From the perspective of how the presidency should work, a vice president should never force the hand of a president on a sensitive, first-order issue by getting out ahead publicly. … Biden committed a governmental sin of the first order.
Ben Heineman, lawyer
Last week brought an unexpected, albeit unsurprising, declaration by US President Barack Obama. Obama confided in a hastily scheduled television interview that he had reached a personal view that gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. In policy terms, Obama’s announcement has little impact: states have legislative authority over marriage, not the federal government. Indeed, Obama revealed his position just days after North Carolina passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Nevertheless, the admission was historic. Obama became the first US president to publicly support gay marriage, and a darling to the gay rights movement.
It was a curious time to make such an announcement — at the start of what will be a gruelling campaign for Obama to secure a second term in the White House. But some believe Obama’s hand was forced by his vice-president, Joe Biden, who declared his own pro-gay-marriage position a week earlier. Ben Heineman is one pundit of that view. In a piece for The Atlantic, he slams Biden for jumping out of line with his boss. Heineman concludes that Obama should dump Biden, and pick a new running mate — suggesting the outgoing Secretary of State, and former sparring partner before the last election, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton would, in many regards, be a compelling choice for VP. But before getting carried away with the idea, it’s worth considering Heineman’s reason for making such a switch. He contends that Biden has effectively betrayed his boss. But it is also plausible that Biden was given the green light to air his views as a way to test the public mood in advance of Obama opening his mouth. True, Biden is known for shooting his mouth off. But its also worth noting that education secretary Arne Duncan also endorsed gay marriage before Obama did. (Indeed, Duncan opened up on his views the day after Biden.) If this alternative explanation is true, then the case for dumping Biden is fatally weakened.
That said, if Heineman is right — that Biden’s comments were not coordinated with the Oval Office, and compelled Obama to speak out prematurely — then Biden is certainly a liability for the campaign ahead. If Biden does part with Obama before November, it’ll be a good sign of what really happened this month.
Have I got a Proposition for you
This week, California’s gays and lesbians had reason to celebrate. An appeals court upheld an earlier ruling that a controversial measure to ban same-sex marriage in the state was unconstitutional. The measure, ‘Proposition 8’, was a citizens-initiated referenda that passed in 2008. Religious and conservative groups had championed the measure as a means to overturn a ruling from the state’s Supreme Court that had opened the door to gay marriage in California less than a year earlier.
As legal scholar Noah Feldman writes, not all is good news for advocates of same-sex marriage. The appeals court’s ruling is narrowly defined: it doesn’t establish a right to gay marriage. Rather, it ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional strictly on the basis that it took away from gays and lesbians what had previously (though only briefly) been an equal right to marriage. Hence, if the matter is appealed again to the federal Supreme Court, the justices there will not be asked to judge whether gay marriage is itself a constitutional right, but solely whether Proposition 8 introduced discrimination on the basis of sexual-orientation to something where an equal right had already been created.
Then again, there are no guarantees this matter will end up in the US Supreme Court. The Californian government was not a party to the appeal — the groups that brought the action may not be recognised by the Court. But in an election year, some conservative justices may be chomping at the bit to hear the case anyway.
Many Liberal MPs would, quite properly, have assumed there would be a conscience vote. … Indeed, there has never been a substantive policy issue (as opposed to a procedural one) where Labor has had a conscience vote and the Liberals have not.
Amanda Vanstone, former Liberal MP
Last year, the Labor Party’s national platform was changed to endorse same-sex marriage. But that was only half the battle. It was announced over the weekend that a group of parents with gay sons and daughters are now launching a campaign to convince Liberal leader Tony Abbott to offer his MPs a conscience vote in the event of a private members’ bill being put up to amend the Marriage Act. One poll found that a strong majority of coalition voters wanted their MPs to be offered such a right. (Who knew there was quite so many liberals in the Liberal Party these days?) And now a prominent ex-Liberal MP has thrown her support behind the conscience vote movement.
In an op-ed for The Age, Amanda Vanstone (a minister during John Howard’s reign as prime minister) argues that Abbott risks putting many in his party — and in the wider electorate — off side. He declared that there would be no conscience vote for Liberal MPs late last year, after the parliamentary session for the year had ended, and therefore without consideration from the party room. His justification was that all Liberal MPs went to the last election on a platform to preserve the notion of marriage being between ‘one man and one woman’. But as Vanstone notes, that commitment wasn’t debated by coalition MPs either — it was Abbott’s call to begin with. The problem for Abbott then is that, as someone already identified as a devout conservative with strong Catholic values, he looks like his faith is driving policy judgements — something that leaves many Australians (who are largely secular-minded) decidedly queasy.
