Views
The Other Side of Marriage
The Other Side of Marriage
by Eleanor Brown
I
wanted gay marriage to be banned in Canada. I refused to watch the House
of Commons debate on the opposition party-introduced motion that marriage
be restricted to a union of two people of the opposite sex. The "discussion"
would be filled with earnest friends-of-homosexuals sighing and calling
for teary tolerance and mass hugging.
The debate would be filled with politicians
who'd already made up their minds, arguing for the cameras. With nobody
actually listening to each other. For true equality, they would blubber
(because some of their best friends have been discriminated against),
marriage must include same-sex unions.
Most importantly, I knew that what I really
wanted to hear would not surface. I wanted to hear supporters and allies
of gay and lesbian people talk about the importance of nurturing a nascent
gay and lesbian culture. I wanted to hear about the importance of diversity
and tolerance in Canada, placed squarely in the context of valuing difference.
Accepting that forcing everyone into the same mainstream mold is not what
multiculturalism is truly about. I wanted a gay perspective that cheerily
announced that marriage is a hetero cultural institution - and heteros
can keep it.
I wanted politicians to vote to keep marriage
heterosexual as a way of giving us the right to be different, of celebrating
who we are.
So no watching the debate. Instead, your
scribe dragged herself out to the television set just as the bells were
ringing on Parliament Hill, calling our elected representatives to the
vote.
Yet despite my high and mighty principles,
my stomach knotted as I waited for the results of a nail-biter (the final
vote was 134 to 137, with a straight definition of marriage being defeated).
To my own surprise, I discovered that a very real part of me wanted that
damned motion to fail: I wanted marriage to be opened up.
And that, of course, is because of the reasons
most of those yucky politicians had for voting against gay unions. They
wanted keep marriage hetero out of sheer hatred and bigotry.
Such is the other reason the debate was
avoided. Who wants to sit through hours of soul-destroying crap?
It is hard to accept a gift, to accept an
anti-gay marriage belief that coincides with my own, when the reasoning
behind it is antithetical to my very existence.
But at least the politicians who showed
up took a public stance. The effort is to be respected. Thirty-one pols
didn’t bother to make it to the vote!
Let's say five had real excuses - caught
in traffic or at the bedsides of dying relatives. The rest deserve to
be dumped in the next election for refusing to play their essential role
in democracy. There is a special place in Hell for cowards.
And if you regular folk, non-politicians,
Joe Gay and Jane Lesbian, aren’t getting involved, that goes for
double for you. If you believe in gay marriage, say so. If you hate the
idea - like me - say so. And say why. So many of us mutter about how stupid
marriage is, but refuse to speak out publicly.
The mainstream needs to hear from all of
us. Real debate within our community, in which we involve those out there,
is the only way to let them know who and what we are.
Otherwise, we continue to let the heteros
decide for us.
Eleanor Brown writes about gay and lesbian issues from her home in
Montreal, Canada. Her work can be found at 365gay.com
and fabmagazine.com