What marriage equality means to me (a personal reflection)

Marriage equality is now law in Australia. The first legal same-sex marriages will take place on 9 January 2018, after a drawn-out and often ugly debate during which the conservative right expended every arrow in their quiver in a last-ditch attempt to resist change. Maybe, as Prime Minister Turnbull believes, it had to go this way: that change is only possible when it's inevitable and can not longer be resisted. I don't believe that. Change is both desirable and necessary, and each moment of change resisted is a moment of unnecessary injustice. 

On the website side of things, blogging is going to to slow down as we head towards Christmas, and I get ready for exams and winter holidays. So forgive the personal nature of this week's entry, but I'm going to tell you all a story about what marriage equality means to me.

Once upon a time . . . 

I came to politics late. I was middle-class kid with scientists for parents who never talked about politics and never really showed an interest in social policy. They were prototypical Uninvolved. History was my gateway drug. The past was filled with heroic figures and world-shaking events in faraway places. To this day, "Lawrence of Arabia" remains my favourite movie: the capacity of an individual, no matter how flawed, to change the world was revelatory to a kid in the Australian suburbs. It probably helped that Lawrence was increasingly coming to be seen a queer figure. I obsessed over the Second World War (aided in part by my grandparents memories ), intensively studying the epic that shaped the modern world. I came out the other side something of an enthusiast for the Soviet aesthetic, a teenage 'tankie'.

Thanks to a scholarship, I was educated a private boys school in Melbourne. The atmosphere was blatantly homophobic, if not outright reactionary. Hard as it may be to understand only twenty years later, but it was a very different time: the internet and social media barely existed; kids didn't have phones and bullying and inter-student violence was commonplace; teachers could and did employ corporal punishment, even if it was slowly falling out of use. Although kids I went to school with came out later in life, I only knew of only one 'bisexual' guy at the time. He cut himself with glass pieces that lay around the school ground. That was a real thing, that neither I nor anyone around me was equipped to acknowledge, much less deal with. This was an environment in which putting gay people in concentration camps was considered a 'humane' policy: cruelty against those who were different was a way of life. 

This attitude didn't necessarily take its cues from official policy. The school was religious, but overall rather progressive by those standards. Nor was it the result of cultural or racial values: the student body was extremely multicultural, as most in Australia are. No, this was a homophobia bred entirely through adolescent male macho culture that punished deviance and perceived weakness. What a shock then to realise that adult society was no different: that high politics, law and policy embodied these same reactionary values. This awareness dawned for me in 2000, when the conservative Australian government petulantly sought to cut gay couples off from IVF and medically-assissted conception. These adult debates were mirrored in the classroom: one of the jocks threw a chair at me for daring to argue the other side.  

Pop culture also played an important role. Joss Whedon and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will always remain an important influence on progressives of a certain age, and "New Moon Rising", the fourth-season episode in which one of the main characters came out as gay, floored me. The narrative of coming out was unlike anything I had experienced before: it was a personalised heroic epic, the individual taking charge of their own fate and making a conscious break with the established rules and customs of society. It also personalised the broader political struggle in a way reading the news never did: I didn't know any out people, but thanks to fictionalised characters I felt like I did. I wrote an extremely personal essay at the time, trying to explain how much influence the 'coming out' narrative was having on my political worldview, the only upshot of which is that my English teacher probably thought I was gay. 

So I came to politics late, but I came to it through gay rights. Inequalities based on sexual preference made the abstract aesthetics of progress personal in a way that a cis-, white middle class kid would otherwise not have experienced. To realise that everyone is the hero of their own story, and that we all have barriers and oppression to overcome, is a powerful thing. It's served as a lodestar for me these last twenty years (I almost quit the Labor Party in 2004 over their disgraceful cowardice on the issue) and reaching this point therefore feels like a moment of both culmination and release.  I can't claim to have played any role - better men and women than I have made it their life work, and it's they who now deserve all the credit. But I think a lot of us are going to to feel a bit unmoored, directionless and adrift now that it's done. 

