a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Today (May 16) is our second wedding anniversary,  and I asked Christine at breakfast for her permission to celebrate  it with you by writing a post on marriage politics.  Fine, she said, as long as she gets final edit. Fine, I said, that will make it just like our marriage.

But let me tell you first about our wedding. After we had been through the license application process, we booked one of the thirty minute wedding  slots at Toronto City Hall.  With the obligatory two witnesses –ours an American couple,  Annette and Fred Tromly, expats since the 1960s—we turned up in time to be greeted by the  beautiful young Indian couple ahead of us on the schedule and their entourage.  Exuent omnes in a bunch: the men resplendent in white Nehru jackets, the women  joyful in bright saris sewn with little bells and cymbals, all laughing, singing, and blowing kisses to the four of us sixtysomethings standing there in our sober blacks and greys.

We entered the antechamber,  signed the various official documents, which we could request in English or in French, and also signed  a document we had drawn up ourselves. This one listed ten promises we were making to each other that day, probably the most difficult among them being the fifth: “I promise to hold lightly and with flexibility my conviction  that “I am always right,” and that I will not seek to be the boss.” We were expecting the ceremony itself to be humorless and made up of one-size-fits-all boilerplate; it was enough for us that we have  the right, as do all citizens  of Canada or elsewhere,  to marry in Canada.  We had no desire for a religious marriage,  only this civil one with its legal protections.

Then came the surprise.  The justice of the peace chatted with us a bit, interested to hear that we are both psychoanalysts, that Fred is a Shakespeare scholar. Marrying people is, he told us, his day job, while he “really” is a composer who puts  poetry –especially Yeats—to  music.  And his name really is, no joke, Gordon Brown. Then he turned aside and shuffled the pages in his ringbinder of ceremony materials in English. Facing us again, he got started.  Exquisitely,  sonorously, he recited a Shakespeare sonnet, followed by an Apache rain dance prayer that opened with the line: “You are my tent!  When the rains come, I shelter in you gratefully!”

It went on from there, our ceremony,  ranging around the world. A Buddhist prayer,  an English ballad,  a haiku,  an African chant, more Shakespeare.  The usual “I do” business said nothing about husband, wife or God; the word  for us was “life-partner.”

At dinner afterwards,  over lots of New Zealand white wine –Christine is from Dunedin, on the south island of “NZed”—the four of us, none of us native born Canadians,  laughed and cried in sheer amazement  at what a complete pleasure this ceremony had been. A gift to us from multicultural Canada, which has the official motto “A Peaceful Country.” For the past two years, including today, we have  marveled  at it,  especially when we are greeting  each other with  “My Tent!”

Now,  I ask you, who could object  to such a lovely event?  And why?  Well, the answer is lots and lots of people around the wide world from which the treasures read at our marriage ceremony were gathered. The objectors are folks who may have little  in common except that they prioritize their religious beliefs over the political  life they participate in, whatever  that may be, and over their civil marriages.  In Canada,  gay marriage was legalized in  2003,  and since then the  Christian right, which I am sorry to say is a growing force under the welcoming  aegis of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s conservative  government,  has seethed over  the existence of couples like Christine and me.

A new book by the journalist Marci McDonald called The Armageddon  Factor  (Random House Canada,  2010) tells the story of how the same-sex marriage law galvanized  the once  politically marginal  evangelicals  (who  have always  been, in population terms, a much smaller group than  the generally more liberal Canadian Catholics,  francophone or anglophone, among whom there are many Liberation Theology veterans,  particularly in Quebec City).  It’s an eerie story for an American to read, because it is the American story on a smaller scale,  starting up forty years later, but  fast-forwarding  at  astonishing speed.

Stephen Harper is the “family values” Richard Nixon of the plot.  He was voted in by a fraction of the population,  largely to protest a financial scandal in the government of his predecessor,  Paul Martin,  a Liberal at a time when Canadian Liberals had  refused to join America’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq. Harper’s own agenda was little known; he promised squeaky clean government ,  was vaguely pro-business (and explicitly anti-environmentalist  in his support of Alberta tar sands oil exploration), and otherwise seemed pretty harmless and not ambitious enough to secede from the broad Canadian  open-minded and tolerant  “peaceful country” consensus. But soon he embraced  George W. Bush in a sycophantic way that the majority of Canadians found appalling; if Tony Blair was “Bush’s poodle” to his British critics, Harper was Bush’s lapdog.  He committed  troops to his American Born Again buddy’s crusade in the Middle East –sparking anti-war  protests,  although not very powerful ones, as the troop commitment was small (and there was no draft). The two more or less social democratic parties (the centerist Liberals and the leftist NDP) were rudderless and disorganized after Paul Martin’s ouster –and they still are.

