of life's tapestry that most Australians take it for granted. We cannot imagine an Australia without it, so we do not bother to imagine it at all in a political sense. But for more than a million Australians marriage cannot be taken for granted. It cannot be taken at all.
Here the Western tendency to prioritise the economic in favour of the social, and the Australian tendency to take good things for granted, collide. Yet the absence of marriage equality from Australian life is harming many, and will end up hurting the institution and the country at large.
While gay rights movements have enjoyed rapid success in Australia — achieving a near legislative volte-face in just two generations — there is much they could not predict and which no social movement could control. Australia has accorded to homosexuals a range of rights, mostly relating to private relations. We have yet to link them to the sorts of responsibilities that can give a full and balanced meaning to those rights.
The absence of marriage and, importantly, the prospect of it, in these million-plus lives denies gay and lesbian Australians the best social support structure available in our society. For more than 150 years, data on the effects of marriage has demonstrated that marriage builds happier, healthier and longer lives. While no two marriages are alike, most are roughly the same. Being in a marriage is likely to save you expensive care costs, steer you away from crime, and deliver a sense of security that reduces stress and its ill effects. Name another institution or government policy that can do all that.
In contrast, consider what the absence of role models, development paths and stability might do to those who cannot marry. Is there no connection between this and the disproportionate numbers of suicides and risky and addictive behaviours found in gay communities? Are we not denying the very best safety net to some of the people who need it most?
Opponents of marriage equality may be enraged not so much by the marriage aspect as the homosexual aspect. But herein lies the key to gaining grassroots support for change. Marriage is an excellent conservative institution, but for gays, getting married is the most radical way to express their commitment to each other.
Extending marriage is therefore a unique opportunity to bridge political and cultural divides.
By adding to an existing institution, rather than wrecking it or building a rival one, marriage equality also meets the core test of conservatism: guarding what works, in order to save it from sacrifice at the altar of fashion.
It fits with the pattern of Western liberal history, of including in an institution good people who make a good case to join. The rights of workers to own property, indigenous Australians to be citizens, women to vote — these cases set the precedent for allowing gays to marry.
To be part of marriage means to be part of society. Were your parents married? Do you think your classmates from high school would have expected to marry? How many single 40-year-olds did you know as a child? The answers will almost certainly illustrate that marriage is a powerful norm.
Yet most gay and lesbian Australians have spent most of their lives believing marriage is not something they will experience. The empty feeling this produces is best captured by English actor Sir Ian McKellen, who said in an interview: "It never crossed my mind that it'd ever be possible for me [to get married]. That's the scar that I and so many others bear — we believed ourselves to be second-rate citizens for so long, the idea of being able to say, 'This is my husband, these are my children', was not an option."
Perhaps it is the parents of gay children who are best placed to see that marriage is often the best shot their children will have at happiness. In hoping for happy children, it is hard to see why one should get this chance and not the other. As the fears of parents shift from questions like "What will the neighbours think?" and "Will he get AIDS?", the question of marriage keeps rising to the surface. Why would any parent want to condemn their child to what the journalist Jonathan Rauch describes as "a partnerless life in a sexual underworld"?
No families and couples I have interviewed in my research on the topic want this insecure existence. I have spoken to couples from Brisbane who saved for a year to fly to Canada to be married alone in a registry office, and others who left Australia because it was the only way to be with the one they loved. I've listened to mothers from Wollongong talk about the pain of seeing one daughter marry while the other is left in limbo. I have watched the frantic balancing act of gay politicians pushing uphill to change the law while desperately trying to keep their own personal lives together. And everywhere I have found couples who feel the burden and responsibility of being public role models, who fear that if their relationship or marriage founders they will help ruin the future for everyone. Nearly half of all opposite-sex marriages fail, despite their total anonymity. So imagine how hard it is for same-sex relationships to survive public pressure without the social endorsement that opposite-sex marriages enjoy.
It makes it easy to wonder whether the walls of privacy around the likes of Penny Wong and Bob Brown tell us more about their own nature or that of Australian politics. Is it just a coincidence that we know next to nothing about the family lives of our gay politicians?
The punters are racing ahead of the law, if opinion polls are to be believed: most Australians now regularly tell pollsters they support marriage equality. While these responses are a welcome sign of progress for equality activists, the strength of this support remains unclear. Will it dissipate as did support for euthanasia, in the face of aggressive opposition, or founder when the choice is not about a general principle but a specific model, as with an Australian republic?
No major political party supports marriage equality, quarantining discussion to the fringes of politics — Senate inquiries, web petitions, street rallies and queer magazines. The advantage of this political cul-de-sac is that it gives equality supporters time to mobilise the growing list of supportive data and hone arguments that engage the "middle Australians" politicians court and fear. A longer debate also forces Australians to confront their own prejudices. Would you be happy to take your kids to a wedding with two blokes walking down the aisle? What if one of the blokes is your brother? Do you really think gay relationships are as meaningful as your own?
