Same-Sex Marriage

Sometimes it's difficult to find the right argument, the one that gets to the heart of the matter as quickly and cleanly as possible. It doesn't mean your argument is weak or faulty or that your beliefs are foolish or wavering - sometimes you have trouble expressing something, no matter how much you feel it. Or you can't express it in a way that will convince others.

Such is the case, I find, with Same Sex Marriage. This Sunday is of course the big protest march about it, and I will be there of course (1pm in Queens Park, that's the one opposite the casino). But sometimes it's hard to convince people why it's important. Important enough to protest. Important enough to demand to be fixed, right the hell now.

Then this morning my flatmate was reading through The Sneetches. If you don't know it, it's a fantastic Dr Seuss story about a group of bird-like creatures called Sneetches who live near beaches. And some of the Sneeches have bellies with stars and some of the sneetches have no stars upon thars. And the star-belly sneetches are the only ones allowed to walk on the beaches while the plain-belly sneetches are second class creatures. Soon enough, a figure comes along and messes with the status quo. He charges a small fee to turn plain-belly sneetches into star-belly sneetches. Lacking a way to exclude others, the star-belly sneetches are miserable - until the outsider offers to remove their stars for a small fee. They all agree and then try to assert than having no star on your belly is the source of societal primacy. This causes the newly-star-bellied to be forced to revert, but before they can finish the star-bellied want theirs back again. The process devolves into chaos until the outsider is rich and the sneetches are all mixed up again - half starred, half unstarred.

Like most of Seuss' work the parables seem obvious but have a surprising amount of depth to them as well. It's not just an indictment of corportations controlling our low sense of self esteem, it's greater than that. To me, I see it as a total reductionist approach to all tribalism.

Humans are tribal creatures. We can't escape that and most of the time, there's nothing wrong with it. It only becomes problematic when we use our tribalism to justify our moral outrage (or when our moral outrage leads us into tribalism, declaring those whose actions we find immoral to be anethama and inhuman, but of course this blog would never stoop so low). At times like that it's important to not just realise that such outrage is silly to be fuelled by nothing but tribalism but that the tribalism itself is fundamentally ridiculous.

And that's really what this is about. There are some people in this world who think that only star-bellied sneetches should walk along beaches, because star-bellied sneetches are better than plain-bellied sneetches. It's all very silly of course, but these people seem to take it very seriously indeed. Their beaches are so very very important that to let a plain-bellied sneetch in would destroy the value of that beach. Of course, if a plain-bellied sneetch would only go and acquire a star, they would be happy to let them in to their beaches.

Some of us, however, think everyone should enjoy the beach. The beach is lovely, and the more people who enjoy it, the better. Some of us don't see any reason to care about the contents of a sneetch's belly. Some of us grew out of sneetch-like behaviour when we were six. Some of us think government and laws are for grown ups, not little children who don't want to share.

If you think laws are for grownups, do join us on Saturday. Numbers are a weapon.