Tom Kenyon, a burst of illogical reasoning and keeping the Christian vote in the Labor party

Who the fuck is Tom Kenyon and why should you care?

Well it seems he's the latest in The Punch - the dumbest conversation in Australia - offering, in what might be called an exercise in balance, a view on gay marriage, and this time it's all about its unseemliness - perhaps because recently both tabloid sensation David Penberthy and Rob Mills both wrote pieces in favor of gay marriage.

The recipe. Take a yokel from Adelaide, a hix from the stix, and make sure that he's from the Labor party so that he can't be seen as a demented Bill Heffernan type, and then let him loose on a computer keyboard.

The result? There's no logical reason to allow gay marriage.

Well there's no logical reason to publish or read Tom Kenyon's thoughts, but there you go. Let's have at it anyway.

It is fair to say that in some ways the purpose of marriage has changed over the years and yet, maybe surprisingly, the nature of it has not. For thousands of years, certainly well before the time of Christ, marriage has been the name given to the partnering of a man and a woman mostly until “death do them part”.

Well unless it happens to be until "court do them part", as it so happens for some forty per cent of the couples in Australia that currently seek to end the ecstatic state of holy union known as heterosexual marriage, when the flames sputter out and a new 'marriage unto death' partner appears on the horizon.

But never mind, let's get down to the nitty gritty. 

What exactly is the purpose of marriage and how can we tell aspirational poofters to fuck off? Let's not worry about definitions involving expectations of a lifetime arrangement or people sharing their lives together or making sacrifices to help their spouse. Unfortunately poofters can lay claim to all that romantic malarkey. No, let's play the kids card:

... marriage is still more than that. Most people go into marriage expecting to have children at some point, especially those entering their first marriage. It’s true that some don’t but our definition of marriage needs to reflect the broader understanding and expectations about marriage within our society.

The simple fact is that while some marriages do not produce children, no gay relationships can produce children. Children may be involved but they haven’t been produced as a result of the sexual relationship between the couple.

Oops. What can we say about Julia Gillard then? You know the one Bill Heffernan labelled as deliberately barren? Oh well, I guess that's why she's just living in sin and can't see any reason to get married. And I guess that takes care of Maxine McKew and her very Catholic desire not to marry that divorced Bob Hogg.

But I guess as a general rule infertile couples shouldn't get married either, since the buggers can't bear kids, except through elaborate technology which offends either the all seeing eye of god or the Catholic church, or both. What's worse, even some fertile couples get hitched and then don't carry through on the kids thing. Perhaps we should punish them with automatic dissolution after ten years if they don't get on with the fecundity thing?

And while we're at it, why not go back to the good old days when the law prevented miscegenation for fear we'd all go coffee colored?

Because you see our fearless Tom is very worried about the historical definition of marriage, so no doubt he'd be very anxious about a black man with a big cock marrying a blonde white woman. But I keed, I keed, you see gays getting married is just such an ahistorical idea, except maybe on the island of Lesbos or in the land of the Amazons:

Gay relationships do not meet our historical/cultural understanding of marriage (essentially revolving around gender) and they are not the same in terms of the production of children.

This is not to say that gay relationships are better or worse but that they are significantly different.

Historical Tom is keen to remind us what everybody from the Egyptians through the Persians to the Greeks and Romans have got up to in relation to marriage.

Well yes, and it's lucky that Caligula didn't try to marry his horse Incitatus, but according to cheap Roman gossip only wanted to make the beast a consul and a priest. That kind of relativism is just too shocking for words. 

So when he married his sister Drusilla, we were all relieved to come to a better understanding of Roman marriage, that long standing tradition which also involved killing partners you'd lost interest in. As perfected by Henry VIII.

There’s nothing wrong with defining a form of relationship that is distinct and unique to the exclusion of other relationships. We already do this within straight relationships, making a distinction between “de facto” relationships and marriage.

The refusal to include gay relationships in the definition of marriage is not discrimination. I am a married father. If I were to apply for a single mothers pension I would not receive it, and rightly so. I would not have been discriminated against, I just didn’t meet the definition.

But what about being called a wanker? Do you happen to meet that definition? I don't say this to discriminate - after all there are so many wankers in the world - and as a result I understand there's nothing particularly unique or distinct in being a wanker. But I always thought that wankers lacked the capacity for logical argument, instead seeking refuge in historical precedents and nonsensical emotional rhetoric.

Because it wasn't so long ago that the same historical arguments were being used to persecute homosexuals, stop them coming out and metaphorically (or physically) stoning them to death because their very existence was an act of perversity and decadence, an aberration and abhorrent in the eyes of any number of gods. Courtesy the assorted religions and their definitions. 

Suddenly it's okay to be gay, but not to be a married gay? Well how did this historical relativism happen?

Okay, forget the wanker angle. How about a little condescension from a great height?

As I said earlier, there are many long-standing, committed and loving gay relationships and I have no objection to some form of recognition by the state for those that seek it but I do not think that marriage and a gay relationship are the same thing. A gay relationship needs to be called something else.

Well yes how about poofters in chains? Instead of getting hitched to the trouble and strife?

Instead of evoking the ball and chain, why not the ball and ball? Hmm, I'm thinking pink triangles on coats would be a good way for the state to provide some kind of recognition of gay folk. Fetching. Yellow for other difficult folk.

Our definition of marriage as between a man and a woman is part of our cultural heritage as well as recognition of the uniqueness of the relationship. There’s no reason to change that.

Well yes it's so a loved institution. Why when I went to the Urban Dictionary I turned up this for a married man:

A guy that is pussy whipped, hen-pecked, has no life, has no friends, and can't make any decisions without asking his bitches permission first.

Talk about a rich cultural heritage.

Now don't get me wrong. I can't see why gays want to be part of an army which gives them permission to go off and die for a country which tends to diss them. In much the same way as I can never understand why gays would want to be part of a church following a remote god, which regularly tells them how fucked up they are and how certain it is that hell awaits them. 

And I guess you'd have to be pretty perverse to want to get involved in a marriage with all its emotional and cultural chains (thank the lord for divorce). Why on earth do these people think that they're human and somehow like heterosexuals?

But if they want to, where's the harm? 

Except from the frowning disapproval of Pecksniffian loons still thinking that the world somehow revolves around Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden? You know, back when incest seemed the best way to get things going and maintain the family line after mom and dad got thrown out of paradise.

But let's not get too hung up on maintaining the proud tradition of biblically approved incest. 

There's not one coherent argument, outside of petty traditional prejudice, as to why gays shouldn't get married, at least as presented by Tom in his rant. Compounded by the use of bizarre words "logical reason" in the header. When what he meant to say is that it's his personal prejudice, buffered by an appeal to similarly prejudiced people throughout history. 

However did we manage to end slavery? Also biblically approved (not to mention the virtues of rape).

Remarkably poor Tom copped a bucketing from most of The Punch readers who could be bothered to reply. Let's hope he stays in his seat of Newland and doesn't stray too far out in the big world where things moving at a frightening pace and change is in the air.

Lordy, even Spain and South Africa are getting on board. But in the meantime feel free to join with John Howard, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull in sticking your finger in the dyke, holding back the tide King Canute like and continuing to persecute a minority with personal condescencion and public intolerance. 

Because that's all you've got and it ain't enough to keep things the way they were, unless a theocratic Islamic society is your ideal as a way of moving forward ...

(Below: I've used this cartoon before, but heck I like it. It's just so perversely relativist and has no sense of history whatsoever).