Hopefully you have not noticed, but there is a new campaign being run to enable you to show your support for same-sex marriage (if you must, see ido.org.au). There are three protagonists.
Marie Claire magazine, whose July edition (and besides the gay marriage hook), proves its love for diversity by (and this is not a joke) dealing with issues such as ‘my life as a porn writer’, ‘hoodie hysteria - when fashion turns deadly’ and ‘why you need a 5 year life plan’. Obviously, the sort of serious publication that springs to mind when confronting the social issues of the day.
Then there is Sunrise, the Channel 7 morning television program. Even if you’ve never seen it, you know the type of thing: the lovable bantering breaky team that you just feel you know.
And finally, Get-up, a social change group, that I suppose is something of a legitimate voice in this debate.
On a serious note, (so what to do with Marie Claire?) this issue does throw up some points worth commenting on.
Firstly, and like many social issues, the pro and con camps quickly polarise and form into ‘CFZs’ – communication free zones. Whilst we are all seemingly having a jolly old debate, and indeed using words from the very same dictionary, there is a stop upon the engagement and communication needed to resolve, or at least understand, key issues.
In the marriage debate, the CFZ appears to be over what marriage is. Is it about a public affirmation of love, and nothing more? Is it about enabling procreation in a stable environment and nothing more? Is it about ensuring social stability and children being raised by their mother and father? Etc. Clearly these are questions that need some serious thought. They are also given it elsewhere (compare academics like Robert P George (Princeton) and Jenni Millbank (UTS Sydney)). Maybe we should read the ‘my life as a porn writer’ article for answers? (I’m also assuming that it is an article.)
Next comes the ‘social isolation’ aspect (a good writer on this topic is Bishop Charles Chaput, see most recently: A Heart on Fire: Catholic Witness and the Next America). I expect that if the person next to you on the bus was reading Marie Claire, you’d not really care. There is certainly no faux pas. The point being that the more you are told, told and told that gay marriage is a ‘no brainer’, that not having it is a ‘denial of human rights’, that it is ‘inevitable’, the more you are punched into acceptance, if only acceptance by your silent disagreement.
The last point I’d like to make concerns the statistical aspect to all of this. We are told, and I have no reason to doubt, that there is a consistently surveyed majority that in some way are not opposed to gay marriage. These are often called the supporters on the issue. I suspect that many branded supporters are perhaps better described as apathetic – along the lines of ‘well if they want to get married, good luck to them, what do I care?’
The statistical representations, both mathematically and philosophically, require some further consideration. For instance, how should an apathetic attitude be represented? Probably by having other categories besides ‘for’ and ‘against’. Should there be some consideration given to those who support gay marriage but place no value on marriage between men and women? I recently read a statistic in (I think) First Things about the percentage of adults in the USA who are not married, and it was high. How should this be dealt with?
No comments:
Post a Comment