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Thursday 10 May 2012

Wedlock 'em up.

FINALLY the leader of the Free World has said what most people think - he wants to punish gays for the rest of their lives.

They've have had it good for too long, if you ask Barack Obama. Our homosexual brothers and sisters have a far greater disposable income than heterosexuals, no risk of unwanted pregnancies, no call to rush home when a brat has earache, far better shoes for men and of course vibrant social lives.

Barack's obviously got fed up with gays having all the fun, and now says that seeing as the rest of planet has to endure it they can damn well get married and see how they likes THEM apples.

Infrequent sex. Anniversary restaurant trips. 'Date nights'. IN-LAWS. Thanks, Barack!


If I were gay, right about now, I think I'd announce I was a treesexual or pastiesexual, anything where I wasn't legally able to marry my partner. "Oh that's a lovely idea Traditional Cornish, it's just such a shame society won't let us be free, shall we do something more interesting instead?"

The above is of course a joke. Well, mainly a joke. My own experience of marriage was happy-at-first and bloody-awful-at-the-end, which was neatly mirrored by a subsequent divorce that began in agony and ended in delight. The process of disentangling yourself from someone you no longer love is so grim it's the main reason I've no wish to tie myself up again.

That's just me; I don't think everyone should feel that way. But there's an awful lot of people who want to tell others how to live their lives, whether it's who to marry, how to marry, how to raise your children, how many to have or whether you ought to have them at all.

There's a serving judge who has set up the Marriage Foundation to campaign against the 'scourge of divorce' and thinks Hello! magazine causes marital breakdown. There's bills being brought into Parliament for new dads to take more time off work and to have access to their children guaranteed after a split, but nothing compelling lax parents to foot even some of the bill for their offspring. And every five minutes there's a new dictat about what is good or bad for children.

In fact, as I recall, it was the business of saying you wanted to get married in the first place which made everyone else pipe up with their idea of how we ought to go about it. That's why, I suspect, the suggestion of gay marriage has made people start sounding off.

Not one to be left out, my twopenn'orth is this: I can't tell anyone how to have a happy marriage, but I can tell you how to screw it up. The main way of doing that is to forget that the two people who got married are imperfect creatures, and that it's a 40-year project in which there's no point sweating the small stuff.

Getting married is many things - it's an expression of your love, it's a public promise, it's a nice party. It's saying this is how you will spend the rest of your days. It's chaining yourself to somebody until one of you dies and hoping they don't kill you in the meantime.

And it's asking for increased regulation and state interference in your life - it's rules, expectations, standards which not everyone can meet.

Getting married isn't a right, because sometimes it goes very wrong. Marriage is a freedom, the ability to make a choice, announce it to the world at large, and then live your life accordingly. I don't really want to do it again even though I'm allowed, but at least I can choose.

Anyone who says same-sex couples shouldn't marry isn't talking about rights or religion. They're saying someone doesn't deserve the freedom to do something everyone else can, purely on the basis of who they love.

Well, I've seen people get married who I think shouldn't be allowed the freedom to use cutlery. I've known couples that look like a divorce waiting to happen. Some of them bumble through and some of them don't. They've all had the freedom to try.

More importantly, all the history books show that people who try to deny freedom to others always lose in the end.

It strikes me that gay people can screw things up just as well as straight people can, and they ought to be given the chance. They can't be any worse at it than we are.

Once you've done it, you're stuck with it.