Don't call it marriage

You could blame it on love. Man falls in love with man and woman falls in love with woman, when more than friendship it leads to marriage. Nearly 6000 same-sex people got married in the City Hall of San Francisco by the end of last month. What can you say? Birds of same feather like to stick together. And they want to take their vows.

Look at the rest of the industrialised world, where people don't even want to take those vows. In the 15 countries of the European Union, almost no one gets married anymore. In Sweden, 76 percent of all couples aged 16 to 29 are living together. In a Roman Catholic country like France, the number of cohabiting couples is as high as 50 percent.

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Say, what is happening to old-fashioned marriage? Of course, nobody is saying it will not be there. But if you take out the same-sex marriage and its living-together cousin, what is left may not come to much. Marriage as an institution is going bankrupt, if you know what it means. It's going the way of an overused joke. People may still want to hear it, but don't expect to get a good laugh.

Let us say we understand it, people may want to have the freedom, which is inhibited by marriage. Let us even say we understand why some people may think it's not wise to buy books when there is a public library in town. But how do you explain the other thing, when people are influenced not by the books but by their covers?

After all, the idea of marriage is like a book that tells a story. You want certain things out of life, more than sex, more than companionship. You want family, home, and children who will live for you when you are gone. Marriage, I guess, is all about that and it takes two to do that tango, a man and a woman, who can make love, raise children and bring the mysteries of yin and yang.

Take that book and give it a cover, which is the face of people who are involved. Is it the same book when a man covets another man or a woman covets another woman? The answer is no, because while love, companionship and sex may be there, the conjugal touch is missing. Yes, men or women who fall in love with each other might take up the roles of man and wife. But what will happen to the family portrait? It will look like a picture from fraternity or sorority house.

The same-sex affinity isn't new, and it has been there for as long as time. The itch in the flesh can be a glitch, which can lead to an aberration. But this is one closet that people carried inside them until they started to come out. Okey-dokey. Man is mortal and let him be spunky for what he likes. Same thing for woman, and she has the right to feel good and happy.

But think of them as parents by adoption or artificial insemination. Think of children growing up in a house where both parents shave in the morning or trim their beards and moustaches on Fridays. Or, think of a house where both parents are women, its clothesline displaying panties, bras, skirts, blouses and breeches day after day. More importantly, think about a boy growing up in an all-female house or a girl growing up in an all-male house.

Even worse for boys, who will grow up with male parents, and for girls, who will grow up with female ones. They will have one-sided view of samesided world, either male or female, where one parent will differ from another not by quality but by degree of sex, more masculine or more feminine, when compared to each other.

Will it not put the clock backward? Mankind has struggled for centuries to bring balance in man-woman marriage, the liberation of women and their rights harnessed at great costs. But the same-sex couples are throwing it away. It is known that one of the spouses is submissive and another is dominant. The old controversy will start afresh. Who will wear the pants in the house?

Other things also come to mind. Who will touch, and who will blush? Who will wear cologne and who will wear perfume? How will you address them? Will both be misters, or will both be missuses? How will census workers show it in their surveys? One man, one woman or two men, two women?

Of course, there will be benefits as well. You will need one wardrobe in the house, probably same size everything so that both spouses can wear them. Each will have a resident best friend, man to talk man things, and woman to talk woman things. One spouse will find another as more of her or more of him. Betcha. It's gonna be lots of fun, I tell you!

When two people fall in love, it opens up the gates of heaven. And love is blind, because when the heart opens wide, the eyes get shut. So who can mind when a man falls in love with a man and women follow suit? People even fall in love with animals, and Hindu ritual has it to marry spinsters with the trees.

The same-sex marriage cannot be worse than that, but somehow it grates the mind. Not because it's right or wrong, but the sanctity of marriage suffers in the translation. Marriages are all about homes where families bring heaven on earth, where children grow in the shadow of their parents, one mother, one father, who give them a healthy balance of body and mind. And that balance comes from the draft of air these children breathe, which draws whiffs of both perfume and cologne.

Every relationship has a name. Man is husband, woman is wife, and then children have their father, mother, aunt, uncle, grandma and grandpa. Marriage is also a name given to particular brand of relationship, the brand, which speaks of natural union between man and woman. This union both covets and begets. It's a thoroughfare not a dead end.

The same-sex union is as much a marriage as an artificial lagoon is a lake. Two men cannot procreate; neither can two women. Two invaders or two castrators don't make the game. Call it cohabitation, contract, lease of love, or anything else. But don't call it marriage. Inky-stinky. It simply doesn't make sense.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.