Abstract
As I write, the House of Commons has just approved the first reading of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill by a stonking majority.
I find myself considerably more troubled than I anticipated. I’m not really a political animal: my tendency is to care more about a character in the latest Dickens by my bed than what the Lower House is messing up now. So I am asking myself why I care. And I notice that I was similarly churned up about a couple of other political issues which initially seem unrelated.
One was the inexorable drift away from the feet and inches of this island’s history, towards the regimented and soulless metricity of Europe’s Bonaparte. The other, the unworkable Hunting Act which nominally came into force in 2005.
Yes, there are similarities.
First, I don’t remember any democratic mandate for the criminalising of greengrocers selling bananas in the lbs and oz of our forefathers: when did we agree to that one? Secondly, when Parliament was spending over 700 hours deciding how best to cull vermin, the vast majority of the British Public, if asked, “For or against?” would have said, “Kindly fix the NHS.”
Go on, try polling your local pub. I bet you a packet of Smarties that nine out of ten people you ask about Gay Marriage (including gay people) respond that they’d rather have a pension.
Though I know a few of the remaining one in ten. One a dear friend of mine, who is longing to marry his partner after several miserable decades pretending to be straight.
I recognise his need. I passionately believed Civil Partnerships were long overdue, and didn’t go far enough when they came. I had a friend who, ten years ago, could not live in the same continent as his partner, one being British and the other American. Such a situation was far more iniquitous than an unequal age of consent.
Nor do I, for a moment, believe a Gay Marriage Act will undermine heterosexual unions. We heterosexuals are managing that all on our own, without any help from the gay community.
Perhaps Christians should stop bleating on: surely it’s up to the state to marry whom it wishes, and up to Christians to get on with the far more important job of preaching the Gospel.
Certainly, it is indeed the state’s job to confer legal rights and privileges. Of course two people of any gender should be entitled to appoint one another next of kin, with every advantage this brings in joint tenancy, visiting rights, inheritance and anything else. The shame is that we showed a prurient interest in their sexual behaviour, and denied this right to siblings.
But this is very different from redefining our language. Which is not the business of the state at all. Or rather, it tends to be the business of extremely unpleasant, nasty, totalitarian states.
My deep unease over this has nothing to do with homosexuality - any more than I really mourn the loss of furlongs and bushels. It is because I loathe dictatorship.
When an imperial force wants to crush an indigenous culture, it sometimes outlaws the native tongue. We did it with Ireland. It is arguably the most subversive and effective way of curtailing a people’s freedom, by controlling freedom of expression and therefore thought itself.
David Cameron can no more redefine marriage than he can change the colour of the sky. But by pretending he can, he becomes a cultural tyrant: insisting that tomorrow it will be green, and anyone who doesn’t agree is an intolerant bigot fit for Room 101.
And I don’t like that very much.