Wednesday, January 02, 2013

The Twelve Homosexually Fixated Press Releases of Archbishop Nichols's Christmas

It takes a sense of style, to be one of the UK's Christian leaders, to talk about marriage, and to use a Christmas Day message to spread a message of anti-love.

In other words, Archbishop Nichols invoked the spectre of an Orwellian, totalitarian state on purpose. On Christmas Day itself, he said:
From a democratic point of view, it’s a shambles. George Orwell would be proud of the manoeuvre.
Still, it takes a breathtaking cheek for a Roman Catholic prelate to even hint at a supposed fascist streak in the formation of British laws; particularly given that his boss was once a member of the Hitler Youth. 

Of course, one takes the Pope at his word, that he had no option but to become a member of the Nazi youth group. You'd have thought, however, it might have made his employees take care with their language, if nothing else.

Do you object to my casual elision of Nazism and Roman Catholicism? 

I did it on purpose – there's no such link, in my mind – in an attempt to shock men like Archbishop Nichols into an understanding that their own words, which casually forbid gay couples even to dare to conceive that their love can ever be equal to that defined by his church, are not issued in a dry seminarian debate; they are powerful, real, potentially damaging things. 

Real men and women woke up on Christmas Day with nothing but love in their hearts, switched on the radio, and heard Nichols's message to the planet. The bit about Jesus and love was cut from the headlines, in order to give him space to push his political agenda.

Like some homosexually fixated version of the Twelve Days of Christmas, Archbishop Nichols hasn't wasted a single day's news cycle over the holiday to campaign against the government's plans for marriage reform. That is his right, as a British citizen. 

It's also our right to study his words. His latest broadside contains this phrase:
At this time, we look to our Members of Parliament to defend, not change, the bond of man and woman in marriage as the essential element of the vision of the family.
Where does Archbishop Nichols think that gay people come from? 

Outer space? 

Most of us were blessed in that we were born and raised in families of which Nichols himself might approve. 

How is that family undermined by its offspring establishing their adult home and married life with a member of the same sex? 

Are we no longer part of our birth family? 

Are our in-laws not part of our extended, married family?

There are real social problems that have acted against the health of our key institution, marriage, over the last few decades: the rise of divorce, the rise of the single parented home, the couples penalty in the benefit system, and so on; all of them destabilisers to the central human need to pair-bond for life. Married gay people are the opposite of such destabilising forces.

That the reform would do nothing to devalue heterosexual relationships is obvious. But increasingly, the marriage debate takes us back to the 1980s; we're not really discussing how to register gay partnerships anymore. 

This is Section 28, redux, and it gives a long-awaited permission to those people who didn't understand the fuss about that clause to issue their barely coded remarks about the secondary status of gay British citizens. 

What those people never understood was that it wasn't the phrasing in Section 28 about not "promoting homosexuality" that caused the fury; it was the subordinate clause, the bit about "pretended family relationships" that made the blood boil. There's nothing "pretend" about my life or the love that fuels it.

On the day before Christmas Eve, I sat with a friend in a fish and chip restaurant on a pier that was being lashed with stormy rain, as the muddy, angry waves crashed onto the shore and the wind howled strong enough to make one fear for the flimsy, wooden structure that held us above the sea. 

The weather suited our mood – you will probably have read my friend's words since then, on the Comment pages of this newspaper, and they're as gloomy as I think the elements made us feel that day. 

We don't agree about the marriage debate, but we do agree that we're sick of the Right tearing itself apart, and I'd tried to explain to my friend how tiresome it can be for gay people to see their lives used as political footballs in a wider cultural war between the forces of reform and those of reaction, that I hoped the reform would pass speedily and that those who opposed it would quickly see the sky still in place, comfortingly above their heads.

I don't recant from that sense of weariness, but – remembering Section 28, and the fuss over equalising the age of  consent – it's a weariness formed through experience. 

The Archbishop's relentless campaign makes me doubt the change will come quickly or with ease; which only makes me more determined that the change must come

As I'm typing this I can hear the howling winds, still, loudly outside my window; the waves crash onto the shore, and the rocks on the beach are slowly worn down.