Equality for all

I have always believed that everything should be fair and equal. Is this a naive assumption? Possibly. But it shouldn't be!

In light of everything that's happened in Ireland (yay!) and what's happening in Australia (hmmm) I thought I would write about why marriage equality is so important!

Now my boyfriend asked me the other week, it's just a piece of paper, so why do the LGBT community want to legalise marriage? Surely a promise ceremony is just as important? And for awhile, I was a little tongue-tied. Sure I replied with the - "well it's not fair that we can get married and they can't". But in this day and age where de-facto marriages means you're pretty much essentially married, but without the piece of paper saying you are, then why is a piece of paper so important?

I racked my brain trying to think of a good example as to why it's just "not fair" that the LGBT community aren't allowed to marry without sounding like a petulant child stamping her foot and screwing up her face saying "It's not fair!" It took awhile, but I finally thought of an example that made even my stubborn boyfriend think, 'Oh, ok!' (p.s. he LOVES dogs, especially his own)

So I put this forward to him, how would you feel if you didn't own your dog? You had him, you looked after him, you trained him, you did everything you are doing right now with your dog, but you never signed any piece of paper saying that your dog belongs to you. They will always belong to the breeder. And the breeder will do everything that you're doing. The only difference would be that on paper, they actually owned the dog, and you didn't. That's when it clicked for him.

You see, it's not just about that piece of paper. It's about so much more than that! It's about the fundamentals of being a human being. Who are we to say that people can't marry? Because it makes us uncomfortable? Because it's "not right"? And the one thing that really gets my blood boiling is, 'Because a child needs a mother AND a father'.

As a paediatric nurse (and a dance teacher prior to that), I have had my fair share of dealing with different types of family and not all of them had a mother and a father. Some had just a father, some had one mother, some had two mothers, two fathers, two mothers AND two fathers, some just had grandparents. Especially in this day and age where the conventional nuclear family is the rare occurrence as opposed to the norm. I have seen kids being neglected who had a mother and a father, I've seen kids who were in an unsafe environment who had two mothers or two fathers. Conversely, I have seen wonderful kids being brought up by a mother and a father, and I have seen wonderful kids being brought up by two mothers or two fathers. The child doesn't NEED a mother and a father, a child NEEDS to be loved and cared for in a safe environment. Isn't that more important? Shouldn't more of our resources go into child protection instead of wasting our time fighting for something that should already be legal?

I'm hoping fifty years from now, our children's children will look back on this time with our fight for marriage equality and go, how silly was that fight? Just like we do when we look back at history and see the fight for women and people of different races to do something as simple as vote. Yes the fight still continues, even today (which is a whole other ridiculous thing), but they have come a long way since the days people crossed the road because they didn't want to walk on the same side as a coloured person. We all need to stop fighting for equality because underneath it all, we're all the same! There are bad and good people in every race, religion, country, gender, and sexual preference. We need to stop judging books by their covers.