Cameron's Gay Marriage Bill and Dystopia

See bottom of article for update.
This article isn't about the rights and wrongs of gay marriage in general: it is about the Bill currently going through Parliament, what it might be intended to achieve, and how the kind of sexual revolution it purports to be part of, fits in with dystopian societies as envisaged by the leading dystopian writers: Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The author has read B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two" and isn't disposed to deal with it here, as it's too much of  a paean to experimental psychology to offer much insight into anyone's future in the real world. (For example: making the great psychologist's disciples put teacups on strings to avoid spilling any tea.)

The columnist Suzanne Moore has said that the bill offers conformity rather than equality, which may be true in a way, but it's also a reminder that the institution of marriage in general has some very prominent and formidable foes.

A much more insightful quote, which betrays thought rather than reflex, comes from the Labour MP for East Ham, Mr Stephen Timms:

Children are at the heart of marriage... but they are barely mentioned at [all in] the Bill. The Bill aims to open up the benefits of marriage to people excluded from it at the moment but it is doing [that] at the price of taking away a significant part of its meaning.

There have also been some much loved national figures declaring their determination to take advantage of the Bill's provisions at the earliest possible opportunity, and nobody with a heart would, for instance, want to deny Alice Arnold the undoubted joys and privilege of Clare Balding's hand in marriage.

Supporters and many opponents of the bill have used a great many words, Mr Timms who is a critic of the Bill, but not necessarily its ostensible intent, has used very few.  His concise analysis is that the Bill all but ignores the primary purpose of marriage and diminishes its meaning. The latter is probably a reference to the Prime Minister's inexplicable determination that the Bill will be used to remove all legal meaning from the words "husband" and "wife" with their resulting deletion from all kinds of official forms. This aspect isn't recognised or acknowledged by many supporters, either of the Bill itself or gay marriage in general, and it may actually prove a disappointment to many gay couples:

Miss Balding's publicly stated reason for wanting to marry Miss Arnold rather than be satisfied with a civil partnership, is that she dislikes "civil partner" as a term for someone she loves very deeply. If the Bill is passed as drafted, and implemented across all other affected legislation in the manner the Prime Minister has indicated and stubbornly demands, then Miss Arnold will never actually be acknowledged as Miss Balding's "wife" for any official or legal purpose. All spouses will be something very similar to "partners" and that's precisely what Miss Balding dislikes about their current arrangements.

It's an instance of equality being achieved by taking something away from heterosexual couples without actually giving homosexual couples the full deal they yearn for. Careful note should be taken when the authors of the Bill are utterly unmovable on awkward and frustrating details which don't seem at all necessary to their declared purpose. 

If it's inappropriate for one woman to be the wife of another (and how equal is that?) can't we mine the world's richest and most expressive language to adopt a nicer and more elegant word for it and let heterosexual couples remain "wife" and "husband" in the eyes of the law, too? The last thing Miss Balding seems to be asking for is any linguistic camouflage for her loving relationship with Miss Arnold, or for everyone else to have to adopt the ugly terminology imposed upon it.

George Orwell saw that language was not merely a powerful tool, but a deadly weapon in the wrong hands. If gay marriage is to be a positive institution, then the associated language needs to be elegant and expressive of love, rather than giving one's partnership status in a purely bureaucratic way which expresses nothing whatsoever. And yet, this is the part of the Bill upon which the Prime Minister has his heart set and he has made it clear that no compromise or change whatsoever will be accepted. The most negative aspect of the Bill, is something that he strongly desires. That will bear further discussion when we get around to dystopian societies, below.

If the meaning of marriage is being changed, indeed nullified, by the Bill, what of the purpose of marriage? As Mr Timms noted, children are barely mentioned.

