SOCIETY: Oliver, O Oliver
Imagine if the Tory party had even a thimbleful of courage
Of pretence & pretended relationships
Odd-looking and still more oddly-titled Barbara Roche — our ‘Minister for Social Exclusion and Equalities’, and presumably against the former but in favour of the latter — has confided to The Independent that not only is the government preparing legislation creating ‘legally-recognised civil partnerships’, but that such legislation would include ‘gay men, lesbians and bi-sexuals’ within its ambit.
The nature of Toryism for ERO is that it mediates between the world that is, the world that was, and the world that is yet to come. Not so, anymore, for Dr Shirley Robin Letwin’s son. For Olive, Toryism has been reduced to, ‘crikey, there’s a thing I’d better not be caught on the wrong side of’. And now, so every Portilloite in the popular (well, more popular than us) press says as one, ‘watch out for Labour’s cunning trap!’. Sceptics might well wonder, where and for whom is this ‘trap’? They’d be told that the trap is, look, Labour are doing something unpopular, and we’d better make sure we support it, or else. Thus, the Portilloite madness being as strong as ever, the Tory leadership has stood on its hind legs and begged furiously and loudly for their fulsome support for this measure to be acknowledged by all. This insincere, unhelpful and instant fear betrays only our complete abandonment of guiding moral principle, yet utter failure to find any successful political convenience in its place. Lying about marriage now as well will do us no good; but then we’re too scared to speak up for the good, even when we know what it is.
Let’s consider, for a moment, the case Ms Roche makes for this innovation. In this context, she takes as uncontroversial the idea that ‘legally-recognised civil partnerships’ should bear virtually the same weight as actual marriage, even in its most prosaic and least demanding civil incarnation — wrongly, but let that pass for the moment. Her principle concern seems to be that whatever the nation-state is planning to serve up in place of wedlock, gay people should get their fair share, too. This is not, as Ms Roche is strangely keen to insist, mere political correctness, but rather a ‘[recognition] that British society has become more tolerant’. Tolerant, once upon a time, used to mean putting up with something objectionable, but we suspect that is not quite how Ms Roche means it.
The minister continues:
There are thousands of gay couples who have been together for years, who look after each other, support each other, live their lives in exactly the same way as any other family. Yet the law, the state, does not recognise them as a partnership, as a family, while they are together or when one of them dies.
In the face of this horror, The Independent notes in passing that
The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is keen to avoid the term ‘gay marriage’ because a ceremony will not be necessary for couples to sign the proposed legal contract recognising their relationship.
We hope, nay trust, that the Deputy Prime Minister celebrated his nuptials in considerable style — it’s hard to imagine that Mrs Prescott, that model of a politician’s wife, did not dress up for the occasion — so perhaps he may be forgiven for what in other contexts might sound like abject confusion about what ‘marriage’ means. Here's a hint, though — whatever else marriage is about, it isn't a 'ceremony'. So why is there this fear of calling a spade a spade, and of marrying off homosexuals in the same way that hereosexuals can marry? What dark prejudice fuels such behaviour?
Of course this proposed legislation is both patronising and based fundamentally on an assumption of inequality. For more than a thousand years, both the Eastern and Western churches have agreed on the nature of marriage. It is a sacrament, but one of a very particular kind. The sacrament is in no way effected by what the priest or parson does, but lies instead in the nature of the promise that two individuals make to one another. The role of the church was simply to ensure that the two individuals were in a position to make a valid promise (e.g. that they were old enough to make such a decision, that they were unencumbered by any previous marriage, and that each was who he or she claimed to be) and to ensure that the actual promise was sufficiently public that no doubt could arise about it later (hence the insistence on at least two witnesses).
Neither the Reformation nor the 1836 Marriage Act, which required that all marriages be performed before a registrar (either a civil registrar or an Anglican minister), fundamentally changed this basic formula of public promise by two unencumbered individuals. Divorce has done terrible damage to the institution of marriage, and it is hard to believe that a promise made before God invariably has quite the same weight as a promise made before a faintly bored-looking civil servant, but the basic formula is still there. In other words, when we talk of ‘marriage’, this is what we mean.
