What’s in a Name?

Quite a lot actually.

Yesterday, a Facebook friend of mine posted a link to the ‘Coalition for Marriage’, an organisation which is campaigning to keep the institution of marriage as purely a heterosexual affair. He was encouraging his Facebook contacts to sign a petition on the site, and when he was challenged about why he was doing this, he explained that it was because it was his religious view that the definition of marriage should be kept restricted to only being between a man and a woman.

This actually made my blood properly boil. Not only is this guy fully aware that many of his friends have gay friends and family members who are in committed relationships, but also (as he keeps mentioning on his status updates) he’s getting married later this year and so what he’s basically saying to me (and people like me) is ‘I get to call it a marriage, but you don’t’.

My response to this was to post a fairly angry response and then defriend him, but sadly Facebook doesn’t support the ability to flounce off in this manner, as when you defriend someone, your posts get hidden. If you ask me, that’s a terrible design flaw. Anyway, for the record, here is roughly what I posted:

“I don’t know whether you know this but I’m getting married later this year! To a man! Surprise! So although this is goodbye, I hope you’ll do some soul-searching and think about why you’d want to deny me the thing that you are clearly so looking forward to.”

Now, I know it’s true that Donny and I are not getting technically married – we are entering into a civil partnership and that’s marvellous – but I don’t see why we can’t call it a marriage, and use that word in all the invites and along the top of this very website. In my mind, what we are doing is absolutely a marriage and I’m not going to have a bunch of social conservatives telling me otherwise. It’s how Donny and I see it, and surely that’s the only thing that matters.

For me personally, whether we get legally married or civilly-partnered is neither here nor there, but it is incredibly important to lots of my friends who belive very strongly in the institution of marriage, but just aren’t wired in a way that allows them to currently participate in it. So I don’t see how extending the institution of marriage to include same-sex couples is going to somehow cause difficulties for society and lead to polygamy – there is a big difference between wanting to marry one person and wanting to marry three people, whatever their gender. And is telling children that same-sex couples exist and can get married really going to be such a terrible thing?

It’s just prejudice – pure and simple. Don’t dress it up as tradition, don’t dress it up as common sense and, above all, don’t dress it up as faith.