Nicholas Richardson says ‘I don’t’ when it comes to marriage vows.

Marriage equality is clearly the most dominant political campaign amongst queers in Australia. But despite all the attention, a closer look at the issue reveals all this marriage business to be a little bit dubious.

The debate, at least in Australia, is about access to the word ‘marriage’, or, more specifically, access to the right to be called ‘married’ by the Australian state.

Whilst at times campaigners lead one to think that vast rights and responsibilities are being denied queer couples, this is simply not true. Since mid-2009, queer couples have been treated on the same basis as de facto couples and de factos receive treatment largely equal to the married.

The exception is the word ‘marriage’, or, given that one can call one’s relationships with others by whatever name one pleases, the possession of a piece of paper, verifiable by a government agency, called a marriage certificate.

When describing the difficulties that such a piece of paper will solve, marriage equality campaigners struggle.

In an opinion piece published in The Age, Mark Peel cites potential issues in relation to hospitals. Campaign organisers Equal Love raise concerns regarding insurance companies. In both cases it is unclear what exactly the problem to be solved is.

The only apparent difference is that having a marriage certificate would make it easier for queers to prove their status as a couple and thereby gain the rights attributed to all ‘significant others’, whether wed or unwed.

That most organisations require far less than a certificate to prove such status, being happy with personal identification, appears to undermine the already questionable significance of the issue.

If marriage equality offers anything it is in the exceptional circumstance. Peel emphasises this when he qualifies his concern over hospitals with the following: “It probably wouldn’t matter, because most people who work in hospitals are sensible and flexible. But that’s the problem with an absence of rights: you can never be sure you won’t end up with the bigoted and inflexible exception.”

Apparently the benefits that come to queers are the benefits achieved via the suppression of ‘the bigoted and inflexible’, in other words the suppression of homophobia.

Equal Love puts the argument like this: “Equal marriage rights would help to build community acceptance of lesbian and gay people and challenge homophobic views.”

But the link between a marriage certificate and homophobia is sorely missing. Homophobes hate queers because they are queer, not because they are unwed. Marriage equality would make no change to homophobia in places of worship, amongst bureaucrats or in the community more broadly.

Marriage is about recognising some relationships as legitimate and others as less so. On one side is the idea of the nuclear family, on the other everything else.

If any benefit arises from marriage equality it is from the relative advantage one group of queers may get over others by praising the sexual habits of the nuclear family over all other relations.

Given this, one must ask whether marriage equality is in harmony with the principle that the sexual conduct between consenting adults should be no basis for discrimination, a principle that stood at the core of queer rights campaigns of the past.

If there is to be a campaign around marriage it must be critical of, not pandering to, the massive apparatus of coercion and cajoling that seeks to ensure that the model of the nuclear family appears as some natural state of being.

Only then could it be said fidelity is held with the campaigners of the past and only then would an appropriate home be made for the language of justice and equality currently being deployed in this dirty marriage business.

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