I received a glossy No2AV-style purple leaflet the other day from an organisation calling itself 'Scotland for Marriage', and yet curiously their main preoccupation seems to be with preventing certain people from getting married. Surely such an organisation ought to be called 'Scotland Against Marriage'? Just a thought.
Clearly if I ever receive a leaflet from 'Scotland for People with Irish Surnames', I should be a very worried man.
Anyway, here is a small selection of their reasons for believing that 4% of the population should be legally barred from getting hitched -
"Marriage between a man and a woman is not a recent social invention."
Lettuce is not a recent vegetable. Is that an argument for banning spinach?
"Everyone knows that marriage predates law, nation and church. It goes back to the dawn of time."
It predates law? It predates church? What exactly is marriage without law or church? I have a feeling you're getting mixed up with cohabitation, old son. And I must admit that my knowledge of the dawn of time is a wee bit hazy, so I can't even be 100% sure that cohabitation was going on back then. If it was, it presumably must have been undertaken by genderless single-cell organisms, which is admittedly a pretty impressive thought, but not really an argument against same-sex marriage.
"Same-sex couples already have equality...through civil partnerships. Equality doesn't mean bland uniformity or state-imposed sameness."
Does equality mean state-imposed difference instead?
"Many gay people don't want it.
Just four in ten members of the gay community see same-sex marriage as a priority, with only a quarter saying they would enter a same-sex marriage...Latest official data shows that only 0.5 per cent of UK households are headed by a same-sex couple. Not all of them want, or will enter, a same-sex marriage. So why is such a monumental change being imposed throughout society?"
So let's recap. There are hardly any gay couples anyway, and of the microscopically tiny number that do exist, hardly any of them plan to get married when the law changes. In a nutshell, nothing much is actually going to happen. How, then, does this constitute a 'monumental change throughout society'? Hmmm. Something isn't quite adding up here.
Another lovely deconstruction job.
ReplyDeleteWhat, in fact, these people put out was a list of their own personal prejudices.
I've never understood why people are against things that won't concern them in any way at all. And I'm fascinated that they can get way with such flimsy, unsustainable arguments to back up their cases.
In the case of gay marriage, quoting Leviticus, without bothering to have read any of the rest of it, apart from THAT bit, and being clearly unaware of any of the other things that were forbidden in the middle east, by Moses, 2500 years ago.
My favourite is when they say something like "when I think about what these people do..." which, in my my opinion shows a somewhat strange, disturbed even, tendency in their thought processes.
Oh, you read it? I just chucked it in the recycling basket.
ReplyDeleteA few weeks ago one of the elders stood up in the pulpit before morning service and spouted a load of that hate-speech nonsense. He even told us exactly how to contact our MSP and where and when her constituency surgeries are, so we could bend her ear about it.
Being a complete coward I didn't take him to task for being an intolerant, unchristian bigot. I probably should have done. But at least I emailed my MSP and suggested she bear in mind that churchgoers were certainly not united in their support for this lobbying campaign.
I think a lot of these people seemed to be obsessed with sex although they will all deny it. They don't have to marry someone of the same gender if they don't want to. I am more worried about the price of my food going up each week.
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