Objections to gay marriage are unsupportable and dishonest.

With the success of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, Bill Shorten has, somewhat opportunistically, announced a private member’s bill to legalise gay marriage in Australia. The government now faces the choice of allowing a conscience vote which would be likely to result in the passing of the bill, thus giving Shorten brownie points for leadership, or trying to delay the issue until some point when the government might be seen to be taking the initiative, which is probably never.  At any rate, the threat of the vote has stirred up a swarm of objections from those opposed to the notion of gay marriage.

Suffice it to say that these objections are basically both ludicrous and fundamentally dishonest.

The first thing that is obvious is that many of the objections to gay marriage would, if applied, also disqualify a large number of straight marriages.

These include.The purpose of marriage is to conceive and raise children: gay couples cannot naturally conceive children and so a gay marriage is not really a marriage.  Well, millions of heterosexual couples cannot conceive children either because one partner is infertile or they are past child bearing age or the couple simply has no desire to have children. So, the first challenge to the anti-gay marriage advocates is:  are you going to prevent couples who are infertile, or aged 65, from getting married because they cannot have children?  And further, if one agrees that two people aged, say, 65 can get married, how does it matter if they are both women or both men?

While arguing, on the one hand that gay couples cannot be "married" because they cannot have children naturally, opponents are also concerned that gay couples might adopt children which they see as being bad for the children for  the reason that children require a mother and a father.This is an argument based on considerable ignorance and a painfully narrow view of what constitutes a “mother” and a “father.”.

For a start, it is not uncommon for a gay couple to have children that are the genetic offspring of one of the partners. For example, a women has children by a male partner, they separate and she ends up raising her children with a female partner. How is this different from a divorced or widowed woman living with, say, her sister or a female friend? Consider the thousands of women who raised children with the assistance of their parents and siblings when their husbands were away at war. There are many instances of children being raised by single mothers or fathers with the assistance of other members of the family. Why is it a problem if the mother, or father, is in a sexual relationship with the other non-genetic parent? The answer is given below.

Whether the children of the gay couple are genetic offspring of one partner, or adopted, there is still the argument that children need both a mother and father because men and women bring "different qualities" to parenthood. This is based on the archaic notion that men and women are fundamentally different in personality and basically conform to the traits commonly ascribed to their gender. This is nonsense. If we look at the artificial stereotypes of “masculinity” and “femininity” we immediately see that we cannot impose them with any reliability on men and women.  There are countless marriages which are characterised by, what is called, “role reversal”. (Itself a sexist term that implies "normal" roles for men and women). It is not uncommon to find couples where the woman is career minded, the man more domestically oriented; where the woman is the assertive decision maker, the man more passive; the woman stricter the children, the man more tolerant. There are, indeed, women who are not particularly maternal, and men that are very much so.

The value of having two parents is not that one is ‘masculine’ and the other ‘feminine’ but that children are raised by two people with different points of view, different temperaments, different abilities. A gay couple offers children exactly the same diversity of personality and intellect as a straight couple.

But the arguments against gay marriage are also fundamentally dishonest: they are a smoke-screen. They are desperate rationalisations for what is actually a visceral reaction. What is really bothering these people is not the notion of gay marriage but gay sex. Every so often it slips through in the letters to the papers and other communications that “what gay people do is unnatural.” This is, I believe, the real reason people object to legitimising gay relationships as “marriage” and it in a way the most puzzling reason because there is nothing that gay couples do sexually that heterosexual couples don’t and yet this is the issue that is lurking in the background behind the entire debate. 

In the end, we are not dealing with a discussion about quality of childcare or reproductive capacity, but a fixation on sexual activities that perhaps says more about the objectors than the gay people they are discriminating against. 

What the opponents of gay-marriage need to do is get their mind off gay-sex (which is really not that different from straight sex) and think about the real basis of marriage which is the degree of commitment between the partners. It doesn’t matter what gay couples do in the bedroom any more than what straight couples do, and the definition of what constitutes a “man” and a “woman” are not as clearly defined at these opponents would like to think. One could go on at length asking them how they would apply their arguments to people who are transvestite, transsexual, hermaphroditic, androgynous, etc but it is a waste of time. Opponents of gay marriage just have far too limited concepts of gender, sexuality, personality, parenting and, dare I say it, love.