I was at a wedding once, with a poem to read, when the Registrar and his assistant called me aside, ‘We need to see the poem first.’ It shocked me, you see, because this was North London, not North Korea. But I flipped my laptop open, and they stuck their faces in: ‘Yep, that’s okay. Yep, yep, that’s fine.’ No references to God. Check. No references to bride and groom. Check. Out of curiosity, I had to ask, ‘A man and a woman getting married, what do we call them now?’ And the Registrar said, ‘Partner 1 and Partner 2.’ And the writer in me thought – How bland.
You see, if you remove enough of our idiosyncrasies we WILL be the same. And that is not necessarily a good thing, knocking through walls without even asking why they were there in the first place. No, don’t laugh yet. My ancestors used to say so too, ‘Don’t kill the python, it is sacred. Don’t clear the forest, it is evil’. But you laughed away and said – ‘Hogwash!’ Well, guess who is hugging trees and killer sharks now?
So, really, is the union of Partner 1 and Partner 2 the same kettle of fish as that of man and woman? And, please, go easy on the ‘love is enough’ line, for you never quite know who will be using it next – a man and his friend today, a girl and her teacher tomorrow. They warned me, you know – Love or no love, stay the hell away from married women, sisters of best friends, pre-pubescent teens, and fellow boys. Because there will never be a society where every desire is legitimate, talk less of enterable in the public register.
For it is quite the privilege, my brother, to be entered in that register. Consider, for instance, the upgrade, how everyone assumes that wearing a ring on the right finger means you are also in possession of a great deal of commonsense. Or the pecuniary benefit - should your significant other die without a will, you’ll be splitting the property with the kids. Eh? Does it not make you wonder too, why the state should be that concerned? Really, how does it affect the taxpayer, that you and I say we’ve found true love?
Difficult to answer if you live in post-post-modernism, where the primary function of the couple is to be happy. Me? I still live in a country where fourth and fifth cousins pile into rickety buses, to embark on hazardous road trips, complete with sweltering temperatures worsened by being dressed to the neck in akwa-oche, just to be at my wedding. And here you are thinking the old men will bring and bless the sacred kolanut, pass it round in rough wooden bowls, just so I can ride into the sunset with my one true love?
Mba nu! Marriage still serves the communal function here – primarily, to perpetuate the species. Not that those who cannot reproduce should not marry, or that those who marry must reproduce, but that children should not be born into uncertainty. For they will come with needs, one of the most enduring of which would be to know WHO they are and WHY they are. So, my people will never fail to shake their heads at the sight a child who is not sure of its parents for, surely, only a tragedy could have made it so. Yet we are now being asked to celebrate it as progress, that a decision to separate a child from its origins can be a deliberate one, taken long before the child is even conceived, simply to service a lifestyle neither Man nor Fate imposed on those who live it.
Fascinating, the spirit of this age of ultra-individualism, where it is not that there is no God, but that he is now Me. But lacking this remarkable confidence myself, I have no choice but to follow the old paths of intuition, the ones we used to use before this shining age of hubris. Yes. Every child must have a father AND a mother. And till that biological fact changes, my conscience is fine with this crude deduction - if it takes a man and a woman to make life, it takes a man and woman to shape it. Exceptions permitting, of course, but to make them the rule must be to stand on our heads. For how can we talk of rainbows when we would be painting with just one color?
So, yes, I think marriage should be the exclusive preserve of heterosexuals. Because every other benefit can be replicated some other way – write a will, change your name, hold a public ceremony to demonstrate your love, but, not yet, we have not yet found that other way of reproducing ourselves. And, to me, that is a distinction significant enough to justify its own category. At least, until it is certain that our humanity would suffer nothing by allowing the next generation to be raised on these beliefs, that leaving aside the biological need to procreate, one of our two sexes (random pick) is actually redundant.
Either way, it is NOT a decision for a handful of people.
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