So if Ms Roche really wanted to live up to her job title and impose ‘equality’ on Britain, then, surely she would start right here? The only reason why gay couples cannot contract a civil marriage — or, for that matter, a religious marriage, assuming they could find a supportive cleric and religion to officiate — is the fact that being of the same sex as your intended spouse is considered an impediment to marriage, in the same sense that being siblings, ten years old, or in a coma would be. Indeed, far from the current legal set-up being in any discriminatory, there is, in some sense, complete equality before the law. At the moment any man, whether gay, straight or PPC, can marry any woman, and vice versa. It is just not honest to squeak and hiss ‘bigotry!’, when all that is in truth being objected to is that a sexual impulse can not be acted upon, then codified by law. For if that were the case, if that were the supposed inequality being tackled, why then there are a great many other desires than monogamous homosexual coupling which could be tacked onto heterosexual love. All of this could be swept away with a simple piece of legislation. However, what gay couples are in fact to be offered is a second-rate demi-marriage.
Homophobia, though, is hardly the point at issue. Let's ask instead: how necessary is any of this? Not very — which is why Ms Roche’s hurt amazement at charges of political correctness’ don’t quite seem to wash. For one thing, she seems to imply that it is somehow impossible for gay people to inherit from their ‘partners’ — as if personal sexuality somehow proved a fundamental barrier to inheritance. But of course this is nonsense. Gay people, like straight people and all stages in between, can inherit from whomever they like, as long as the dead object of their affections has had the foresight to make and maintain a valid will. If someone can’t be bothered to do this, one has to wonder how potent his or her desire for ‘partnership’ really is.
Even stranger is Ms Roche's claim that gay couples have been denied their 'rightful' place at a partner's funeral. Who, then, arranged the funeral, and should that person have no say in who is assigned what 'place'? Is the government really taking it upon itself to legislate who does what at such endless diverse, difficult and ultimately personal events? Meanwhile her complaint that some gay people have been refused hospital visits to seriously ill loved ones merely is Ms Roche demonstrating the fatuous lack of a justification this change truly possesses. Is a civil partnership really needed to fix that very ‘problem’ cited above, for example — or might a change in hospital policy be more to the point? Finally, she complains that some have been evicted from their home after their partner's death, or forced to sell their home to pay inheritance tax. Well, good luck to Ms Roche if she really thinks there is a way to legislate so that bereaved 'parters', married or otherwise, never face financial trouble when the breadwinner in their household dies, or when unexpected death reveals the inadequacy of a couple's financial provision. It is true that the survivor of a married couple does not have to pay inheritance tax — but their children, grandchildren and other beneficiaries of the estate certainly do. Surely, the obvious answer here is to abolish inheritance tax altogether? But the main point will have become obvious, which is that these alleged problems all have far less to do with marriage, or even 'partnership', than with the extent to which which various organs of the state allow the individual to make his or her own decisions. Life-long monogamous unions — marriages — don't really come into it.
Indeed, since civil partnership is so obviously not marriage, why make it conform to the traditional Western paradigm of marriage at all? Here the Labour government shows a tragic lack of imagination. If it’s legal for a man to contract a partnership with a man, why not allow him to contract a legal partnership with two men, or three, or with a man and a woman? Is Barbara Roche really suggesting that it is impossible for three people to have a ‘loving relationship’? Pervy, you may be thinking — but since in the world of Rochean modernism it is obviously not necessary or even advisable to be married in order to have sexual intercourse, why on earth should these ‘legally-recognised civil partnerships’ have any sexual connotation? Are gays to become the latter-day ‘coloureds’ of Britain’s supposed sexual apartheid state, joining their sometime straight oppressors, all the better to subdue the rest? The state will let you do anything you like now, seems to be the message — but obviously, only up to a point.
The proof of this is the fact that these proposed policy changes do nothing for, say, the aging spinster or batchelor who has no obvious next-of-kin, but who all the same would quite like to be able to chose who could make decisions about their medical care, could inherit from them without the burden of inheritance tax, or perhaps could even benefit from any pension arrangements they may have had. What if such a person does not, for whatever reason, want to undergo a sham marriage just to straighten out his or her affairs? What if he or she wants to designate, say, a beloved godchild or an old friend to fulfill these roles and carry out these duties? Mysteriously, Ms Roche's policy has the effect of sexualising issues that actually have absolutely nothing to do with sex.
But of course this policy change is less about freedom, sexual or otherwise, than it is about promoting a particular political and, dare one say it, moral agenda — or at least making gestures to suggest that sort of promotion. Barbara Roche was speaking the language of modernist truth when she assured us that
A partnership registration scheme would bring benefits to individuals who registered. I believe it would also bring benefits to the whole community. It would send a powerful message about the acceptability of same-sex relationships and about the unacceptability of the homophobia still far too prevalent in our society.
