Last week, I spied a peculiar photograph accompanying a newspaper story about the legalisation of gay marriage and adoption in France.

The caption on it read ”Men in masks: A protest in Paris on Friday against legalising same-sex marriage”.

“These people are engaged in ideological contortions so complicated they must be exhausted”.

But that couldn’t be right. The picture showed a line of shirtless men on their knees, their fists raised in what could have been a gesture of defiance but which looked an awful lot like the universal air-punching gesture of a merry dancer in an especially man-friendly nightclub.

They were all wearing masks and were surrounded by muscled men wearing police uniforms. One of them was wearing red jeans – that’s the kind of thing an anti-gay protester in a less liberal country could get bashed for.

Taken on its merits, this vignette was more Oxford Street than a chalked-on rainbow crossing. And yet these protesters were from a far-right anti-gay group.

Protesting too much, you might say.

The picture was amusing, but also revealing, because it was a perfect illustration of the gay marriage debate, where nothing is as it seems and people, particularly politicians, contort themselves into elaborate ideological twists and end up looking like the exact opposite of what they proclaim to be.

Take Prime Minister Julia Gillard, whose opposition to gay marriage is due to her belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Beliefs are based on religious faith, prejudice or reason. The Prime Minister is an atheist. I strongly doubt she holds personal prejudice against gays or lesbians.

But she is at a loss to provide any reasonable argument to back up her strongly held belief. It’s particularly puzzlesome given the party to which she has devoted her life changed its official platform in 2011 to support gay marriage and also because she grew up in the progressive Left of the Victorian Labor Party.

Before the 2010 election, Gillard gave an interview to Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace in which she assured him that not only was her party opposed to gay marriage (as it was then) but, further, ”we do not want to see the development of ceremonies that mimic marriage ceremonies”.

Mimicking marriage ceremonies! Nobody wants that. The minute we allow homosexuals to dress in eggshell satin and release doves in public parks, civilisation as we know it could unravel.

Once upon a time, Gillard’s own relationship could have been described as ”mimicking” marriage but, thankfully, we live in a more enlightened age.

The Liberal Party is no better. It is the party of small government and free thought, except on this issue, where it believes in the state’s right to dictate the nature of its citizens’ most personal relationships and refuses to allow its MPs a free vote on the issue.

Then there are the Coalition’s social conservatives, the Barnaby Joyces and the Kevin Andrewses.

These people worry about the children.

They reason that children will suffer if they are not brought into families with a mummy and a daddy, ignoring the fact that thousands of Australian children already live in such households and, in the case of many fostered children, the (horribly unsuitable) same-sex parents are the only ones who will take them in.

No matter. You see, these politicians are pro-family, just like the Australian Christian Lobby, which this week released a statement criticising former prime minister Kevin Rudd for changing his mind on gay marriage (he used to be against, now he is pro, a change of heart which cynics point out has cost him zero political pain).

The Australian Christian Lobby statement layered offensiveness upon offensiveness, creating a sort of teetering offensiveness sandwich, by claiming that redefining marriage would create ”another” stolen generation of children who didn’t know their true parents.

”Marriage is a compound right to form a family,” the statement read. That is because the family values types reason marriage is the best overarching structure under which little people can flourish. So why deny that security to children cared for by two male parents or two female parents? You can’t be a little bit family values. It’s an all-or-nothing deal.

Besides, as British writer A. A. Gill reasoned in a brilliant essay pointing out how extremely camp weddings are, it is the pre-marriage stuff the family values people seem to object to the most.

The sort of immoral, liberated sex-and-drugs behaviour that occurs before you acquire a wedding ring, a sensible car and lower back problems. So why don’t they want more people to discover the steadying benefits of strong marriage?
Even if the real reason is (as one suspects) they think homosexuality is just disgusting and somehow wrong, surely they could rationally concede the social benefits of more and more people getting married?

No, they can’t. Because there is no reason to any of these politicians’ positions.

Not the atheist Prime Minister, who has a quasi-spiritual reverence for a malleable institution which, throughout its life, has embraced child brides, polygamy and ratified racism.

Not the Liberals who check their laissez-faire principles at the door when it comes to prying into the bedrooms of us all.

Not the family values types who laud the benefits of marriage and its society-cementing effects, only to deny those benefits to the significant minority of people who fancy their own sex.

And certainly not the think-of-the-innocent-children crowd, who argue all children should grow up under the benign banyan tree of marriage but won’t extend that security to the (equally innocent) children of gay parents.

All of these people are engaged in ideological contortions so complicated they must be exhausted.

The sad thing is that while there are passionate views held on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate, most people in the middle are not that fussed. If we introduced it tomorrow, we wouldn’t get shirtless anti-gay protesters who look like they’ve walked off the set of a blue movie marching in the street. The vast majority of Australians would not be bothered. It’s only the politicians who are and they need to be.

It must take an awful lot of energy pretending to be something you’re not.

Author: Jacqueline Maley
Publication: canberra times
Publication Date: May 25 2013