The evangelicals , having taken many a lesson from the success of the American Christian right,  presented themselves  as Harper’s necessary voter base, without which his minority government would not survive. With his help, they started placing their people in local government  offices, on local school boards, undercover in the quite liberal print media, and even  on the staffs of Members of Parliament. Their people have been carefully trained in communications technologies, and can now get an email out to the faithful in a flash. Televangelism  and Godtalk  Radio were not part of the propaganda strategy  because  the CRTC (unlike its counterpart the FCC in the US) has some control over  media ownership  and thus religious broadcasting. But the “theocons” (as they are called)  network and use internet social networks; they cultivate Christian philanthropists; they use the resources of bigger and better funded American groups like the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, for which they founded a Canadian branch. Thus hyper-organized and cyber-organized, they have been able, for example, to proselytize for Harper’s inclusion in his recent initiative to the G8 for protecting maternal and child health in the Third World  a clause refusing funding for abortions.

But the success of the Canadian  evangelicals  is not so much legislative  as it is attitudinal. The whole tenor of the Canadian conversation  over matters political has shifted a bit and is more  conservative .  The gay marriage law is not going to be repealed,  but the state funding of –for example—the Court Challenges Program has been cut off by executive order so that gay activists’ discrimination cases are not making their way into the courts or into media reporting  or on into public discussion. The Status of Women in Canada agency has, similarly, lost its funding, and feminism has thus lost investigative and reporting steam.

So, this story will tell you how our marriage  is getting to be a problem for more and more  people in Canada  and how they have gained outlets and hearings for their grievance.  But why?  What is their grievance?   It’s not so simple as our failure to play by the (allegedly) Biblical  rules, thus  challenging the idea that marriage is only between  a man and a woman.   Homophobia is a complex social disease, with many forms and motivations. (I’ve written  about these in The Anatomy of Prejudices, which also has an extensive bibliography of others’ writings.) It is not just a fever among religious patriarchs,  a chapter in the story of Old and New Testament -based (or Qu’ran-based) sexism or heterosexism.

In my estimation, the strongest focus of homophobia now, in this particular historical moment,  is on children.  What is essentially at issue for the Christian right is who is going to produce and own children and how  children are going to be raised and educated.  Crucial to this is how parents’ rights are going to take absolute priority over childrens’ rights and how what is “in the best interests of the child” is going to be dictated by parents. Christian parents. Abortion is the  other key contested area: who owns unborn children?

Back in the Sixties, when “out” (very newly “out”)  homosexuals generally did not have children, they were  usually targeted for other reasons, focused on their sexual “deviance” and preference (they are still targeted for this in the American military).  Now, a next generation is being fruitful (or reproductively ingenious or adoptive) and multiplying. Not as fast as the Christian family-values families owning a dozen children each,  but,  nonethless, multiplying.  Gays and all they stand for in the way of degenerate ideas and “degenerate  culture” (an old fascist barb) are going to help corrupt  future generations  as they put their children (in our case,  our grandchildren) in schools and put their stamp on the mainstream culture and education.  (Many rightwing  Christians homeschool their own children now, to keep them pure.) The vision is something like the one Confederates before the Civil War had of Negro slave families becoming freepeople,  citizens,  and multiplying until they outnumbered the whites, filling the schools with their  sub-par children, and generally  destroying the plantation aristocracy.  It’s a typical hysterical  nightmare of a vision: ‘we are going to be overrun by the sexually/racially hyper-sexual hoards!’ (Man-woman marriage is, in this sense, a marriage system that keeps sexuality and reproductivity  authorized, sanctified, regulated.)

At the extreme right of the Christian right, the onwardly marching soldiers are theocrats. They want America  (and the ones in Canada want Canada) to be a Christian Nation.  In America now, there  are two main fronts of the war against gay marriage: one is in California, where  the legal issues are being fought out (and hopefully will be fought out right to the Supreme Court on questions like whether  marriage is a fundamental right, whether gay marriage harms heterosexuals and their marriages, etc.). The other is in Texas, where the theocrats who have positions on local school boards are fighting to have  American History taught according to their interpretation of it, which is centered on the idea that our Founding Fathers were Christians and were founding a Christian Nation under God. In that earthly  secessionist Paradise, non-Christians and their children would be excluded from citizenship or made into second-class citizens.  We would be stateless people.

[Note, please enter your email under SUBSCRIBE on the homepage if you wold like to be notified when a new post goes up.]