“Gay marriage like incest” or “how to take quotations completely out of context”
Posted by Mathew | December 12, 2009 | 1 Comment
In the wake of the repeal of same-sex marriage legislation by the constituents in Maine last month, the Australian Senate was presented with a private members bill to amend the traditional definition of marriage. The Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009, seeking to replace the words “a man and a woman” with “any two persons”, attracted the largest number of submissions from the public – in excess of 28,000, a record number for any Bill.
Australian Senate rejects Marriage Equality Bill
The amendment was rejected by the Senate with a 2/3 majority of the submissions opposing the Bill.
These facts and figures would be amazing by themselves if it were not for the comments made by Family First Senator Fielding which, in the hands of the popular media and the blogosphere, misshaped the debate completely.
Taking the floor during the sitting on 26 Nov 2009 of the Senate, Sen. Fielding remarked:
”A bloke cannot marry his brother; it is not right. A woman cannot marry their sister; it is not right. A bloke cannot marry a bloke because it is not right, and a female cannot marry a female because it is not right. I don’t support this.”
That was enough to outrage same-sex marriage advocates in Australia and the line, “gay marriage like incest”, was the disingenuous header in the main-stream media. No surprise there, really. What is disappointing, however, is how the comment was taken out of context and used to milk sympathy for the same-sex marriage cause.
Contrary to widespread opinion and lack of unbiased, objective journalistic integrity, Sen. Fielding did not state that gay marriage is the same as incest. Discerning readers will note that Sen. Fielding was rattling off a series of different types of relationships that he believes are wrong. He doesn’t equate incestuous marriage as being the same as same-sex marriage; he merely states that, in his view, both types of relationships are objectively and morally wrong, especially in the context of marriage.
Incestuous and same-sex marriage are wrong, but not the same
Now here’s a hint in case you missed it: stating that same-sex marriage is of the same substance as that of an incestuous marriage relationship is a different claim entirely to saying that same-sex marriage is wrong. Period. An honest and fair interpretation of Sen. Fielding’s comment must conclude that he stated the latter, not the former. There’s no same-same here; there’s a big difference.
What is interesting, however, is that the responses from the gay community, by and large, readily acknowledge that incestuous marriage is wrong. But on what basis and with what reason do they believe this? And once all that has been clarified, could they then explain how same-sex marriage is right?
I wait to see the responses burst forth from the blogosphere in answer.
It should be said that Sen. Fielding’s wording was far from being well-phrased – he made the job of his critics relatively trouble free: it is all too easy to bend someone’s words to mean something else entirely if the speaker just cobbled them together and threw them out there as Sen. Fielding apparently did. As such, I would like to think that Sen. Fielding was trying to reiterate a popular aphorism used by traditional-marriage advocates the world-over, but it was obviously not to be. Senator Fielding only wanted to air his belief that same-sex marriage is wrong. Yet the aphorism from which Sen. Fielding borrowed was not talking about wrong marriages or right marriages; instead it refers to the already-existing equality that is found in Western marriage law. In paraphrase:
Access to marriage is conferred upon all members of society with full equality. No one member of the community is prohibited from marriage for reasons that do not apply to any other member. All restrictions are equally applied, without discrimination, to each member in society. Examples of these restrictions are: no one may marry a close-blood relative; no one may marry someone who is underage; no one may marry multiple partners; no one may marry someone who is already married, and; no one may marry someone of the same gender. Operating within the bounds of these restrictions we see the very epitome of equal treatment in action.
Marriage is not an institution for couples to enter into, but an institution in which individuals come together to form a particular type of couple
There is another distinction that can be made here: marriage law is not made for couples to enter into. Marriage law is specifically applied to individuals (precisely one individual man and one individual woman) who wish to form a bond within the bounds of the marriage institution. This further underscores the fact that no individual is disadvantaged under marriage law at all. The only alleged disadvantage is the one that is applied to the self by the individual, who self-discriminate themselves out of marriage by desiring to marry a member of the same gender. This fact appears perfectly irrefutable to me.
When marriage ceases to be marriage
There is yet one further sense in which traditional-marriage advocates can assail the logic of same-sex marriage advocates: the term “same-sex marriage” is oxymoronic. In much the same way as you cannot have a “married bachelor”, you likewise cannot have “same-sex marriage” – insisting in doing so creates something that is completely nonsensical from the outset; chiefly, it is to state that a “same-sex marriage is a union between a man and a woman”, or that it is a “union of a man and a woman in which both partners are of the same-sex”. Marriage is defined in a particular way that to tamper with it is to create something new that can no longer be referred to as marriage.
To illustrate the point, if we take a cube and keep rounding off the corners we would shortly have a sphere – the cube having since ceased to be. And if we now have a sphere, how could we keep calling it a cube? Has it not become another entity entirely? After all, we cannot hold a cube that is now shaped like a sphere and maintain that it is still a cube. That would be like saying “the cube I’m holding is spherical.” No – the best we could manufacture is that we now hold a sphere that once was a cube.
It should be noted that while both a cube and a sphere are equally valid as shapes, they are separate entities. And there are things that we can use cubes as (building blocks, for example) that you cannot achieve with spheres. This same logic applies to any attempts at redefining marriage to mean anything other than a union between the sexes.
The world is losing its mind if it sees no difference between cubes and spheres. If it believes it can dispense away with that area of the human rationale called “discernment” with which it uses to make distinctions between different categories of things every day, the world as we know it will soon go completely pear-shaped.
As the Senator said, capably using his own discernment, it is not right for a bloke to marry another bloke. It is not right because, should it eventuate, the institution in which they are “joined” ceases to sensibly be identified as marriage.
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Tags: culture > homosexuality > marriage > same-sex marriage > sexuality
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March 8th, 2010 @ 11:10 pm
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