This anti-gay marriage stance is far worse than homophobic

It took about an hour after reading the article, “Tory MPs go to war over gay marriage”, for that feeling to rise within me. That savagely-brimming, almost eye-watering fury. It surges up from the base of the gut, hovers a while in the midsection of the chest, before flowing out through the triceps into the wrists and then into the fingers, which are now angrily chattering against this keyboard. Meanwhile, whatever spare rage remains flies north and resides in the eyes, and the brain simmers.

It seems as though a very significant number of Conservative MPs are looking to revolt against the possible introduction of gay marriage by the Coalition government. Some have called these MPs out for their homophobia, but I actually think that homophobia is the wrong word. Homophobia sounds like a gentle word, almost musical, with flowing, mellow syllables. Homophobia is not an ugly enough word to describe the argument that the mere fact of gay people marrying threatens the fabric of society. For one thing, it lacks the hard, uncompromising spit of the word “contempt”. Which is what I am beginning to think that this is about.

Homophobia is actually quite a kind, forgiving word. It is really quite generous. It is saying, “look, it’s OK. Your discomfort around gay people is just because you don’t really understand them. You’re unfamiliar with them, that’s all. Once you overcome that fear, once you see that, you know, we’re all just people, we’ll be fine”.

But this is not about fear. The MPs who would deny marriage to gay people are not, I think, afraid of gay people. I think that they fundamentally believe that gay people are vastly inferior to heterosexuals: and I fear that what underlies this belief is not a transient misunderstanding, still less a passionate commitment to Scripture, but a firm, unyielding contempt.

Many may flock to doctrine to defend the position that the MPs have taken. In response to that, I quote someone widely regarded as one of the most compassionate of Christians. In his foreword to “Sex, Love and Homophobia”, a publication by Amnesty International, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of the shameful treatment worldwide of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “We treat them as pariahs and push them outside our communities, he wrote. “We make them doubt that they too are children of God – and this must be nearly the ultimate blasphemy. We blame them for what they are.”

Tutu had some words on the subject of gay marriage, and given his unmatched prose on this topic I will again leave it to him. “Churches say”, he continued, “that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act – the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?”

As Tutu himself might say, Amen to that.

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