Is Gay Marriage Really About Marriage or Something Else?

I’ve always thought that the political left needs the climate change challenge because (1) it is the closest thing they have to religion, and (2) it enables them to cultivate a Messiah complex that they are our saviours. (Note I’m not taking any side here on the climate change debate, just saying how climate change has an ideological function within the political left. If I had time or money I’d buy a solar power installation company).

So where does gay marriage fit into the ideology of the left. I’ve always been perplexed by this. Years ago the gay folks I came across thought that marriage and monogamy were stupid heterosexual institutions and adopting them was about as tempting as swimming in one’s own bile. Their view: really, only one sexual partner? Marriage, just a piece of paper, its for schmucks! Sure you’ve heard it before. So the gay marriage fracas caught me by surprise. But I’ve also come across gay folks who wanted some legal protection for their relationships and the legal and familial rights that go with marriage – quite understandable! But if marriage, straight or gay, is on the decline, with its main function so girls can be princess for a day, then why is gay marriage such an issue? Why the urgency and desperation over gay marriage when the gay community has always, well until recently maybe, been ambivalent towards it? Well, again, I suspect that it might be ideological. The best exposition of the ideology behind gay marriage I’ve seen comes from the journalist Brendan O’Neil in Spiked, which is not at all religious and is self-consciously left-leaning, and gets the gay marriage agenda out of the closet. Read this:

The reason the gay-marriage issue can feel like it came from nowhere, and is now everywhere, is because it is an entirely top-down, elite-driven thing. The true driving force behind it is not any real or publicly manifested hunger amongst homosexual couples to get wed, far less a broader public appetite for the reform of the institution of marriage; rather it is the need of the political and media class for an issue through which to signify its values and advertise its superiority. Gay marriage is not a real issue – it is a cultural signifier, like wearing a pink ribbon to show you care about breast cancer.

For all the attempts to situate the gay-marriage campaign in the history of progressive leaps forward, where it is discussed in the same breath as votes for women or rights for ethnic minorities, it is the differences between gay marriage and those historic events that are most striking. The proposed overhaul of marriage, as set out in the Lib-Con government’s consultation on the issue, is not a response to any properly independent challenge to the status quo. It is not a democratic reform, begrudgingly enacted in response to a democratic demand; it is better understood as voluntary elite tinkering with a traditional institution in the hope of presenting the elite as both daring and caring. It is really not on to doll up such a cynical political exercise in the old language of radical progressive politics.

Ouch! Could it be that gay marriage is taken up by the left-wing intelligentsia, artificially attached to the narrative of civil rights progress, synthetically making gay marriage the natural trajectory that follows on from women’s liberation and black civil rights, in order to constitute themselves as the moral champions of society, who are ideologically superior to their competitors and opponents? Is gay marriage a boundary marker, a badge, of belonging to a particular ideological group, with a particular vision for society, ethics, culture, and humanity … rather than about marriage? Hmm!

Very probably! But if so, what is the right-wing equivalent? Accept our austerity measures rather than reform of the financial system or you’ll economic civilization will collapse? Save big banks and big oil so we can save you? Alas, the razor of ideological deconstruction might cut both ways.