 This may be because for a homosexual couple to have children other than through adoption, either a third party has to be involved, or they must have access to a level of technological intervention which has is not yet feasible, but obviously might be, one day.  In theory, the third party might be involved only until a child is conceived or handed over, with the homosexual couple assuming full and sole responsibility for it from that point on. Except that laws, which the government (and indeed, the opposition) have no intention of changing, forbid any such thing, for any straightforward way of achieving this. No male who donates sperm in the United Kingdom to allow a lesbian couple to have a baby, can legally surrender all responsibility for the child, no matter how strenuously the lesbian couple may draft and sign agreements to that end. And an amendment to existing laws, going through the works even as the gay marriage Bill begins its legislative passage, will make it impossible for sperm donors' rights to fatherhood of their donor children, to be signed away or otherwise denied. Not quite a barrier, but perhaps a lifelong annoyance and a pretext for legal action or official intrusion at any time.

For some reason, and equality can't be it, though extreme wealth might be, some male homosexual couples have been able to jointly father children by surrogate mothers (usually or solely outside the United Kingdom so far as the author knows) without apparently sharing any long-term rights or responsibilities with the surrogate mother or egg donor (by no means necessarily the same woman). Presumably, English courts are perceiving  this process as a form of adoption, or perhaps because of the wealth and status of the handful of couples so far involved, not perceiving it accurately at all. Legalities aside, surrogate motherhood is a (very) rich man's sport. Paradoxically and ludicrously, the only way a lesbian couple, married or otherwise, could achieve the same undiluted rights over and responsibility for, their children, would be if they, too, involved a surrogate mother, with neither of the lesbian couples carrying the child, but possibly one donating an egg via IVF, and then effectively adopting the child when the surrogate gave it up.

The passage of the current Bill, will not allow a married lesbian couple to have undiluted and unqualified charge of children which either of the couple carry in their own womb, conceived with the aid of  a sperm donor. Technology might one day allow a technical work-around for the law, but it's not possible yet and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive when it is. As long as the embryo has a detectable biological father, English and Scottish law duly detects him and assigns him rights and responsibilities.

The stumbling blocks for most lesbian and gay couples wishing to raise a family of their own as a married couple, don't lie in the marriage laws at all, but in other pieces of legislation, which Mr Cameron's government has no intention of changing, other than to make them tighter, as with the tweak to the law on sperm donors' rights and responsibilities.

Conversely, adoption by gay couples has been made much easier, thanks to a concerted and single-minded effort by three successive governments, which also had the effect of removing nearly all Christian adoption agencies from the field. Three prime ministers and governments including all three "main" political parties unswervingly followed the same path. Making gay adoption easier at the same time as making it somewhat awkward for gay couples of average wealth to contrive to have their own children, seems to be the subject of a somewhat unlikely political consensus.

So, to sum up what the Bill, and other measures happening separately but concurrently, would appear to do: it materially and detrimentally affects heterosexual married couples far more than is being headlined, and advantages lesbian and gay couples who wish to be married and "normalised" a great deal less than most of them appear to believe. If the purpose of marriage for gay couples is to raise a family, as it has always been for heterosexual couples, then other laws and official attitudes will have to change a lot more than seems likely at the moment, unless the family they are to raise has been taken away from somebody else. On this score, the Bill grants lesbians and gays an illusion of progress and nothing more.

A cynical interpretation would be that the probable outcome is the intended outcome, and that the gay rights lobby is being used as cannon fodder for a disguised attack on the institution of marriage, and by implication the Christian Church. This would be the very opposite of what Mr Cameron claims to be his intent, not that it'd be the first time he or his immediate predecessors have claimed one thing and done the precise opposite. The gay rights lobby, like all cannon-fodder, is unlikely to gain from the experience, but can console itself by blaming and witch-hunting "bigots" and "Christians" for any frustrations and disappointments which are already inherent in what is being proposed.

For any analysis of would-be dystopian regimes, an understanding of "divide and rule" is essential.

The other key quality of the Bill, is that it stirs up trouble out of any possible proportion to the minimal advantages it bestows upon the minority it purports to benefit. Whether there might be a much smaller minority which might benefit much more, is another question.

How all this ties into Dystopia:

First of all, we have to consider how fictional dystopias, as in "Brave New World", "1984" and Zamyatin's "We", as well as real-world dystopias such as North Korea and the former Argentine Junta, see families and marriages as a platform for raising children. In the case of "Brave New World" and "We",  families do not really exist, except that the elite castes in Brave New World retain surnames, often ones with a high reader recognition factor, such as "Rothschild". In "1984" and the real world North Korea, families are seen as essentially disciplinary units, though not in the same way.

