Love and Marriage

Why do people get married? I think it would be fair to say that most people in Australia get married because they love their partner, they want to be with them and build a life with them.  Of course there are going to be exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, love is the driving force.

With that in mind, I cannot understand why, in the year 2012, people that love someone who happens to be the same gender as them aren't allowed to get married.  It seems to me to be a pretty basic right, and yet they are being denied this by our government.  I believe in this more strongly than I believe in a lot of things.  I'm not sure why.  I said that to Dr C last week and he said that it seems to have awakened a long hidden social justice part of me.

I've spoken to a few people about this subject and none of the reasons against it I've heard  make ANY sense to me.  Let's see if they make any sense to you...

'But the bible says it is wrong!' Well, the bible also talks a lot about stoning people to death, feeding people to lions, whipping people and having more then one wife, do we have to follow what the bible says exactly?

'Traditionally, marriage is between a man and a woman' If we never challenged tradition women wouldn't even be allowed to vote, let alone be the Prime Minister of Australia.

'They can be together, but the word 'marriage' shouldn't be used, that's OUR word and they can't have it!' Yes, someone actually said this to me. I had no words then and I don't now.

'Australia was founded on Christian values, so we should continue that and gay marriage isn't Christian'. Umm... Excuse me, but I thought the fundamental principles of Christianity were to 'love one another'. How is treating someone differently because of who they love following those principles?

'It will ruin the institute of marriage!'. Sure it will. It will ruin something people like Elizabeth Taylor, the Kardashians and Tom Cruise have been building up for years.

'People choose to be gay' 'Being gay is unnatural' 'Homosexuality is a mental illness'. You don't choose who you love. I'm in love with Dr C, and I would be regardless of his gender. Love is completely natural and as for the mental illness argument, that's complete bullshit.

'But being married is about creating a family, it's about having kids'. There are so many things wrong with this that I don't even know where to start.  Firstly, lots of gay people have kids. I don't have kids, I might never have them, does that mean I'm should never have got married? When is the cut off for me to have them and stay married? 

Convinced? Nah, me neither!

I really think that in twenty years, and in all probability, even sooner we will be looking back on this and feeling a similar shame to what I feel when I read accounts of how white people treated black people, making them sit in the back of the bus, believing they carried different diseases etc.  I really hope that doesn't happen, I really hope common sense prevails and everyone is allowed to be married, regardless of who they want to marry.

Now at this point you might be thinking 'Fair go, Jo, aren't you being a bit hypocritical? You're asking people to change their minds and you don't seem to want to change yours'. And to that I say that yes, I am asking people to change their minds, to a view that won't hurt them one bit.  I respect everyone right to believe whatever they want to believe, but at the end of the day, if you don't like the idea of gay marriage, for whatever reason, then don't have one, but please don't stop someone who does want one from having that option.  

The Busy Drawer

In the white weatherboard house with a blue tin roof  there was a busy drawer.  Do you have a busy drawer?  (When I was a kid it was the top drawer in the kitchen, but in the Castle it's the third drawer from the top and it's full of crap.)  In my childhood busy drawer there were scissors, dead batteries, lots of paperclips, nail clippers, rubber bands, rolls of film waiting to be developed, stamps you could only use at Christmas time and postcards that had fallen off the fridge.  Basically, all the stuff that we didn't really have anywhere else to put.  Sooner or later it went in the busy drawer. 

Most things were just lying around loose, and the lesser used items you had to search for up the back of the drawer, but some things were kept in tins.  A collection of buttons, some foreign coins and the like.  They were in old Strepsils tins.  I don't remember there ever being Strepsils in the tins, so I'm guessing my Dad had kept them for years, just waiting for them to have a purpose.

When I was a kid, if I asked my Dad what a piece of machinery or something was he would almost always answer 'It's a wing-wong for a goose's bridle'.  We didn't have any geese, so I had no idea why we would need a goose's bridle, but I believed him. Don't you always believe your Dad? Even if every April 1st they tell you there is a white kangaroo in the backyard.

My Dad had several sheds full of wing-wongs.  He seemed to know exactly where everything was and kept a lot of things just because he thought one day they might come in  handy.  I only ever had one bike.  I got it when I was about 8, it was blue and had a white basket with plastic flowers on it and streamers hanging out of the handlebars.  When I outgrew that bike I didn't get a new one, my Dad just took the handles off my older brother's long discarded Dragstar bike and put them on it.  Dragstar handles were those long, high bendy ones, remember?  I got a few more years out of the bike without my parents having to spend a cent.  When my parents sold the farm several years ago and moved into town, I thought they got rid of all the wing-wongs.

A couple of weeks ago I was with my sister and we called into my Mum's house but she wasn't home.  I really needed to see what treats she'd been baking use the bathroom and I didn't have my spare key with me.  My sister went into a secret spot in the garden and retrieved a hidden key that apparently everyone in the family except me knows about.  When she handed me the key, a tear ran down my cheek.

It was in a Strepsils tin.

It turns out you really don't know when a goose will need a wing-wong for it's bridle.


This is not a sponsored post, I don't even like Strepsils.

Wordless Wednesday - Minchin