Jonathan Dodd‘s latest column. Guest opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Ed
I’ve been following David Cameron’s determined effort to get gay marriage on the statute books. On the surface it seems completely mad, but once you deconstruct it, the whole thing makes perfect sense.
OK. Let’s roll back a few years. After thirteen years of Labour government, we had increasing regulation and red tape, a huge increase in civil servants and government agencies, a whole new security threat after 9/11 and two foreign wars, followed by Gordon Brown, the crash and the revelation that everything we had was based on greed, mismanagement, grand delusions and debt so large you can’t even begin to imagine it.
Winning is the new losing
In the following election, you would have thought that the Conservatives would have had a landslide, even though nobody liked or trusted Cameron. Amazingly, they failed to do this, and we got the first ever peacetime coalition.
Many people think this was a bad idea, although if they stop to think what the Tories would have done had the LibDems not put the brakes on they might be grateful. The fact is that the Tories should have had a landslide win and they didn’t. This is worth thinking about.
Old white men in suits
Not too long afterwards, there’s an election in the USA. All the polls over there predicted that it was ‘too close to call’, although in the end the Republicans were well-beaten, because large sections of the population saw them as the party of old white men in suits who talked exclusively about their own concerns (or lack of concern).
The rich shouldn’t pay any taxes. Illegal immigrants should all (11 million of them) be sent back to Mexico. Everyone should be able to go out and buy machine guns. Apparently God says you should be able to shoot abortion doctors and trespassers, and it’s all right to burn Korans on the Internet. And so on.
They’ve started a very painful process to try to reconnect themselves with the vast majority of citizens who live in the real world, rather than wanting to yank it back to some imagined memory of how they would have liked it to have been 50 years ago.
A fundamental change to the society of Tory MPs
David Cameron has noticed that there’s another election coming up, and here he is having to talk tough to Europe because so many of his MPs want to leave the European Union, the Church of England has failed to allow women bishops, and politicians are seen to be out-of-touch with the real world, if not cheating on their taxes then cheating on their wives or their expenses. And he’s scared that the electors will wallop his party in the next election.
So I believe his conversion to gay marriage enthusiast is actually a cunning ploy to upset as many of the rump of his MPs as possible, so that they resign en masse and allow a new swathe of MPs in who will be more representative of the general public and who understand how we live our lives now.
This is not a new trick. It’s happened plenty of times before. The hallowed Tony Blair took the Labour Party by the neck and shook it into an unrecognisable shape not so long ago. I watched Lincoln recently, and back in the 1860s the Republican Party was the progressive one, while the Democrats opposed the emancipation of the slaves.
Everyone has the freedom to be normal
I’m going to rise above the actual politics here to make a more general point about freedom.
While I understand and am entirely tolerant of everyone’s right to hold whatever opinions and beliefs they wish, there is a crucial difference between that and the imposition of those beliefs on others.
Proponents of gay marriage want to get married. Why? Because when you love someone, whoever you are and whoever your beloved is, it’s natural and human to want to make a commitment to that person. Some people don’t want to get married, and some do. It’s quite simple, really.
There are always reasons to obstruct change
There are people in this country who want to prevent this change. They don’t want to have a gay marriage themselves, but they want to stop anyone else from having one. Why?
They may be disgusted by the whole thing and think it ‘unnatural’.
They may feel that it’s going to cause the further break-up of civil society and our so-called ‘way of life’ and ‘traditional values’.
They may be regular church-goers and think that marriage should only be between a man and a woman or for the creation of children. They may feel that God said that and that we should obey that version of God.
Maybe they’re just afraid of change.
Have I missed any out? Probably. But I’m willing to guess that each of these reasons is basically saying – ‘I don’t like this so I don’t want it to happen’. This attitude ignores the rights and feelings of other citizens whose beliefs differ. It is never healthy for a small minority to be able to obstruct changes that allow others to enjoy the freedoms they take for granted.
I couldn’t possibly comment
I’m sorry that our own elected MP voted against, and I’m sorry that he has been quoted as saying that the majority of people who wrote to him were against it too. He has also been quoted as saying it was ‘a matter of conscience’.
I disagree, because he does not appear in Parliament in his capacity as a private citizen. I believe that his responsibility is to be in touch with and reflect the opinions of all his constituents and in consideration of the health and protection of society and all those who live in it. I think he got it wrong.
Whatever I think, I applaud David Cameron for taking this step, and it’ll be interesting to catalogue the fall-out. Whether it’s enough for him to win the next election outright or not, only time will tell.
Who do I support? Ah! You might well ask that, but I couldn’t possibly comment!
If you have been, thank you for reading this.
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