News & Comment
'Public benefits'
A successful movement for marriage equality encompasses different perspectives on the importance of reform.
Figures recently released by Australian Marriage Equality about the cost to the Australian economy of not allowing same-sex marriages have been contested both for accuracy and relevancy.
Jim Woulfe makes the point that the figure of $742 million is not recurrent.
In other words, if all those same-sex couple who we believe want to marry, were to marry today, their weddings would be worth $742 million to the celebrants, weddings planners, caterers, florists, photographers and other wedding-associated business people the couples employ.
In effect when AME said
"marriage discrimination costs the Australian economy $742 million"
it should have said
"marriage discrimination has cost the Australian economy $742 million"
Jim and others also ask, why even bother with the economic case for marriage equality when the symbolic issues are so much more important.
"Compared to the symbolic arguments, the economic ones are so marginal that they teeter on the edge of absurdity. I don’t think it’s worth making this case at all."
For me, the human rights case is the most important. But this shouldn’t preclude other arguments for equality.
An effective movement for marriage equality must include people from across the political and social spectrum, including those for whom dollars are the bottom line.
This is why the economic cost of inequality has become the subject of academic inquiry in the US.
The final issue, raised by other people pondering the AME figure, is that if the $742 million is not spent on weddings it will be spent on other things, so, in and of itself, marriage equality will not make a special contribution to the economy.
Of course, some money that could be spent on weddings may instead be spent on other things – mortgages, travel, consumer goods. But there’s no way to be sure those other things will be as useful in generating profits and jobs for Australian small business. There’s also no way we can be sure that money will spent in Australia, given the increasing number of Australian same-sex partners marrying overseas.
I’m reminded of Bernard Mandeville’s famous saying, so beloved of financial conservatives, that "private vices have public benefits."
His example was the libertine whose extravagant habits keep tailors, cooks, decorators and prostitutes in business.
But Mandeville could just as easily have been talking about weddings. Sometimes they seem needlessly lavish, even a bit tasteless. But few of the things we will buy have the same immense, immediate and localised economic impact.
***
In other news,
The Age argues there’s nothing about employing gays and lesbians that is destructive of a school’s religious ethos so schools should not be able to "protect their ethos" by discriminating.
If a charter of rights is dead in the water, as some conservatives argue, why are some other conservatives still pumping out propaganda against it? Maybe it's not as dead as they hope.
Katrina Fox calls on the straight relatives of LGBT people to stand up for us.
Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays national spokesperson, Shelley Argent, goes one step further and argues for same-sex equality on national TV.
And
I want Australia to have conservative political leaders who speak out for LGBT equality and journalists who are not afraid to hold them to their word.
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