The contradiction in terms known as “same-sex marriage” was brought into law in Australia on the 9th of December, 2017. This came into law after close to two decades of activism and after multiple parliaments having already rejected it. There is much to say on this but something that should always be remembered is that for the political left, the issue isn’t finished until they’ve got what they wanted. For conservatives, something is a universal principle until it just isn’t anymore. I predict that the issue of whether or not the absurdity that is “same-sex marriage” should have been recognised by the state will not be up for debate again as long current political arrangements last.
The purpose of this post is not to take issue with the misguided perverts and their allies who desired such a change but to consider where marriage was prior to the change. The moral cowards representing mainstream “conservatism” in Australia tackled the issue much like their cousins on both sides of the Atlantic. Having already long abandoned the belief that not only sodomy but pre-marital sexual relations were wrong; they instead weakly rested their arguments on the nature of marriage itself. The true but rhetorically empty position that recognising same-sex marriage would weaken the institution’s importance or even destroy it altogether.
Where this was ever seriously addressed by activists on the other side, it was quite reasonably mocked by simply pointing out how poorly marriage was doing among those who were already practicing it. This is probably no better shown today then by the continued success of the television show called Married at First Sight.
Married at First Sight first came to my attention when I saw the acronym “MAFS” appearing quite regularly in the Australian trending hashtags on Twitter. I became curious and clicked on the hashtag which quickly introduced me to what is a very popular reality television series. The show originates in Holland but the Australian version of the show began in 2015, two years before “same-sex marriage” was recognised by the state. I am quite sure without looking that activists still pushing for this change would have capitalised on the mockery such a show made of the institution of marriage.
Under Australian law, the people who participate in this show cannot legally be married but they are still put into a situation similar to marriage with a commitment to making it a reality at the end. All my understanding about this show comes from Wikipedia and a handful of tweets and news articles I’ve seen.
Now in its seventh season, the show is regularly watched by over a million Australians and it remains very popular. Of all the couples who have participated virtually none are married, and I would put the probability at zero that any of them remain so in the future. Everything I can gather without watching it suggests it is a typical reality show that thrives on manufactured drama and controversy. And the viewing public as well as the media can’t seem to get enough of it.
Not only the numbers that watch the show but the fact that it exists at all more than demonstrate that marriage was already not taken seriously by the Australia public well before 2017’s change registered yet another “honk” in our region of clown world. As has long been observed, the public “debate” was lost as soon as soon as it was seriously brought up as an issue. All conservatives as far as I can see have since surrendered yet more ground. The next retreat seems to be whether deviant freaks can read stories to children in public libraries and that tells us enough to know what is coming afterwards.
I’ve written quite a few times about the uselessness of conservatism and I am hardly the first to do so. There are many reasons why this is. One is that the mainstream media has ever shifting ideas about the limits of what is acceptable and their remaining employees on this shifting fringe dutifully move with it. The other is where the money goes and the money seldom goes to those with any moral backbone. A fine example is how little is ever done by “conservative” governments to reduce funding for art and media that is thoroughly hostile to anything representing moral tradition. Quadrant Magazine, the Australian equivalent of the ever retreating National Review, even lost its meagre literary grant under the watch of a conservative government. This was a deliberately hostile act by the Australian Arts Council and offered a perfect opportunity to strike back hard but they didn’t because conservatives are losers.
I should put in here that I’m not innocent of defending marriage in the weak manner of conservatives in the early 2000s and used similar arguments. One I favoured considered how state intervention would give complete control to the state to dictate what is and is not marriage. This is true but also rhetorically empty because the majority of the population already consider that a given. The difference for me is I recognised how feeble and useless this was a good while ago. The most prominent conservatives in the country are all much older than me and have continued to argue such positions if not abandoned them entirely.
Leaving conservatives aside, MAFS is how seriously a significant portion of the population takes marriage today. Even those that take it a bit more seriously don’t view it as something permanent or even necessary to society. The 2017 legislation was nothing but a formality of what was already generally believed. And that is also what politics is most of the time too. What was worse for marriage came before the redefinition.
This is by no means meant to be a lamentation of what’s lost. Reality is independent of what any society decides it is. All of what has come to pass will fall apart sooner or later and reality will reassert itself. The longer it takes, the more savage the counter-reaction will be so we must pray at least that it isn’t a long time coming. The triumphant smiles of the victors will be wiped away in either this life or the next. The only thing to be done for those that still hold on to some form of tradition is to keep believing it and make sure their children do too. God will sort out the rest.