It is commonly noted that a conscience vote is not strictly necessary for the opposition. Unlike in the Labor Party (where the principle of unity dominates), Liberals are entitled to cross the floor without retribution. That said, frontbenchers are expected to tow the official line — were they to vote out of step with the leader’s wishes, they would also have to resign their post. Hence senior Liberals who are also philosophically liberal, like Malcolm Turnbull (the party’s communications spokesman), would be left with the unenviable position of choosing between principle and power. A conscience vote would conveniently (for them) square that circle.
Same-sex marriage will be legalised in Australia. But it is the complexities - the reality of difference - that ultimately have to be embraced if our society is going to be genuinely accepting of homosexuality.
Tim Dunlop, writer
Advocates of gay marriage commonly argue that there is widespread public support for the proposition. And certainly, I would prefer to see same-sex marriage included in the Marriage Act than the status quo. (Of course, if I had my druthers, we wouldn’t have government regulating marriage at all.) Plainly legalisation has staunch opponents too — religious groups in particular. But it’s also likely that there is a large bloc of voters — middle class, suburban mums and dads — who would be personally indifferent to the idea of gay marriage, because it’s simply not an issue that affects their lives. For them, it is not a ‘core’ issue — unlike say, energy costs, prices at the supermarket and interest rates. That is not to suggest that issues of equality should be regarded as subordinate to economic issues — after all, politicians should be capable of passing (or repealing) laws on important social issues without distracting from important economic issues. But many voters are unlikely to give more than a passing thought to discrimination unless they (or others close to them) are discriminated against.
On the issue of gay marriage, apathy is not the only issue. Within that likely large, personally disinterested group, there may also be some thought — though they might never articulate it — that there is something ‘wrong’ about homosexuality. This sense is understandable in the same way that I can’t figure out why anyone likes Victoria Bitter. I don’t know what it is in their brains that makes them think that VB is drinkable. To me, that seems wholly ‘unnatural’. Ultimately people have different tastes and preferences, and at a high level, that’s something virtually everyone understands. It’s in the details of our lives where it gets murky. “Of course, we’ve all got different points of view… but we must ban communist parties because they threaten our way of life.” “I don’t want to tell people how to live their lives… but people shouldn’t be allowed to get facial piercings.” “Sure, I don’t have to watch it… but we’d all be better off if reality TV was taken off the air.” This might seem to be trivialising the issue: it isn’t. These are all manifestations of the inability of individuals to tolerate specific differences, even though they might publicly avow (and genuinely consider that they possess) a general tolerance for such differences.
Writing for The Drum, Tim Dunlop argues that gay marriage will one day become a reality. But that on its own is not the end point for defeating discrimination — important though it is, it is merely one hurdle to overcome. Just as the community perception of gender has changed — for example, despite pockets of resistance, we are now broadly accepting of women in the workforce in a way that would have been inconceivable fifty years ago — so too must homosexuality be normalised in the public consciousness. Put simply, while we have made great strides in achieving equality in our society, there is much still to be accomplished.
Politicians, can we please get over the lie that once we “legitimise” gay marriage then society as we know it will end?
Traditional Christian teaching (and, indeed, many religious perspectives) argues that homosexual sex is a sin and that, by extension, homosexuality is effectively ‘wrong’. Andrew Tiedt is one such believer. However, unlike many Christians speaking publicly on the issue, Tiedt has no objection to gay marriage being legalised. His argument is a common sense, but nonetheless refreshing, one: what people do in their lives is entirely their business. After all, many things that religions regard as ‘sinful’ are perfectly legal.
Tiedt goes on to dispel the typical refrain that marriage is an ‘institution’ to promote families, and that gays and lesbian shouldn’t be parents - that somehow, being exposed to homosexual relationships is intrisincally bad for children — or, at the very least, inferior to having both a mum and a dad. But this is pure bunkum. The link between marriage and child-rearing is a tenuous one: many married couples (whether by choice or medical condition) don’t have kids, while plenty of unmarried couples do. And, of course, there are plenty of happy, well-adjusted kids living in single parent households.
Regular readers of this blog (and my Twitter feed) would know I can be highly critical of organised religion. But I have no truck with religious people in general. Andrew Tiedt’s commentary today is a great example of why. While church leaders may seek to impose their values on the world around them, plenty in their congregations don’t. God, if he exists, gave us all free will. People should be allowed to exercise it.