Naturally, some Australians will take time to adjust to such ideas. The elaborate sets of support and understanding for opposite-sex marriage took thousands of years to settle, and it is only 21 years since Denmark introduced the first gay weddings. But in taking time, campaigners may be giving Australia something much better. As the writer Alain de Botton writes: "You can't legislate for humanity." You can't legislate for the feeling that you are OK as a person, the feeling that you and your relationship matter. Only a supportive community can provide that, and only a full debate can guide Australia to that outcome.
Gay and lesbian Australians now enjoy tolerance, but not acceptance. Approval of same-sex marriage would mean acceptance by the rest of Australia. That may surprise the many liberal Australians who now have gay friends and family. Yet beyond geographical pockets, and the millions of individuals who accept gays and lesbians for who they are and what they aspire to be, it cannot be said that acceptance is the social norm or the legal standard. Yearly extravaganzas such as the Sydney Mardi Gras are not a norm; a norm is what goes on in public every day when the cameras aren't looking. And it is perhaps only the ongoing public institution of marriage that would bring Australians to a state of acceptance, and indicate to gay Australians that they are wanted.
Not So Private Lives, a recent research project by the University of Queensland, found that four-fifths of the 2300 gay and lesbian Australians surveyed want the right to marry. Most, including those in committed relationships, aspire to marriage. That means about a million of Australia's estimated 1.3 million or more gays and lesbians support marriage equality. And more than half a million of them want to marry.
In this era of mass migration and the death of distance where, as Brigid Delaney puts it, we churn through dozens of jobs, countries and lovers, it seems the greatest request of these communities is nothing more than the right to settle down.
Imagine arbitrarily telling all the residents of Canberra or the northern suburbs of Perth that they will never be allowed to marry. Imagine telling the several hundred thousand children of same-sex couples (whether from previous relationships, adoption, surrogacy or an alternative arrangement) that you think their parents don't deserve to marry like their friends' parents.
AS WITH all forms of discrimination, the type that surrounds gay relationships is corrosive to its victims. It's rarely one personal act or one law that cements the inequality — it builds slowly over time.
I realised early in discovering my sexuality that honesty meant I could not have a married future. It made me worry about disappointing my family. Having no personal experience to go on, my family in turn had no words with which to discuss my relationships. Very quickly, I went from a person shy of discussing private life with family to being unable to talk about it all. It cut me off from my parents when they wanted to reach out most; it damaged my relationship with a gay sibling who dealt differently with the situation. And I cannot believe it would have been like this if I lived in a country where gay marriage and a language for gay relationships existed.
Multiply that frustration and pain a million times over, and you get a sense of what the status quo is doing to Australian families.
Would the creation of a rival to marriage, a kind of "civil union" system, be a solution? No. You are either equal or not. And what would it mean for marriages made overseas? Would they finally gain recognition, or will Australia continue to refuse to recognise them? Imagine if you were to suddenly become single in the eyes of the law while visiting Europe with your husband of 20 years. It happens every day to foreigners visiting Australia, where you must leave your same-sex marriage at the border along with your fruit and the soil on your shoes.
These scenarios are not the fair go we have all been taught to believe in. You cannot support a "separate but equal" stance, and pick and choose which marriages you recognise, and still claim to support a fair go.
Keeping prizes like marriage away from deserving and interested couples is unbecoming of a responsible middle power, and in contrast to our peers and closest allies. From Mexico City to Malmo, Lisbon to Lillehammer, Buenos Aires to Brussels and Boston, our partners in the most advanced nations and leading economies have all introduced marriage equality.
All of our main Commonwealth peers have reformed their laws to offer marriage or marriage in all but name — leaving Australia in the company of the likes of Nigeria rather than Canada.
In the same week that MP Anthony Albanese tried and failed to win Australian Labor Party support for equality, in June 2009, Albania's parliament voted to introduce marriage equality.
If Nepal passes its widely advertised marriage-equality law in late 2010, as expected, Australia will be the only inhabited continent without marriage equality.
In that case we will be a fortress holding out against equality — not only in spite of our national tradition as an open and egalitarian land, but in spite of rational thought.
It seems absurd that we would explicitly prevent the strengthening of communities and allow our politicians to cower before a minority opposed to marriage equality. The damage from such social exclusion is not limited to gays and lesbians. It affects their children, their wider families and their ability to take part fully in a productive Australian future.
When we think of the legacy we will leave to future generations, we must think of our families as well as our bank accounts.
Our social capital is part of our wealth, and the strength of our families is the bedrock of future life chances. This can't be separated from the need for marriage equality; the goals are one and the same. Gay and lesbian Australians have been outsiders for too long, it's time to bring them in from the cold.
This is an edited extract of the essay Love in a Cold Climate, published by the Grffith Review.
Ryan Heath is an Australian writer based in Europe and a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He edits www.thegaymarriageblog.com.
