Tim Wilson, marriage as a contract, and supersizing heterosexual choice

While on the subject of marriage, it's great fun to read Tim Wilson's offering in The Australian on the virtue of competitive marriage.

Marriage for church and gays offers a solution to the current imbroglio by so mucking up any conventional understanding of marriage as to make it open for all.

Thank the lord for free markets and private enterprise and the understanding that beneath it all, marriage is a social and economic contract. And before Mr. Wilson's wise words, I'd thought polygamy might be the best way forward.

Best of all, that noble word "competitive" worms its way into the action.

The government can allow multiple marriage contracts. Registering a contract would require meeting minimum standards set by government, and religious bodies could set additional requirements for a marriage to conform to their faith.

For example, under competitive marriage the government could have a default contract between two people. The Catholic Church could register a marriage contract recognising it as a sacrament, including restricting it to a man and a woman and requiring that it be ordained by a Catholic priest.

Competitive marriage would replace the one-size-fits-all model. Importantly, it would address the imbalance inherent in government reserving marriage for heterosexual couples. All marriage options would have the same social, legal and political standing.

The benefits would be manifest. Religions would no longer have their institution threatened by government influenced by political activists.

Competitive marriage should also be desirable to gay activists. Same-sex couples could have their relationships legally recognised.

And if heterosexual or homosexual couples wanted to upgrade their marriage from civil to religious they would still need to conform to the tenets of that faith.

So Mr. Wilson concludes triumphantly, this all conforms to the principles of a liberal society, by ensuring that the private laws of god can discriminate but the laws of man won't. And best of all, we have competition policy at work in all areas, including marriage. Did I mention how virtuous is the word competition? 

Why soon we can look forward to competitive tenders and competitive offers and competitive pricing, and if husbands and wives don't stack up, you might be able to put out an offer for competitive partnerships or casual fucks or lifestyle support. What we already have it, and it's called adultery? Oh never mind.

This is all well and good, but is really the most desperate and circuitous way around not offending the churches while offering up gay marriage to activists (Wilson quotes the recent poll of 1100 Australians suggesting 60% of Australians support marriage for same sex couples, with support strongest amongst the young).

And the end result? Well you'd have to be a mug to enter into the Tony Abbott sanctioned kind of marriage, which for convenience of skateboarders and paintballers, we might call "extreme marriage".

Under the Xtreme marriage rules, no fault divorce is restricted, counseling is required, and the church can load the deal any which way it likes. Which if standard conservative patriarchal thinking is involved will see the rights of women again limited. Which will result - if parties feel aggrieved and want a divorce - in parties trooping off to the courts to sort out the contractual mess. Which will result in a fine flurry of floozies before the courts demanding justice, and discovering a contract is only what lawyers and judges determine it is. Along with the intruding churches. What's the bet the churches lose business? In a competitive market place.

The sad truth for the religiously inclined is that the days of 'what god put together, let no man tear asunder' are going, going, gone. Into a 40% divorce rate, for starters.

Are matters so desperate in conservative ranks that they are determined to follow Groucho Marx in insisting that whatever club would want them as members is the kind of club they would refuse to be a member of? Unless they're offered special leather chair privileges in quiet rooms away from noisy chattering folk?

Covenant marriage is effectively the secular equivalent of Catholic marriage. Abbott's argument is that if society is going to recognise gay marriage it should also "surely be capable of providing additional recognition to what might be thought of as traditional marriage".

Supersize my marriage? Make it different from the kind of marriage that gays might have? Keep theirs coarse and secular? Make sure it has no spiritual or religious overtones? Make mine absolutely, totally and comprehensively unique?

Wilson argues the Abbott line by wanting religions to be able to add bonus items and levels of difficulty available only to the most hardened game players:

But in arguing for same-sex marriage most gay activists don't appreciate the significance of marriage to religions. In response, many religious conservatives have bunkered down for the fight. They shouldn't. The solution is to establish alternative options such as Abbott's covenant marriage.

Don't appreciate the significance of marriage to religions? Dumb activists. They probably don't appreciate the significance of birth or death either, let alone communion as a way of avoiding a lifetime in hell. But there in the heart of it is revealed the standard prejudice about gays and their desire for discrimination to end. Somehow they're foreign, alien, they don't understand heterosexual ways, they're different, they're other, and thank the lord they're not Tony Abbott.

But if the upshot is to ensure that god can discriminate, it's not a solution at all. Perhaps a simpler solution would just be to allow gay marriage, and if anyone can persuade a priest to turn up to give the marriage a spiritual component, then good luck to all concerned.

What's that you say? Too simple, too straightforward, and lacking the free market competitive spirit? And without bonus add on heterosexual elitism and smug differentiated contracting that will bring fault back into a system that the world, or at least Australia, has shown it can live without? 

Only in a Catholic dreaming.

Ah well, back to injecting as much FUD into the debate by introducing complications, difficulties and a sense that gay people simply don't understand the significance of marriage. A civil contract will be good enough for them, along with the bulk of secular and atheist souls who really shouldn't get married at all, when the de facto state caters to their coarse desire to couple.

So can someone explain to me why some gay people want to get married because of its emotional and personal significance? And for some its religious and spiritual significance? Go figure.