Where, then, do we go next? Obviously, trans rights are going to be hard fought the next few years, but there too, social change feels inevitable. I think the path I've taken, and the advice I'd give to others, is this: whatever brings you to progressivism, stay a while and listen. Ask your comrades what brought them there and offer your support. Listen and learn, build ties between your struggle and theirs and come to see the connections and structures that unite them. It may take a while, but eventually I like to think we can generalise our identities from the initial struggles that motivate us: to recognise that it was not this injustice that made us angry, but this injustice. And one by one, working together, they will be overcome. 

Marriage Equality: A quick and dirty guide to arguing against religious exemptions

So, the results of Australia's non-binding and unnecessary post vote 'survey' on marriage equality are in, and it's an emphatic victory for "Yes". Finally! What happens next, hopefully, is that a flawed but largely fine bipartisan bill will be introduced to Parliament, voted on, and undo the terrible wrong that was committed in 2004 when marriage was restricted to only hetereosexual couples (a moment that led me to almost turn in my ALP membership in disgust). On a personal note, gay rights has been an animating issue for me politically since I was a teenager in the 90s and finally, if belatedly, seeing this moment arrive feels like a great national and personal catharthis. 

But. This isn't over; it isn't over in the United States, and you can be sure the religious right is going to import much of the same politics into Oz in coming months and years. The first battle is going to be to stop parliament's hardline conservatives from inserting broad-ranging exemptions into the  bill that allow religious groups and others who express a 'moral belief' in the exclusivity of traditional marriage broad licence to discriminate. Without a bill of rights of our own in Australia, local progressives aren't practiced at making these sorts of arguments. So here's my quick'n'dirty guide to arguing against them. 

Five Ways They're Wrong

Liberal rights make a distinction between the public and private. People are free to believe and act however they wish in private, but the public sphere is a neutral space where no belief is privileged over any other. By asking for an exemption to a law of general application, people with moral beliefs are asking the state to privilege those beliefs, and thus violate its obligation of secular neutrality. Why do we make this distinction? Because . . . .

Rights are not unlimited. They extend only so far as they don't infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. People are free to belief and act however they wish; however, we live an an interdependent social setting where our actions affect others and we must take the rights of others into account if we recognise their equal human dignity. So, sorry, you can't unilaterally infringe the right of others to marry and found a family, or (if you're a social service provider) deny them their right to education, healthcare, housing and social support.  But what essential rights are infringed by cake-shop owners or wedding venues? Well . . . .

Everyone is entitled to protection from arbitrary discrimination in public life, including access to general goods and services in the marketplace. It is fundamental to the mutual recognition of human dignitty and equality that everyone is entitled to equal treatment, regardless of any arbitrary personal characteristic, including race, biological sex, gender expression and family structure. Protection from discrimination is a human right, and is embodied in a series of positive Australian Acts. We accept without reflection that market participants must not discriminate against persons of particular races or religions; sex and gender are no different.

But wait, they say, we need an exemption from just those discrimination laws! And exemptions to laws of general application may be justified if their neutral application leads to adverse or discriminatory consequences in fact. However, this is a matter of consequentialist weighing of harms against rights. For example, ministers of religion are exempt from an obligation to perform religious ceremonies in violation of their rites because that would constitute a direct infringement of their right to practice their religion freely. I can eve see an argument that churches and religious buildings be exempt from being hired for religious ceremonies outside their doctrine. On the other hand, we must weigh up the manifest harm of the denial of equal treatment to members of the community against the psychic 'harm' to the 'true believer', who has freely chosen to engage in market activities fundamentally unrelated to their exercise of religious freedom. For example, religious groups that own public venues discriminate when they use their private beliefs to exclude certain people from accessing their services. 

But wait, they say, forcing us into a neutral public stance threatens the ongoing viability of our community of belief! However while some liberal philosophers accept that the survival of a religious community sometimes justify special treatment, not a single one accepts that this extends to imposing restrictions on individuals 'external' to the community. In other words, a religious group is free to expel a homosexual couple from membership of its congregation (an 'internal' regulation), but cannot claim to regulate the rights and responsibilities of other members of the community with different views (which would constitute regulation external to its community). 

So there you go, five quick and dirty arguments to win the argument and make sure the Smith bill passes speedily and unchanged.