Same-Sex Marriage Storm of the Week
It was a calm, sunny Friday afternoon in London, but on Facebook there was a storm brewing. The magazine Country Life, which owned by IPC Media, a Time Warner subsidiary, had run an ad in its latest issue paid for by the organisation Coalition for Marriage.
The Coalition is supported by the anti-gay group The Christian Institute, a propaganda website that twists any story it perceives as pro-gay to show that traditional thinkers are being persecuted and their rights taken away. One its spokesmen, the MP David Burrowes, declared last month that in the same-sex marriage debate, it was the people who defended traditional marriage who were the victims. “I have also received a demand from some to not speak up for marriage,” he wrote in the Telegraph, a newspaper that tends to report the claims of The Christian Institute without question. “Hate filled messages of bigotry, intolerance, and violent threats (including death) have strengthened my position that this debate is as much about freedom for people to express their belief as it is about equality.” The bigots, the intolerant types, are those who would lobby for equal marriage, Burrowes thinks, and so plays the role of victim. The right to be a bigot, he seems to think, is his, and his alone.
The Coalition is also supported by CARE (Christian Action Research and Education), an organisation that believes in the “gay cure”: in other words, if only those people would try hard and stop choosing to be gay! So they offer to mentor “the sexually broken”, and provide interns to government, of which Burrowes is one of the lucky recipients.
And so Country Life ran an ad in which Coalition for Marriage claimed that 70% of people did not want the definition of marriage changed, which is based not on a recognised poll, but on one they had commissioned. (A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times found 43 percent in favour; it also found 15 percent opposed, with 32 percent in favour of civil partnerships but not marriage. An ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph showed 45 percent supported marriage equality.) And there was a backlash on Facebook and Twitter.
The Country Life fan page on Facebook contains a litany of complaints against the magazine for its decision to run the ad. I saw one lone voice who supported it. It hardly seems the place to guage the debate on equal marriage, this weekly property magazine aimed at the rich and white, with a circulation of 38,000. Of course, it is hard to say what the general readership think based on the reactions on the Facebook fan page, but it is encouraging nonetheless.
On another angle, this is what Helen Evans, advertising manager for the Women’s Insitute magazine told the Coalition for Marriage, as reported in the Daily Mail (of all places): “we are a national campaigning charity and your campaign doesn’t fit with any of our resolutions first and foremost. As WI Life is the national membership magazine, any promotion of your campaign could be seen as an endorsement to members. We do also welcome all women to the WI and this campaign could offend many of our members.” That is precisely how it should have been handled.
Why not sign the C4EM petition, the Coalition for Equal Marriage, to show that there are other voices, or add your voice the Equal Marriage Consultation run by the Home Office. And if you subscribe to Country Life, write and tell them what you think.
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I am a straight woman…married 43 yrs. to a man…but have many lesbian friends who are married and gay male friends who are happily married…I have bisexual friends….a relative who commited suicide because he couldn’t handle ‘coming out of the closet’ and lead a very miserable life which he decided to end in his 30s.
I am sick and tired of all of these closed minded people with BIG mouths. Why can’t they just live and let live. I belong to many support groups such as the LGBT and WHOF…..why do these PEOPLE have to keep pushing to be accepted. These people do not go around telling Bible thumpers and nice Christians, how to lead THEIR lives…they just want to be left alone and live happily…the WAY THEY WERE BORN.
Sorry..my name is Anne-Marie Grange (I left out the ‘n’_
Here’s my concern: what if being gay is a choice? So what? It’s still no one else’s business, and no one’s right to rule others by their religious precepts. It bothers me that so much emphasis is placed on homosexuality being an inherent rather than chosen trait, because it strongly implies that religious bigots do have a right to enforce their beliefs, just not on people who aren’t choosing to be the way they are. I’ve identified as heterosexual all my life, and am strongly and pretty much exclusively sexually attracted to men, but if I chose to have sex with a woman tomorrow it would be no one’s business but hers and mine, and no one’s right to interfere. And if somehow I fell in love with her and wanted to marry her, that wouldn’t be anyone else’s business, either.
Excellent point. Allowing the anti-equality viewpoint to frame the conversation is a fundamental mistake. Their premises are faulty.
However, if one wants to play on their framing of sexual orientation being a choice, ask when they chose to be “straight”.
I’m glad some people see this the way I do. Another thing I hate is when they argue if it’s natural or not. Who gives a shit? Did we decided murder was wrong, or that doing your hair how you want should be allowed based off of if we can see less intelligent life forms doing it first? Do these idiots want to model themselves off of savage creatures with lower levels of intelligence? I ask them that and they always seem to get antsy lol.
But homosexuality is natural. I used to know a family that owned a bull who was gay, they had to use male hormones to get him to mate the cow dummy for his sperm to impregnate the cows. Funnily none of his off spring, male or female were gay. When it came time to put him to pasture and buy a new bull they managed to source a gay bull, they were very happy together and the family simply continued to use male hormones. There are many gay animals both in the wild and captivity, so yes it is completely natural.
This persecution and victem mentality the religious right are claiming is a lie. No gay person ever attacked a straight person because of marriage and gay people aren’t trying to stop straight marriages, this is an unsupportable lie put in place to justify the vitriol coming from them, but it is not them under attack which can be clearly seen from the media. And I don’t see how gays having the right to marry is so offensive.
These are people who obviously don’t know any gay people. Who obviously don’t want the world to progress and I’m guessing are ardent conservative supporters.
As a straight woman with two gay sisters and loads of gay friends I support gay marriage as does my fiance and all my family.
This is not just about gay marriage, this is about equality and as long as a privaliged few can with hold a basic right from anyone, then we are none of us equals.