Has Julia Gillard been fooling us all along? Is she not actually the conservative we thought she was when it comes to marriage equality but in fact a progressive leader?
The Gay Star News reported yesterday:
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has told gays that her own relationship proves you don’t have to marry.
Gillard, who opposes same-sex marriage equality, isn’t married to her long-term partner Tim Mathieson but says they are still committed to each other.
She told ABC TV: ‘I think you can have a loving relationship of love and commitment and trust and understanding that doesn’t need a marriage certificate. That’s my life experience – so I’m speaking from that life experience.’
Despite the clumsy way Gillard expresses this (given the context behind this statement) these words should give us a moment of thought. When looking at them it’s hard to disagree with what she says.
Of course, as marriage is enshrined within our legal system I think everyone should be able to have access to it. Equality under the law is a basic principle I think we must follow. However, what I read into Gillard’s statement was more of a questioning of the very nature of marriage in itself. For me, what she was saying was that we don’t need marriage to enshrine people’s love at all.
This argument of course isn’t new. Many people have argued that what we really need to do is completely redefine the idea of marriage or abolish it entirely. As an institution that defines how people should shape their relationships, marriage puts people into boxes that they often don’t fit into. The question has to arise, why is the state involved in such a process? As long as they are consenting adults, shouldn’t we let people make decisions about their relationships for themselves?
Where Gillard’s statement was telling for me though was that I also think it called out some of the conservative tendencies behind the same-sex marriage movement (again I think without her meaning to do so). This is something I bang on about a bit (this is my second post on the issue in the past couple of weeks), but it’s worth pointing out again.
A lot of the narrative around same-sex marriage has been focused on this idea of ‘equal love’. It’s the basic idea that gay and lesbian couples love each other just as equally as straight couples and therefore deserve the same marriage rights as straight couples. We deserve the right to publicly celebrate our love the same way straight couples do.
This narrative moves beyond both the ideas of equal rights under the law and the issue of the legal rights that marriage brings. It is about the idea of marriage as a cultural institution, and in particular one that allows couples of formalise their love publicly. As gay and lesbian couples can’t celebrate our love in this way, we are unequal couples within our society (note that I am only talking about couples not because I have a problem with poly relationships, but because this is the dominant agenda of the mainstream queer movement).
It’s the same kind of narrative that I hear a little bit in the discussion about the removal of legal ceremonies from the Queensland Civil Union Legislation. Again, I fundamentally disagree with this move by the LNP. If legal ceremonies exist, everyone should have access to them. For many however this hasn’t been framed as an equality under the law question, it has been about the idea that this will remove the ability for gay and lesbian couples to express their love publicly.
The problem is that within all of this, there is an implicit idea that marriage is the only way people can express their love equally.By making this debate about ‘equal love’ what we are saying is that without marriage we can’t love each other equally, or properly celebrate our love publicly. The flow on effects of this are obvious; even when equal marriage occurs we will still have an institution we have defined as the ‘epitome of love’ and people who don’t fit within it will be left out.
What I am getting at here is Julia Gillard is right. We don’t need marriage to be able to express our love. In fact, when we start going down that path what we are doing is falling into a conservative trap that locks people into relationships that may not work for them.
So, is Julia Gillard more progressive than most of us when it comes to marriage? Even though I think it wasn’t meant, I think Gillard’s statement was probably one of the most progressive I’ve heard around marriage equality in a little while. The answer is probably no though, as her statements would only have been actually progressive if she had backed it up with questions around the institution of marriage itself. It’s pretty clear that these words haven’t come from a view of wanting to redefine or abolish marriage to allow for a more open and progressive approach to defining relationships. It is about trying to find excuses for her position.
But, for once, her words should cause a moment of thought about how we are framing our push for same-sex marriage.