In "1984" marriages are tolerated only for couples to have children, and those who fail to produce any are under official pressure to divorce and move apart by a significant geographical distance. In real world North Korea, whole families are routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed for the "crimes" of one individual. This does not happen in "1984", at least as long as the family members follow the rules about denouncing traitors. When Winston Smith, to his surprise, finds himself sharing a holding cell at the Ministry of Love with his super-loyalist neighbour, Parsons, Parsons express pride in the fact that it was his little girl who reported him for muttering "I hate Big Brother" in his sleep. What Parsons is expressing, of course, is relief that his daughter has the ruthless instincts necessary to survive under Party rule. 

In the same scene, two women in the holding cell are probably lesbian lovers, and it's also pretty obvious from the context that this is their crime. 

It is explicit throughout "1984", that marriages are solely for the purpose of producing children for the Party. And the Thought Police officer. O'Brien, who interrogates Smith, claims that the Party is seeking a scientific means of removing all pleasure from the act of procreation. (This puts the Party in line with the traditional ethos of Fettes College, which is that pupils are to lust after everything in life, except sex. Money, power, acquisition of great art, but no sex. If you want to understand our possible future, it does no harm to take note of what's taught at the schools which educate our would-be rulers.) In that kind of context, lesbians have no future at all, and male homosexuals would probably have to be very, very useful to the Party to survive. Which would mean they'd need to be the most ruthless and treacherous beasts around.

In "Brave New World" children are produced entirely on an industrial basis, and entirely to plan. There are no families as such, but elite genetic lines  are recognised and perpetuated. There is an awful lot of sex, especially orgies for the elite, and even the drudges are encouraged to perform, (only with each other), but affectionate relationships are deeply unfashionable for most, out of the question for the elite, and tolerated only for the lowest castes, who are all deliberately mentally handicapped anyway. Clumsy relationships between members of the lowest castes are a source of patronising amusement for those who supervise them. Love is almost universally seen as a weakness. Sexual "freedom" is taken to the extreme where it must surely be oppressive.

In "We", children are again effectively an industrial product, though there's not really a caste system, more a differentiation by a "Number's" area of expertise. Sex is by arrangement and absurdly formalised, but anyone can ask for a ticket to have sex with anyone else and there's no absolute right of refusal: the only leeway is the arrangement of a mutually acceptable appointment. Everyone lives in glass apartments, and blinds can be lowered during sex at specified times, not at any other time, or for any other purpose. When D-503 commits a rape, his female victim is desperate, not to protect herself, but to get D-503 to observe these social rules.

It's worth noting that in his follow-on to "Brave New World", "Brave New World Revisited" (an extended essay rather than another novel) Aldous Huxley states that his dystopia, Orwell's and Zamyatin's,  despite their differences, could all be the same dystopian society at different stages in its evolution.  (With Huxley's own work representing a period between "1984" and "We"). The author would also like to point out that Orwell's pre-war novel "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" whilst not a dystopia in itself, could have sown the seeds for much of the post-war "Ad Man's Dystopian Science Fiction" such as "The Space Merchants". A lot of the subliminal manipulations which preoccupy Huxley in "Brave New World Revisited" are not there in "1984" but are on view in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying". Written a long time before anyone but Orwell had really cottoned on to the marketing industry's tricks.

So, a dystopian regime still fighting for its existence resents both the energy wasted in sex and any affection for anyone but Big Brother, but needs children to raise as cannon-fodder, so a loveless, mechanical but productive  marriage is the ideal.

A dystopian regime facing no external threats, able to produce children industrially to order, but still seeking to refine its control of human society, outlaws marriage or any kind of genuine affection, except for the least mentally able castes. But its citizens at all levels are required to have regular sex and consume recreational drugs, the elite needing to be the most heroically hedonistic of all castes.

