Dan Savage explains why it’s straight people who have redefined marriage, not gay people.
This morning, syndicated US advice columnist and gay rights advocate, Dan Savage, was interviewed by Julian Morrow on Australia’s Radio National. Here’s what he said about marriage equality.
“Some people don’t believe marriage can be between a man and a man, that you can’t have a wife without a husband. But it used to be that you couldn’t have a girlfriend without a boyfriend and now nobody disputes the right of gay people to call their boyfriends ‘boyfriends'”.
“Marriage isn’t a gendered institution any more as straight people live it and practise it. That’s what makes a lot of straight people uncomfortable about gay marriage – not what it says about gay people but what it says about straight people and how you guys have re-defined marriage.
“It’s not us that wanted to redefine it. Marriage used to be a property transaction. A man gave another man his daughter and she became the wife of the other man. Women were property. They couldn’t own property, couldn’t inherit, didn’t even have a right to their own children, there was no such thing as marital rape being considered a crime, a woman didn’t have a right to control her own body.
“Straight people decided that was BS and changed the definition of marriage to what it is now, which is, to your credit, two legally autonomous and equal individuals making a commitment to each other to care for each other for life – monogamous or not, children or not, religious or not, for life or not, that’s all up to that individual couple. It’s not about gender or sex roles any more, and that institution, marriage as straight people redefined it, there’s no logical reason to exclude same-sex couples from that institution.”
For the full interview, click here