Marriages Made in Heaven

A few years ago, I bumped into a former colleague at an Open University study day. We had worked together at the Medical Research Council: she as a radiographer and I as a laboratory technician. She left to have a baby a few months before I resigned to do other things, and so I asked her if she had returned to work. She looked askance at me, and told me that she’d not been able to go back. We had worked together in the late 1970s, and at that time there had been no right for women to return to work after maternity ‘leave’.

I believe that 30-40 years from now, someone will meet a pensioner and ask why he never married, and be as surprised as I to recall or discover that back in the early 2010s gay marriage had not been possible until, like my former colleague, it was too late.

I believe that today’s vote in the House of Commons in favour of gay marriage is progress, though I know not everyone will see it as such. I have listened to a few arguments against today, scarcely a wide view, let alone a scientific survey, but along the lines of the ‘the definition of marriage cannot change’, and ‘it wasn’t in any manifesto and shouldn’t be debated as legislation’. These are relatively easy to dispense with (underlining my selective choice, no doubt). Definitions change all the time. I don’t believe that ‘goods and chattels’ now include wives; and if items not included in party manifestos were to be banned, then early day motions and a raft of other parliamentary processes would disappear, and our democratic process would be diminished with them.

Chief among my thoughts following the vote, however, is one that I believe relates to a major argument against gay marriage. Despite what people have said on the matter, I don’t believe that my own marriage has been devalued by today’s decision. The promises my wife and I made before God are still ours and still extant and still important to who we are as two-joined-as-one. No man can put that asunder.