In "We", a dystopian regime which has, or at least thinks that it has, conquered all that Earth has to offer, bestows a lot more superficial freedom than the more primitive dystopias, but is still jealous of anyone harbouring affection for anyone but the Benefactor, and to some degree his secret police, the Guardians. (D-503 rather admires, in a not quite sexual way, the one Guardian that he knows personally, and it seems that either the Guardians are designedly attractive, or that society is somehow deeply programmed so that all Numbers tend to admire the Guardians.) So anyone can ask to have sex with anyone else, presumably even including Guardians, but it has to be done in a completely unromantic way, as a way of dealing with a physical urge. Anything deeper, is suspect and dangerous.

In a way, the population of the City in "We" is composed exclusively of the elite caste from "Brave New World", even though "We" was written a generation earlier. Huxley may have been consciously trying to work out how mankind might have gotten from the nineteen thirties to "We", but it's also worth noting that "We" is indeed a society where only the elite have survived and there is no underclass within the City, which is completely independent of the world "beyond the green wall."

So, dystopian regimes are not necessarily "sexually repressive" and may indeed make sexual activity mandatory. It's evident that any celibate citizen of Huxley's world will be swiftly corrected in some way. Anyone who avoids recreational drugs will be dealt with even more swiftly! A polar opposite of the Taliban, but just as oppressive.

It isn't at all hard to see a great deal of Huxley's "Brave New World" in where we are at the moment, but it's quite not so easy to see much of his dystopia in where Cameron's Gay Marriage Bill might take us.

There is a significant echo of Orwell's "1984" in the way that the Bill will strip the emotional and spiritual meaning from heterosexual marriage, making it in effect just a form of partnership to create children.  That was always its purpose, but never its sole meaning. But the purpose, having children, is notably absent from the Bill itself.

"We" a world where only the elite survive, is visible in the way that very wealthy male homosexuals will be free to go to California with an enormous wad of cash and reproduce via surrogates in a manner not available to most others; the somewhat more direct route to reproduction available to lesbians being subject to at least a (recently strengthened) legal deterrent if not yet a ban. In the real world, it is perhaps the deep ecologists, rather than the gay rights lobby, who come closest to actually wanting the world of "We". Because it is they seriously propose eliminating more than 90% of the human population -and totally controlling the reproduction rights of the survivors, along with complete societal control over the raising and education of what few children they are allowed to have.

There are disturbing echoes of classic fictional dystopia in Mr Cameron's Bill and where it seems designed to take us, but the most powerful parallels are with a real world dystopia, which we haven't really discussed in detail yet:

Argentina under the military Junta, and other Falangist states, such as Franco's Spain.

We enter dangerous and heretical waters as far as liberal political thought is involved here, because Margaret Thatcher fought a war against the Junta (no matter how hard her Foreign Secretary and his ministers of state had tried to sell the pass first) and this means that the Junta was a victim of Thatcher and can't have been as bad as the lying Tories make out.

No, they were much worse. But the way in which it was worse still isn't grasped by anyone much outside Argentina, to this day.

There was no widespread racial genocide, the original colonial River Plate Province government having done most of what was necessary in that direction (only 1% of Argentina's population has native American origins, and they dare not use native American names). There was extreme nationalist rhetoric, but it wasn't particularly racial. Economic control was exercised by the traditional Peronist method of having state-controlled (not exactly state-owned) combines in charge of each major industry, though trade unions were banned rather than being state-controlled, as in Peron's day. Economic control was pretty much as it had been under Peron: the real difference lay in the pioneering mechanisms of social control, which Peron hadn't seriously attempted, though General Franco had, in Falangist Spain.

Again, because what Franco did wasn't really understood outside Spain (except for Argentina, of course) what happened has largely gone unnoticed. 

The Argentine military  Junta exercised social control through the adoption of children.

Loyalists, and promising potential loyalists, were given children to adopt. Dissidents with children disappeared and their children were those adopted by loyalists. The fate of the vanished children was used to blackmail friends and relatives of vanished dissidents into silence, though there was never the slightest intent on the Junta's part ever to give the children back.

Those who were considered delinquent rather than dissident, had been at risk of losing their children before the Junta even came to power. This had no doubt given officials some useful practice.

The vanished dissidents were indeed murdered by the thousand, how will be described below, but all were aware before they died that their children had been taken away from their relatives and would be brought up by their opponents, to believe and stand for the opposite of what their natural parents had believed and stood for. If grandparents and other relatives tried to track the children down, or demand their return, they were threatened with death and quite often killed.

