I wasn’t planning on wasting time and a free-flowing Saturday to get into grips with such a hypocritical mess as the same-sex marriage debacle, but as I have, bear with me and spend some of your own to engage in the next few strong-spirited lines.
When Dickensian children were being bought and sold into sex slavery, a life of crime and beggary by London’s ‘finest’ vagabonds in the 18th and 19th centuries untold and utter poverty, (existing today in other forms, infinitely more ruthless and sophisticated), no one in the elitist circles of the time lifted a brow out of their finely fitted carriages.
Sure, Dickens made a few sociological examples out of them, an early depiction of massive social inequalities. Stories of lives lost and perhaps, a number of them even saved for the sake of the hopeful storyline. But no one really cared to change what was accepted as the fate of birth or condition at the time.
When the Suffragettes threw themselves under the supreme thoroughbreads at Ascot and Epsom to claim their own right to vote at the turn of the century, what most saw was a group of deranged women, daring to suppose they could succeed, in what seemingly, was utterly ridiculous-a lost cause.
Surely, the females were much inferior, smart perhaps, but just enough for the household chores. Public life? Come on. The gentlemen of the time were pacing in hysterical laughter inside their exclusive clubs, narrating the stories of those frontrunners, members of a movement who were willing to sacrifice their lives, for the right to take part in decisions, for the simple commitment of merely being part of the whole. What we pompously call today without actually really understanding what it should mean- Gender Equality.
When the Industrial Revolution and mines gobbled up young and grown men, took them away from their loved ones for a piecemeal existence, when it gave them lifelong respiratory conditions, untreatable at the time when they were just toiling in potentially deadly galleries to feed the social monster of development, no one lifted a finger.
No one had even heard of working conditions or trade unions. When they finally got going in the foggy afternoons of late 19th-century industrial fumes as the first cities crawled out of medieval mud, they were seen as anathema by the privileged early industrialists. They were trampled beyond recognition again and again, driven to the ground before they could even muster a semblance of improved conditions for workers.
When children were suffering untold horrors behind the heavy, unapproachable gates of Catholic monasteries, under the guise of being educated by ‘respected’ clergy, or when the mentally ill screamed into oblivion while electrocution was an accepted form of therapy-even when the brilliant British mathematician who broke the Nazi code and won the war for the allies, was being ‘unhomosexualised’ in a mental institution-no one lifted a single finger, no one shed a single tear, no one raised an eyebrow from the social acceptance that marginalised everyone not understood, refused, or failed to fit into neat little boxes of forbearance, of the moving on, of the just the way it is, of being part of the times and not the right and wrong.
When the gays were beaten in the ’60s and ’70s, when the blacks suffered police brutality in their segregated neighbourhoods, when Martin Luther King was being killed in the name of leaving things as they are, the dust settled and civil rights a utopian dream, perhaps that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But that took decades. It took guts, it took locked away, illegal and destroyed dreams, it took broken bones, it took blood. Yes, I am indeed going somewhere with this.
A few days ago now, Greece legalised same-sex couples’ marriage and adoption. It simply made tying the knot, an equal act. No matter what ‘category’ of a sexual or emotional being you might belong to. As if such a distinction can ever made.
Did I understand the reactions? The call to social arms on many occasions? The arguments about the threat to the nuclear family, the role of father and mother? The social stigma to children of these marriages? Similar to the ones made in a number of countries, who are otherwise proud to be members of modern, forward societies of equality and cohesion. Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t.
There’s only one act that matters. Before you lift up the stone of rejection, the torch of unwillingness to even discuss human rights, the beacon of leaving things as they are-think again. You’re not gay. But everyone is a member of a social group. Any social group. Would you like your own rights violated and no one lifting a finger? Look at the wars around you. These people are fighting for survival. Is your own couch big enough for acceptance? Sometimes you might need those you reject to accept you, embrace your own cause and fight with you for what you believe you deserve and worth.
Forget about journalism, information, logic. Beyond of course what is right and legal and what only the state should decide on.
I am writing or even pleading with you as a man who’s had to overcome decades of hushed but seen prejudice, lurking in the shadows, in the forced smiles, in the accepting hypocrisy of people to move with the trend, as I forged ahead. I had to wade through all that murkiness of being so-called ‘different’.
Utter poppycock if you ask me. And managed. Cause I can certainly tell you one thing with the utmost of certainty. As sure as Jane Bennett’s mistaken first impressions about the dreamy Mr. Darcy. What is right can never be put down. It will rise in retribution. And then? If solidarity is lost, no one will be able to claim their own piece of equality. With tremendous consequences and unspeakable social breakdown.
Consider it.
(Picture by REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki)
