I’ve been avoiding writing this post.

Not because I don’t believe in what I’m saying. To the contrary.

I believe wholeheartedly every word I am about to write.

But because I have friends, whom I care for deeply, who I know this may offend.

Sometimes, though, we need to stand up and respectfully, passionately, state our support for an issue.

Not because I believe the gay and lesbian community deserves the same rights as “the rest of us”.

It’s because I believe the gay and lesbian people of this world ARE the rest of us. We would not be the world we are, the community we are, without what is essentially a microcosm of society.

Just one of our many parts.

And it’s not just that I believe we are all the same.

I believe in marriage. Full stop.

I believe that any person has the right to marry another person.

After all, is there any more true expression of freedom than choosing a person to spend the rest of our lives with? Consensual, eye-opened, choice – it’s power. It’s human right.

And yet, in 2012, we still deny members of our community this right? This freedom?

I can’t express how incredible and astounding I find this.

In a country where we spout acceptance, multiculturalism, forward thinking and giving everyone a fair go, we point the finger and say: “EXCEPT FOR YOU! YOU DON’T COUNT!”

I guess we’re not as awesome and friendly and inclusive as we all thought.

And what’s our reasoning? Why is homosexual marriage so wrong?

Oh, the Bible says so and it goes against Christian belief in the sacrament of marriage?

Marriage wasn’t defined as a sacrament by the Catholic Church until 1215. Marriage was not invented by Christians and thus the sanctity argument doesn’t fly with me (and I say this as a woman raised in an Anglican family with particularly conservative views, who was free to marry her husband in a civil ceremony on a Friday afternoon in the park next to a courthouse).

Besides, anyone who looks into the history of the Christian faith and marriage will find, very quickly, that the original Christians weren’t exactly supportive of marriage.

Marriage, as an act and institution, was regarded as only one step up from prostitution in terms of sacredness.  Sexuality and carnal knowledge was the lowest one could reside on the scale of purity, divinity and faith.  The furthest from God a person could place themselves.

St Jerome wrote:

“It is not disparaging wedlock to prefer virginity. No one can make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil.”*

Wedlock as an evil practice…

Moving away from the religious argument – because let’s accept that Australia is a secular state and religion should have no bearing on the legal process –  it was only 45 years ago in the US that interracial marriage was still illegal in some states, until 1967 when the US Supreme Court ruled against anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia, and thus legalising interracial marriage, stating:

“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men… Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.**

Is it really so far a stretch that if the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by racial discrimination, that marriage not be restricted on the basis of sexual orientation either?

I don’t believe so.

It’s 2012.

Here in Australia we have values AND LAWS protecting, accepting and honouring religious freedom. Racial equality. The right to an education. Our privileges are countless.

Yet we stand as a country, and say:

“You are free to believe. You are free to prosper.  You are free to speak! You are free! Rejoice!”

But then we disregard and deny one of the “basic civil rights of man”, a “vital personal right”, “the freedom to marry”.

Freedom, with this kind of restriction, doesn’t seem like freedom at all to me.

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I was made aware of the Loving vs Virginia case and the history of the Christian view of marriage in a recent reading of Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Extra research into the ruling and St Jerome were my own.

{Side Note: The ruling I referred to above  was made in the case of Loving Vs. Virginia. I’m not even joking when I say that the interracial couple that fought for the right to be married without imprisonment in the state of Virginia, were called Richard and Mildred Loving.}