 The method of execution was unusual: condemned couples, and they often were couples, who'd been held separately, would find themselves reunited at an airfield, only to be sedated. Some of them do seem to have been forced to sign documents relating to their children before being sedated. More as a way of forcing them to be aware of what was being done, rather than because their permission was being sought. Outer clothing, sometimes most clothing, would be removed. They would be taken to a twin-engined utility aircraft (not usually a large one) with a military doctor and a couple of "cargo hands".

The plane would fly out over the South Atlantic, the doctor would administer an injection; this seems to have been a muscle relaxant to prevent any struggle which would endanger the crew during what happened next. No authority has said the dissidents were unconscious at the last, merely incapacitated. With the dissidents unable to struggle and the aircraft flying at height over a strong ocean current well out at sea, the two cargo handlers would toss the dissidents out of the cargo door, one by one. The fall was from a great enough height to break the bodies on impact with the sea and carry them under. The ocean current having been well chosen, nothing identifiable survived by the time that current would have brought anything back to land. The removal of clothing, and especially shoes, must have played an important role in the elimination of the bodies, because floating shoes and overcoats have sometimes protected feet and other body parts from marine animals and decomposition for many months.

This was a far more expert process than many assume: it was brutal, but the evidence was at least as thoroughly destroyed as in the gas ovens in Nazi concentration camps, and the method did not require any equipment specific to mass killing at all. The aircraft used could have delivered flour or other essentials to remote communities, and sometimes they probably did.

As well as the terror of falling from a great height, and nobody has ever suggested that the dissidents did not know that this is what was in store, nor can anyone say they were unconscious when they fell, they would have known that their children, had they any, were to be brought up by the enemy, to stand for the complete opposite of what they stood for. No Jew died in the holocaust knowing that his children would be raised as Nazis, merely that they were probably dead already. In God's hands, not the Devil's.

Relating the Junta's social control methods to Cameron's Bill:

Legalizing gay marriage in a legislative and bureaucratic climate where, for all but the wealthiest, gay couples will encounter disincentives to build families by any means other than adoption, creates a huge demand for children to adopt. Ministers have already exploited a scandal over the sexual grooming of children in (privatised) local authority children's homes to state that a much higher percentage of children taken into care will be adopted. This means that there is going to be a presumption against returning them to their natural parents in most circumstances.

If all these newly married gay couples are to have the children they yearn for, in the way in which the government is prepared to let them have children, then someone else is going to conceive, bear and lose those children. The recent case in Rotherham, where a foster-couple famously had three children snatched away from them "for being UKIP supporters" was actually more notable for the fact that the children in question had been taken from a Slovak immigrant couple on the most questionable of grounds.

The "necessary" secrecy surrounding all workings of the family courts, has been used to conceal from the British public the fact that there have already been diplomatic protests from the Slovak government about the very high number of Slovak families living in Britain who have had their children taken into care and offered for adoption. The grounds on which any child is taken is, of course, a secret protected by the family courts. But some local authorities are seizing children from certain ethnic groups on an industrial scale, and others, notably in Norfolk and Suffolk, are using the slightest suggestion of a learning difficulty or other minor handicap on the part of the natural parents, as a pretext for taking children away.

Just as the Gay Marriage Bill promises to make about a tenth of the adult population into adoptive parents, the State seems already geared up and tooled up to go out and grab enough children to satisfy that demand. Once that practice is established, we can probably take it as read that protesting, about anything, will make it more likely that your children will be taken. Already seems to be the case, in fact.

General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli would have been proud of David Cameron.

Update:

 It seems that behind the layers of secrecy associated with the family courts system, the adoption and fostering sector in the UK has been in the process of realignment towards a new goal since circa 2007.

Many of the web posts relating to this have been killed, apparently by court order.

However, there are web discussions taking place outside UK jurisdiction that might give readers a legal starting point. Go to the link and work outwards from there. This author isn't going to give readers any directions or conclusions, because it's not yet clear what's really going on. But it doesn't, so far, seem at all incompatible with his conclusions, above.