Today the government's bill to legalise gay marriage is being debated in the commons. It is expected to pass because all three main parties have a free vote, and most labour and libdems are in favour: but the issue is very divisive for the tories and there are some dissenters in the other parties as well
This is the where the real arguments for and against the principle should be spelled out and so I have been having a look at what is being said
1. Concern that passing the bill could lead to religious groups being persecuted. This argument has been covered before on this board
2. "Marriage is not a matter for government, it is a matter for God" Hmm, I have seldom heard such a stupid argument. If that is what you believe you should oppose any civil ceremony and also any legislation predicated on marriage: so that means no law made on tax as it relates to married people; no law on the care and custody of children if a marriage breaks down; no law that wealth should be shared or passed to a widowed person when their partner dies; no preferential treatment for a spouse in terms of visiting a partner in hospital and on and on. Government has no business interfering in this in any way at all.
As it happens some religious groups have already dealt with this in one form: some denominations do not recognise second marriages after divorce: so they tell themselves that those couples are not married in the eyes of god. That leads to some bad consequences for the couples involved but it is accepted: the couples get all the recognition of their marriage from the state and all the privileges and obligations which attend it: and the religious get to stop them taking communion or whatever they think is important within their own belief system. If they can live with divorcees who remarry why not gays?
3. It has been seriously argued that this legislation is flawed cos Mr Cameron has not a mandate for it. Not like dismantling the welfare state, for example, or privatising the NHS. Oh, wait....
4. The semantic argument also run again: some say this is orwellian in that it changes the meaning of a word for a political end. Not like "reform" or "customer" or any of the other changes which are rather more important, then?
5. Marriage is there for the production and rearing of children. Oh well, back to "putting away" a barren wife (and presumably husband, in these days of equality): and also dissolving all the marriages of the childless and of people past childbearing age, and of those who have a hereditary disease and who choose not to pass that on. Hmm, who is going to enforce all this if marriage is not a matter for law but for God?
So far, so mainstream and silly. But it gets odder. One MP claims that this will lead to a charter for incest. I have no idea how that is supposed to work. Perhaps there are lots of full brothers and full sisters who have been holding themselves back because they do not believe in sex outside of marriage, and perhaps there is a clause in the bill which exempts same sex marriage from the usual rules about degrees of relationship? I do not think there is such a clause, however....
Another MP informed that when gays were given the right to marry in Spain the incidence of people in herterosexual marriages went down. Seems that the gays spoiled it for them......or maybe it was to do with the fact they liberalised the divorce laws at the same time? We are not told. We are given the correlation and nothing more. If you are ever looking for an example to illustrate that correlation is not the same thing as causation look no further
Christopher Chope said he was voting against because he is a conservative: so any conservative MP who votes in favour obviously has identity issues? Or not? Or what?
One wee sausage who is voting against is upset that he has been called a homophobe: it is rubbish when the cap fits, ain't it?
We ought to have some sympathy for Peter Bone, who said that this is the saddest day of his career as an MP. You can't dispute the honesty of someone else's emotion: but you can find your mind boggling at his priorities. This is a man who, before he entered the commons, was described as the "meanest boss in Britain" because he defended paying a 17 year old trainee in his company 87p an hour in 1995 (you do not misread that: it is not a typo for 1895). However that was before he entered the commons in 2005: since then he might have been made a little bit sad by his assertion that the NHS would not be out of place in stalinist russia: but apparently not. He could have been saddened by his own support of homeopathy: but he wasn't. The cuts in benefits for the poorest might have depressed him, but they didn't. Nope: this is the saddest day he has had since 2005. And yet he thinks there has not been enough time for this debate and would like another day devoted to it: I admire the man's fortitude because he apparently thinks the best idea would be to put the question to the people in the referendum on europe which Cameron has promised.
And then there is Nadine Dorries. She had a unique take on this I have not seen before. According to her, passing this bill will make homosexual couples more likely to cheat on each other. I will quote part of her speech in case you can make sense of it, cos I can't
QUOTE
This bill in no way makes a requirement of faithfulness from same-sex couples. In fact, it does the opposite.
In a heterosexual marriage a couple can divorce for adultery, and adultery is if you have sex with a member of the opposite sex. In a heterosexual marriage a couple vow to forsake all others ... A gay couple have no obligation to make that vow [to faithfulness] because they do not have to forsake all others because they cannot divorce for adultery. There is no requirement of faithfulness. And if there is no requirement of faithfulness, what is a marriage?
I am not sure about how adultery is defined but this occurs to me. If I marry a person who is bi, and he goes on to have sex with men it seems to me if she is right I cannot divorce him on grounds of adultery. Fair enough: If it happens, and I find I cannot live with that behaviour, I might not have that particular route out of the marriage: but just possibly I could go for irretrievable breakdown? Or "unreasonable behaviour"? "No fault" divorces have been happening for ages, so I am not sure what she is getting at: but if her notion of a successful marriage is one held together by the threat of divorce I am awful glad I do not live in her world
It is all vastly entertaining in its way, but dumb
