Homosexual Marriage: Welcome to the new Dark Ages
Something
terrifying has happened during the past five years: a belief that was held by
virtually all human beings for centuries has been rebranded as bigotry,
something that may no longer be expressed in polite society.
That
belief is that marriage is something that occurs between a man and a woman, or
between a man and many women: the idea that marriage is a union of opposite
sexes.
This was
once seen as a perfectly normal point of view. Now, in the historical blink of
an eye, it has been denormalised, and with such ferocity and speed that anyone
still brave enough to express it runs the risk of being ejected from public
life.
Consider the ABC’s Q&A this week, and the furious response to it. The show
was unusual from the get-go because it featured not one but two gay-marriage
sceptics: Katy Faust, an American Christian, and me, a godless Brit.
I made the
argument that gay marriage now seemed to play the same role God played 200
years ago: anyone who didn’t believe in it hadn’t a hope in hell of getting
ahead in public life.
There was
a chokingly conformist climate, I said, with critics of gay marriage facing
demonisation, harassment and, in some cases, expulsion from decent society.
Consider Brendan Eich being sacked as chief executive of Mozilla for his belief
in traditional marriage. Or all those Christian cake shops beleaguered by
gay-rights activists demanding that they make gay cakes. Twenty-first century
religious persecution.
The
response to my comments, on Twitter and in parts of the media, proved my point.
It can be summed up as: “How dare you say that the gay-marriage campaign is
intolerant, you bigoted arsehole?! Get out of Oz!” “Irony” doesn’t even begin
to cover this.
Labor
Senator Sam Dastyari, also on the Q&A panel, accused Faust of being
“hateful” and talking “Christian evangelical claptrap”. Yet all she said was
that marriage should be between a man and a woman and children had a right to
know both their father and their mother.
The demonisation
of Faust shows how thoroughly the Christian viewpoint has been turned into a
kind of hate speech. Something that was a standard outlook a few years ago is
now treated as a pathology.
And as a
liberal — small L — I find it deeply troubling that a moral outlook can be so
swiftly put beyond the pale, branded “INAPPROPRIATE”.
Then there
was Twitter, which went into meltdown over Faust’s and my comments. We’re
bigots, haters, scumbags, “vomiting our bile”; we should be sent packing.
You know
what? Scrap my comparison of gay marriage to God: 200 years ago, in developed
Western countries, even the godless had a better chance of getting ahead than
gay-marriage sceptics do today.
Are
Faust’s views really so controversial? Most people would back the idea that
kids should ideally know their biological mum and dad.
Indeed,
adopted children often seek out their biological parents, believing it will
help them make sense of who they are. Maybe they’re bigots, too?
The
response to Q&A shows that gay marriage is not a
liberal issue. Rather, what we have here is the further colonisation of public
life by an elite strata of society — the chattering class — and the vigorous
expulsion of all those who do not genuflect to their orthodoxies. Whether
you’re a climate-change denier, a multiculturalism sceptic or, the lowest of
the low, someone who believes in traditional marriage, you’re clearly mad and
must be cast out.
The social
impact of this illiberal liberalism will be dire.
A whole
swath of society — the old, the religious, the traditionalist — will feel like
moral lepers in their own country, silencing themselves lest they, too, be
branded scum.
