The following address was prepared for the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legal Affairs Committee hearing into marriage equality by AME Board Memeber, Malcolm McPherson, on 3.5.12.
Senators, thank you for inviting us to meet with you this morning.
This issue is not an academic issue for me. It is a part of my lived reality. I am a gay man who was in a heterosexual marriage for 27 years. I probably have more experience of marriage than most people in this room. I was out to my wife before we were married and I was a faithful and loving husband and a good father. We raised two lovely well-adjust children who are now young adults. I was a good husband and father because I am gay and not in spite of it.
My ex-wife and I married because we loved each other. We were sympatico and still are. We separated four years ago and my wife has re-married. We are committed to remaining good friends. My position as a second-class citizen was highlighted when my daughter and I led my ex-wife’s wedding party down the aisle. It is not something that I would be permitted to do by my church or by the Australian government. My children now have a father who is a second-class citizen and a human being considered to be inferior – ‘intrinsically disordered’.
Further to my own experience is that of my niece. I have here a wedding photo taken last year at her wedding to her wife. Her wedding and marriage is equally important to her wife and herself, to her family and to myself, as her uncle, as any of the other marriages among my nieces and nephews.
In speaking with you today, I have the support of my ex-wife, who is a committed Anglican like myself, my children, my eldest brother, a committed Seventh Day Adventist, of my other brother who is an Anglican minister in a regional Queensland town and of my sister and her husband who are Roman Catholics as well as the support of my nephews and nieces.
I want to deal with two issues. The first is the debate about what is ‘natural’. The second has to do with purpose and meaning.
It is difficult for the 90% of people who are heterosexual to understand those of us who are same-sex attracted, transgender or intersex. However, we are a naturally occurring group within the population in the same way as those who are left handed. I know of left-handed people not much older than myself who were forced to use their right hands, as being left handed is ‘not natural’. That attitude has a long history. The word ‘sinister’ is derived from the Latin word meaning left-handed.
When people say that the natural order of things is for men to marry women, that is true for the great majority of the population. It is not true for those of us who are attracted to the same sex. My marriage to my ex-wife was not, therefore, natural for me. Eventually I had to deal with the consequences of that unnatural relationship. Yes, I could pass successfully as heterosexual. I was a ‘good enough’ husband.
Ours was a very good marriage. I expect that our family was seen as a model family. Behind the façade was an essential lack of openness and honesty and an inability to be who I really am. The effort of living what was an unnatural life for me began to take its toll.
A friend of mine is wont to remark that “when you let us marry each other, we will stop marrying you.” There is a serious issue behind that apparently facetious comment.
I moderate a net-based support group for gay men married to women. I am very aware that some in that situation find themselves committing indiscretions that can destroy their marriages, their families, their careers – and even their lives.
I can understand why straight people do not understand what it is to be attracted to the same sex. I could never really understand what my straight male friends found in Playboy.
Just because straight people do not understand us does not mean that our relationships are not equally valid and valuable.
That brings me to ‘purpose and meaning’. To define marriage in terms of procreation is to narrow the definition of marriage as we know it. Marriage does not depend on procreation to be legally valid or socially useful. Marriage is about a committed, lifelong, loving relationship between two people “for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish”.
For a heterosexual couple, I have no doubt that that committed loving relationship creates an environment in which the couple thrives and in which children can thrive. For the rest of us, it creates an environment in which we can thrive and, where we do have children, it creates an environment where they too can thrive. It also creates the foundation from which we can better contribute to our extended families and to our communities.
I know couples who have been together for forty years, since they were in their twenties. To deny those couples equal recognition of the relationship is illogical and unjust.
The creation of family connections and kinship ties is the second purpose of marriage. Marriage is not just about two individuals but about their relationship with family and community. When I married my ex-wife, I became a member of her extended family and she of mine. When she re-married, I found that I had not so much lost a wife as gained a … (we don’t have a word) as well as a connection with her new husband’s family. Those ties are as valuable to same-sex attracted people and to transgender or intersex people as they are to straight people.
Finally, on a theological note, as theology is about purpose and meaning, I wish to add this.
It was only in 1967 that laws in the US against inter-racial marriage were finally quashed. The initial judgment which Mildred and Richard Loving contested and which was eventually overturned by the US Supreme Court was based on the biblical justification that inter-racial marriages were not natural. They were not part of God’s plan.
Mildred loving said, in 2007, 32 years after Richard had died: “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry.”
I believe that if Adam had been same-sex attracted, then God would have given him Steve. However, that is not a story that most of you here would have identified with. The story needed a wider audience. Just because our story was not told does not mean that it was not intended. “It is not good for a person to be alone” is the take home message from that story.
I ask you to consider that message in your deliberations and in formulating your recommendations.