Happiness is valued more in our day than it was in our parents' day, and most especially in our granparents' day. It's not uncommon for people to divorce each other because of unhappiness - whether it's as criminal as cheating or as unintentional as drifting apart. Divorce has shed much of its social stigma and become a socially accepted norm.
Not that our grandparents didn't have self worth, it's just that within the span of a century our value systems have changed dramatically. Instead, they valued selflessness. Couples stayed together 'for the sake of the children'. But living in a post-divorce society, we have the studies to suggest that growing up in an unhappy home didn't work out to be such a grand idea either.
So where am I going with all this? I think we should give gay marriage a 'fair go'. Homosexual couples in a loving relationship are not living in some psychotic fantasy land where their love is not the same, if not more powerful than that of their heterosexual counterparts.
Sure, there's de-facto relationships and there's civil marriages. But it's like saying you're not allowed to have ice cream, and being told to settle with an ice block and stop complaining because it's kind of the same thing. Fast forward to the future and imagine yourself happilly married of twenty years. You were denied access to combined health insurance, tax benefits and retirement planning. But you loved each other so much you stayed together anyway. Your partner suddenly becomes ill and is sent to hospital, with only a few days to live. But you can't visit them. They die. And you can't make claims on the house, car, social security paymens, bereavement leave, superannuation etc. Why all the rejection? Because gay marriages are not legally recognised.
During the 1990s... the leader of the liberal party John Howard, used the notion of the preservation of the nuclear family as a key issue. His opponent, Paul Keating, the then leader of the ALP responded with: 'John Howard keeps incanting the word "family" as his own personal mantra; he claims he is "pro-family" as if the rest of us were anti-family. Where does he think the rest of us come from-Mars? - Holmes, D., Hughes, K. & Julian, R. 2003, 'The family: nuclear or unclear?' in Australian Sociology: A Changing Society, Sydney: Pearson. p. 287.
Anything outside of the nuclear family was, and still is seen as a threat to the backbone of Australia's patriarchally based society. There are hundreds of orphans without a home, and homosexual couples with spare rooms, stable incomes and loving hearts are refused adoption. They say that having same sex parents are detrimental to the child - but so are hunger, no education and not having a bed to sleep in. I think we're just being picky.
In Ancient Rome homosexuality was a norm. Emperor Nero, a male, married a male slave. Somewhere between then and now heterosexuality became rationalised, and I'd like to hope that in the future homosexuals will be granted their rights to the benefits of legally recognised marriages. To be treated as humans, and not aliens from Mars.
