No one likes to be a party pooper. But as the champagne corks rocket through the air and politicians slog it out to see who can be the most effusive in their celebration of the legalisation of gay marriage in Britain, there remains one awkward question about the whole thing, an elephant in the fabulously decorated room. And it’s this: how did this all happen so quickly? How did we go at such speed from a situation where gay marriage was a rather eccentric concern of small numbers of professional activists and lawyers to a situation where to oppose gay marriage is treated as an eccentricity, and a wicked one at that? How did saying ‘Let gays get hitched’ go from being fairly outré to utterly orthodox in about the same amount of time - I’m saying around five years - that it takes most modern campaign groups to design their headed paper?
It isn’t surprising people are reluctant to ask this question. For to do so, to give this conundrum some serious consideration, might just reveal that our society is not quite as tolerant, or as free, as the gay-marriage campaigners and their influential backers would have us believe. It might just show that the true driver of gay marriage up the political agenda, at a pace unprecedented in the modern social-issues arena, has been less a new civil-rights vibe and more a kind of soft authoritarianism - a largely media-driven momentum that has turned gay marriage into social demarcator par excellence, where those who accept it are Good, and those who oppose it are Bad, bigoted, ripe for being mauled and ideally silenced by the strangely intolerant promoters of tolerance for same-sex unions. (more...)
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