Gays should be allowed marry the person they love. It’s that simple

LATER this year, with luck, my wife and I will celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary. 

I take anniversaries seriously, partly because of the mistake I made on our first. (If you’ve ever seen the look on your wife’s face when you gave her a kitchen implement on her wedding anniversary, it teaches you a life-long lesson.)

Ever since, I have relied on a famous list compiled by the librarians of the Chicago Public Library (it’s online, if you have a wedding anniversary coming up). This year, the gift they recommend is travel.

But there’s another reason I take anniversaries seriously. It’s because my wife is the most important person in my life.

She and I are capable of disagreeing about the time of day, we often communicate as if we’re from different galaxies (all my fault, I know), but I couldn’t imagine life without her.

We were married in a registry office — and everyone told us it wouldn’t last. Four brilliant, talented daughters later, star grandchildren, and sons-in-law and partners who are a fundamental part of the family, I think it might! We’ve had ups and downs, good years and bad years, all sorts of issues.

But there is (I think) an unbreakable bond between us that can survive any row, overcome any obstacle, sustain whoever needs sustaining, and celebrate (with gusto) whatever needs celebrating.

We’ve made a contribution to the world around us, individually and collectively, and we share a set of values that we never need to talk about.

I’m telling you all this by way of explaining that I believe in the family. I believe in marriage. I cannot imagine living in a society or a culture in which marriage and the family aren’t valued, as they are in our Constitution.

And for exactly that reason, I cannot imagine any circumstances in which any adult should be excluded from the right to marry, and the right to have a family, just because of their sexual orientation. People who really want to marry, who really want to be part of a family that is protected by law, should be celebrated and welcomed by anyone who cares about the family. They should not be rejected.

That’s why, with mounting despair and anger, I read journalist Bruce Arnold’s recent treatise on equal marriage, to which he is implacably and (in my view, blindly) opposed. But I also read it with sadness.

Arnold is an admirable man. He is a highly distinguished writer. He has championed minority and unpopular subjects with erudition and passion.

He has been brave and lonely in his journalism, and has made (and survived) powerful enemies. For all those reasons, I don’t want to question his motivation in writing what he has about same-sex marriage. But I find it hard to imagine anything more appallingly misleading than his ‘Private Paper’ on the subject.

Although described as private, it has been widely published. It employs every conceivable technique and argument of fear, to ensure that people will vote against the equal marriage referendum. The arguments are disguised in learned and elegant language, but they are arguments of fear, nevertheless. And they are based on such sweeping assertions that it reads far more like prejudice than any sort of reasoned position.

I don’t have the space here to dissect Arnold’s nearly 15,000 words line by line. But even in the so-called “abstract” at the beginning, he makes bald assertions that we’re required to take as fact.

Like this, for instance: “The freedom to hold to, and teach, the traditional understanding of marriage and family would be curtailed, as the new dogma is promulgated with zeal and intolerance by the organs of the State”. I simply can’t understand on what basis this assertion is made, except to generate fear.

Arnold paints a bizarre picture of the future as an evil gay conspiracy. They’ve already succeeded in changing the Constitution, he claims, “apparently to facilitate the legalisation of surrogacy” (although that change is currently held up in the Supreme Court). That’s a palpably nonsensical assertion.

But he argues that if we allow same-sex couples to marry, it will only be a matter of time before we’re allowing “a ‘triple’ or even a ‘quadruple’ or other polyamorous loving relationship” to be formalised in marriage. The change will result in thousands, nay, tens of thousands, of women being exploited by ruthless international practitioners of commercial surrogacy, with generations of future children being deprived of the love of their biological parents.

“The ultimate logic of this approach,” he says, “is that children would, with ever greater frequency, be produced independently of any married relationship”. (He even quotes the famous sci-fi novel of the 1930s, Brave New World, in support of this assertion.)

And then he says that any attempt to regulate any of that could be unconstitutional, because we can only recognise the right of a loving and committed gay couple to get married by inserting a “Trojan horse” into the Constitution, and that Trojan horse would be used to destroy the fabric of our society.

But Arnold only uses the “Trojan horse” argument because he is opposed to gay marriage. He makes that clear throughout, and also in a recent piece he wrote for the Irish Times.

In that article, referring to Stephen Fry’s recent marriage, he said: “However, I do not accept that theirs is a real marriage at all. And I will never so accept it, despite the changes to the law in Britain, possibly in the United States, and the further possibility that similar changes will soon become the law of this State.”

He’s entitled to his view. But he’s not entitled to base it, for the purposes of public debate, on a simplistic set of statements that bear no relation to fact.

Underlying his argument is an assertion that the institution of marriage is age-old, has existed as a sacred entity since time immemorial, and has always been at the core of a strong society.

Those self-same arguments were used, in the past, to justify laws that prevented white people from marrying black people, in many parts of the United States. Such laws existed from the inception of the United States and were only finally outlawed as unconstitutional in 1967.

This is not a debate about preserving sacred institutions, no matter what Bruce Arnold might assert.

This is a debate about allowing people who love each other, and who want to make a life-long commitment to each other, to do that within the law.

Because I’m heterosexual, I can get married to the person I love. Because you’re gay, you can’t, no matter how deeply you love. That’s all this debate is about. Voting ‘yes’ in this referendum will strengthen our concept of marriage, not weaken it. Fear has no place in this decision.

This is a debate about allowing people who love each other to do that within the law