Tuesday, December 31, 2013
On being a
high-hanging fruit
The High Court decision earlier this month on gay marriage
was all that could be expected – a firm and prompt (but not hasty in an
unseemly way, mind) “no”, in response to
an ACT marriage proposal cooked up more in present desperation than in
the hope of a considered long term future together.
Some would say that the High Court could have consented to
the engagement, at least, at then let the rest harmlessly unravel in its own
way (the Commonwealth can strike down any piece of Territory legislation it so
wishes). But this would be against the
laws of symbiosis – and the High Court is necessarily ever the forlorn
pre-fiancée here. That is, a marriage
between parliament and judiciary would be an indecent proposal, so the two must
simply live together in messy ambiguity, or “in sin” as they used to say. In any event, the never-to-walk-down-the-aisle
High Court, while trying its best not to come across as overtly bitter, is
structurally an institution which could not possibly be sympathetic to other forlorn
brides, in the literal sense.
That’s my reading of it, anyway. If you prefer to see the High Court as a fallen
woman, with the Commonwealth parliament conspicuously chaste in contrast, read Geoffrey
Luck’s “Rush to judgment has hidden agenda”, Australian Op Ed 27 December 2013 and
David Flint’s prim letter to the editor, in the following
day’s Oz. They both seem to believe that
the 2004 Howard amendments to the Marriage Act needed no constitutional basis,
and that the High Court is showing temerity, if not minx-hood, in suggesting
that they do (see also Nicholas Ferrett’s letter next to David Flint’s). “Can no
one rid us of these turbulent judges?” asks Geoffrey Luck, possibly
rhetorically, but certainly with his hands flapping oh so dramatically, in our
minds’ eyes.
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In any event, cheer up, Brides of Canberra (now there’s a
horror film title, just ripe for the plucking!). The consolation prize is symbiosis – nature’s
grand pairing of the straights and the gays.
I love this time of year, for its abundance of sweet ripe
fruit. Or, if this ever crosses your mind,
the seeds of a parent tree, lovingly packaged up as to be temptingly both
removable and consumable, so that the parent tree can spawn far away from its
small fixed orbit of reproduction. Gays,
rejoice in being fruit!
We can start with the boast that we’re highly pluckable – some
of us, anyway. (I’m a high hanger, or so I like to think. Which leaves my plucking: (i) for the birds,
or (ii) for the intrepid). And some
fruit – citrus comes to mind – has thorns, but you can always choose scurvy (a
straightly-named disease if ever there was) instead.
Not worth dwelling on, perhaps, but still needing to be
mentioned, is another sort of pointy end – how the seeds, or the fruit’s
payload (from the parent tree’s perspective) get delivered into the soil, so
they stand a chance of taking root in a faraway fresh territory.
We fruit must thus usually be (ahem) spat out or shat
out. Of course, modern
rubbish-collection and sewerage systems rather disrupt such natural payload
delivery. Which is possibly why, in a
very roundabout way, gay sex came to be viewed as deeply unnatural in Victorian
toilet-obsessed times. That is, c .1870
fruit fruit became divorced from its symbiosis of a reproductive inner and
attractively packaged outer, while gay “fruits” similarly fell out of symbiosis, and into singularity.
So that’s gay reproduction for you – how in unlikely outer
suburbs and country towns, far away from the base of the tree, as it were, a
new generation is seeded. Sexuality, if not also marriage, can spring
from even “the poorest Methodist chapel”, as Geoffrey Luck so quaintly puts it.
