the lower house

I am ashamed to be part of this system.

I can’t distinguish, anymore, between same-sex unions as a ‘political issue’, and human rights. What even are human rights—any of them—if they are protected by a government that patently rejects equality, that patently refuses to recognise the equal rights of individuals?

It makes me sick.

I cried trying to explain this thought to mum tonight. I’ve not been watching much television; I didn’t even realise there’d been a vote. ABC News ran a report that started with, ‘the same-sex marriage bill has been voted out in the lower house…’ Disappointing, if not surprising. But it shook me how many people were smiling for the cameras, like it’s no big deal. Even Malcolm ‘#GENYHERO’ Turnbull was cheerfully mumbling things about legislation for civil unions: because haters gonna hate, philistines gonna philly, and compromising with them should help us sleep at night? The report ended with footage of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott paying their respects to Gillard’s late father and to the memory of young soldiers killed in action, and with the moral, ‘politicians are human’.

And I feel sick.

Because I’m being told that they are human, that they have feelings, and that their feelings are real, and that they are moral people, and that—if we only saw that in the media more often—we might think more kindly of them. Like, somehow, their feelings can absolve, or contextualise, their decision to refuse Australia social equality. As if, the problem of same-sex couples who are refused the right to marry is trivial in comparison.

Maybe it is.

But how can we even comprehend ‘bigger’ emotions—how can they matter—if we don’t respect basic moral rights, like human equality?

And what am I supposed to think if people who have—and apparently value—feelings don’t value the feelings of other people?

I was proud of Gillard when she recited Dylan Thomas and ended in tears: because that was strong as fuck. But I’d rather pretend that she and Abbott and everyone else don’t have feelings than have to accept that they do. Because, if they do, they know exactly what they’re doing. And, if they do, she’s an immoral hypocrite. Why should she be entitled to grief—and to grieve so nobly—when she considers it her conscious to undervalue the rights of her people, and to cheapen the so-called ‘morality’ of her country?

Because the reality of same-sex marriage isn’t all that’s at stake. The government’s decision is a victory for that little kind of person who can believe themselves good or moral, and not recognise that their morality is selective and discriminatory. Or, worse, it’s a victory for that revolting kind of person who does know, and who thinks it’s okay.

So—before you ask—yes: if, over time, it becomes socially normal for marital-like relationships to include more than two people, then ‘marriage’ should—and will—come to reflect that. Probably not in the near future.

And—before you ask—no: until animals and lampposts are capable of showing desire for and consenting to marriage—and until they ask for it—that’s not an insightful or interesting or even slightly-relevant analogy.

And—shut up—by definition, underage children are beneath the age of consent and, by definition, they can’t consent to marriage.

None of these are even things.

Same-sex marriage is a thing.

Like apricots.

If you don’t want to eat apricots, you don’t have to. But you don’t go around denying that they’re stone fruits or campaigning to say they don’t grow on trees. You might not think apricots go very well in salad, but you don’t block legislation that claims they’re edible.

That was a terrible metaphor. Simile. Extended metaphor. Whatever.

I’m ashamed to be a part of this system. I don’t know what.