I Just Got Engaged

It's pretty awesome. And not at all what I had expected. I used to work as a family lawyer and had to deal with the end of marriages, financial and emotional. I knew the technical definition of marriage and what the Family Law Act said about the rights and responsibilities of marriage. I had to interpret that Act in the cases I dealt with. The law is completely unable to deal with people as actual people, and can only treat them as parties to a contract. So legally that is all marriage is to the law, a contract. And that is how I came to see my family law cases, the breakdown of a contract that had certain legal remedies. Marriage for x years, plus y number of children with z mortgage contributions led to a certain outcome. Neat, rational and legal.

For people in New South Wales, there is also the Property Relationships Act. This was an Act that I had to litigate from time to time as well. This is basically a different contract for de facto couples (i.e. homosexual couples). It has a different formula, which isn't as robust as the Family Law Act formula.

For a long time I thought that this was not right. Homosexual couples should not have to put up with an inferior formula to people who enjoy rights under the Family Law Act. But the solution I thought should be put in place was to simply transfer the Family Law Act formula to the Property Relationships Act. That way everyone would have equal rights before the law, and inequality and prejudice would be banished forever! Hooray!

But you know what? Now I'm getting married, now I am starting down that path, I know I was completely wrong. (Like how I suddenly got an opinion on income tax once I started earning an income). Marriage isn't some formula in an Act. It's humanities oldest institution. For thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years, people have been getting married. The formalities have been codified over the last few thousand years, but the actual act, the question, the answer, the commitment of two people to stick together, no matter what, hits you when you do it like a punch in the chest and you know, this is why this is such a hallowed institution. This is why we make a big deal out of it. This is a fundamental part of the human condition.

So that is why my old argument that merely changing a few words in some legislation and saying to homosexual couples 'look you have civil unions, isn't that great!' is just absurd. More than absurd, it's denying people the right take that punch in the chest that thousands of generations before us have taken. To be part of a tradition that makes us what we are.

Marriage is bigger than the small minds of people that want to cordon it off. Everyone should be allowed to marry.