Imagine this: 5 lesbians in a car on the way to soccer training. But what did we talk about, I hear you ask? The usual: IVF, adoptions, babies, marriage, partners, love, and of course soccer. Oh wait, cats featured also. Of course they did.
What else would 5 thirty-something year old ladies talk about in a car ride for 45 mins? Ok, lots of options no doubt, but in reality it wouldn’t necessarily be greatly different if we’d been non-gay. I like that, non-gay. Everyone should be referred to in their state of gayness, after all it is a synonym for merry! Why not have that as the baseline?!
I must admit, I’m completely incensed and somewhat dumbfounded by the whole argument attempting to prevent gays from marrying. Seriously people (those who are against marriage equality, not the rest of you fabulous people who have hearts), it’s in living memory that black and white weren’t permitted to marry in this country. Have we really not learnt from our horrible mistakes in the past?
A friend, a lovely gay Aboriginal man, tells of how his Aboriginal grandfather had to petition the government for permission to marry his white grandmother. And now he has the pleasure, in his esteemed gayness, of being denied what his grandparents nearly were – the opportunity to openly and legally express love for his partner through marriage. Hopefully that will change in 2012.
Ok, so not everyone wants to get married. We live in a modern world, with an unmarried modern (ish, if she supported marriage equality she’d get the full rights to modern) woman as our PM. That’s cool, heaps of gays don’t want to get married, just like heaps of non-gays don’t. But they do want the choice.
The rates of gay suicide, bullying, discrimination, hate crimes, family rejection, and deep emotional pain are all still incredibly high in this “modern” world we live in. There is still a dire need to fight for equality, for humanity. As long as there are oppressors in the world, there are those who are oppressed.
Time to learn, me thinks. Time to forgive. Time to grow up. Time to love.
Afterall, I’d very much like to marry my gorgeous lady. The government can’t stop me having a loving ceremony in which we express our love for each other. They merely can stop me having it legally registered at the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Oh wait, that’s right, marriage is therefore a SECULAR word. Funny, I thought the argument against marriage is because it’s a religious institution?