'Unacceptability' . . . 'still far too prevalent' — where's that tolerance now? Think what you're told — or else. Thus similarly, and inevitably, are told that we mustn’t fall behind our civilised peers. Eight EU countries, Canada and 'some US states', no less, already recognise gay partnerships, so 'it is time the UK caught up'. But fear not, for
This is not about being 'PC' but about bringing law and practice into line with the reality of people's lives.
Which is true, too, come to think of it, of teen pregnancy, truancy, child abuse, fraud, and racism, to name but a few examples of the 'realities of people's lives' — but evidently some realities are more acceptable to the government than others.
God love him
Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin promised that the Conservatives would support the measure:
Whilst we attach a huge importance to the institution of marriage, we do recognise that gay couples suffer from some serious particular grievances
To repeat: this registration is not really marriage — if it was, they’d call it so — and also doesn't deal with the grievances of any gay person who doesn't want to succumb to the lure of such a 'partnership'.
Not, as we have said, that it would be impossible to see the state further degrade actual marriage so that this new certificate could fairly designate a condition known as ‘marriage’. The rot that set in with the 1836 Marriage Act, the introduction of ‘civil’ marriages [sic] is being brought nearer to its ultimate secular end with this Rocho-Letwinian scheme to make a marriage-like condition easier — not least, as the obvious counterpoint to divorce-on-demand. But even Ms Roche shies away from taking this final step, and instead proposes just to keep gays in their ghetto, though sprucing it up a little, so as to keep them happy. Add a ribbon or two to the ‘ceremony’ and that’s bound to do the trick. No, why not reduce all ‘couple contracts’ to being just so, with ‘marriage’ an obscure, esoteric extra added on top solely by the weird, the archaic and the churchy? Let the state put us together, and set us free, as we and they see fit — keep the church, morality and all that old stuff out of it. Let us have modern pseudo-marriages, and see what they’ll make of us.
The real world, and those who live in it
That real, old-fashioned, honest-to-God marriage still has some force can be seen from the anxiousness of many people — not just law-makers, either — to shy away from it. Just think of all the heterosexual couples who choose to cohabit rather than to have their union sanctified and publicly endorsed through the formal act of marriage.
Why the reluctance? Look around you, and you can see it everywhere. There are the people who want to keep every option open, those who pretend to be happy whilst remaining on the lookout for something better, those who want to take without the necessity of giving, and those with an anxious eye trained on an escape route if it all goes wrong. All these are strong motive forces in modern British life, for ill and for worse. Nor it is surprising that this should be so. A society that is squeamish about being seen to commit to any particular values — other than 'tolerance', of course — is one that arms its children with few of the habits of mind or spirit necessary to make marriage work — habits like patience, charity, perseverence, loyalty, forebearance, chastity and plain old-fashioned kindness. What sort of reality television would that make? No, being married means sticking with one momentous decision through bad times as well as good, as the marriage vows instruct at some length. It means, ultimately, a negation of individualism in the recognition that your life is not really entirely your own any more, and won't be again. Marriage is a daunting commitment, not to be entered into lightly — but then that's the whole point.
Of course this is not particularly fashionable. Nor, it must be said, is it remotely easy. Yet it is manifestly worthwhile, even in the crude sense that sociologists can measure. Marriages may break up, but they are far less likely to do so than cohabitations. Children whose parents are securely married face better outcomes in all sorts of ways — in terms of their own relationships, achievements, even health — than the children of 'partnerships', as thousands of studies over the years have, sometimes to the frank horror of those conducting them, made abundantly clear. Married men still live longer than their unmarried counterparts. Plenty of marriages fail, but what is almost more remarkable in these difficult times is the extent to which so many of them succeed, proving the strange truth that the simple act of marriage really does serve, in some mysterious and complicated way, to keep couples together.
Or to put it another way, the reason marriage has been survived for so many centuries is because it actually is more resiliant, more satisfactory and simply better than its alternatives. But that's a conservative point, and so it says something about the present Conservative Party that we will hear nothing like it from the Opposition front bench. God alone knows what marriage — real marriage, not some ersatz version — would do for homosexual couples. Certainly this government, and their Portilloite chorus, aren’t about to allow them, or us, to find out.
ERO's editorial comment
ERO, December 6, 2002 03:06 PM