Lord Tebbit stated during the equal marriage debate that, as gay and lesbian people can already marry someone of the opposite sex, they therefore already have the same rights as everyone else with regard to marriage.
This surely represents a journey into the outer limits of either stupidity or disingenuousness by someone who, as a former airline pilot and cabinet minister, must surely have enough intelligence tucked away somewhere dark and obscure to be expected to know better.
Gay people do not have ‘equal rights’ just because we have the right to marry a member of the opposite sex.
Gay people don’t want the right to marry a member of the opposite sex. We want the right to marry a member of the same sex, if we choose to do so, because that is who we are sexually and emotionally attracted to and bond with.
This anti-equal marriage argument is the equivalent of an Apartheid supporter saying that prohibiting mixed-race marriages is not a violation of equal rights, as each partner in a mixed-race relationship has the right to marry someone of their own race. (Indeed, the Dutch Reformed Church supported the outlawing of mixed-race marriages, and claimed to find their justification in Scripture: an interesting parallel to the current opposition to equal marriage.)
It is similar to a hospital only stocking Group A blood, and telling someone who had a Group B blood type and needed a transfusion, that he was not being treated any differently from other patients, as he also had an ‘equal right’ to a Group A blood transfusion.
If this argument of Lord Tebbit's is valid, then it equally gives validity to criminalising homosexuality, on the basis that gay and lesbian people would still have the same right as heterosexuals to have sex with a member of the opposite sex.
It is such an appallingly irrational and offensive excuse for an argument that anyone uttering it should be exiled to the Galapagos Islands in the hope of a speedy mutation.
