A Letter to Murray McCully

I expect a form letter asnwer.

 

Mr.McCully,

I understand that you're voted in for your opinions and preferences, but I can't let it pass without comment that you changed your vote to change your support of Marriage Equality to be opposed to it.

As the National MP in the ECB you've secured my vote for the previous elections. Mostly because you're inoffensive and are in a party that by and large suits my own thinking. By and large.

Being the intelligent, well travelled, and well rounded man that you are I can't begin to understand how you can vote against something that I've enjoyed for coming up to 25 years this year, that of being married.

I can't begin to understand how you could support it one day and be against it the next. You're now one of only 4 people who've been swayed, cajoled, or harangued into taking a contrary position to one which you came to on your own.

I'd lay Dollars to Cents that you've been lobbied by the religious element in this. Modern marriage is a construct of religion, religion that does all it can to deny minorities the status that they themselves confer upon themselves.

The world will not end, churches will not crumble, men will not start eyeing me up lustily in the streets, people will go about their lives. Traditional marriage, and denial of it to all people, is about religious dogma. Traditional Marriage isn't for life, as the number of divorces will attest. Marriage isn't for everyone, else everyone would be married.

At a time when Atheism or non-religion becomes more prevalent and religious dogma and teaching become less relevant you find yourself in a position where you are in danger of becoming a dinosaur of a past age.

Mr. MCully I ask you, if you could travel back in time would you yourself would have voted for women's suffrage? And whilst not comparable in moving society forward, I ask you why you would vote against Marriage Equality, something that clearly brings equity to everyone?

I'd ask that you do me the service of not sending me a stock/form reply, because that's just avoidance, and my one vote might not make a difference, but then again it might.

Philip Walter

As I get older I get different - #1

It's clear from some of the conversations that I have with my children that as I get older my attitudes to many things have changed.

Not everything, because that would be weird, but a lot of things. I'm more tolerant of things like gay marriage, and that's not to say that I was ever against it, but having been married for 24 years I'm prepared to concede that it's not all it's cracked up to be and that if you want to get married go for it.

The gay "fear" is no longer a subtext in anything. If you review the 70's and 80's TV you'll find all sorts of caricature characters that frankly belittled gay men, mostly, can't think of a sit-com that has a lesbian woman in it offhand.

Many of my generation were fed a fear diet of how bad, camp and effete gay men are, and that given the chance they'd man-rape you in a blink of an eye. True. Unless I'm over-reacting or making memories up. That sometimes happens. But not in this case.

So get married if you want. Like all marriages it's a hard work full time job, not a romantic interlude on a Saturday afternoon of fluffy dresses and cheap champagne. I doubt that given enough of a statistical pool that any one marriage of any kind is any different from another kind of marriage.

And on reflection all this made we appear to be mildly homophobic, got to work a bit harder on that, and I think you might confuse my liberal attitude to my personal phobia and fear. Not the same.

p.s. MrsPdubyah if you're reading this I didn't mean it about not being all it's cracked up to be.

p.p.s. Just because Barack came out and said pretty much the same does not make this a BroWaggon post.