Raimond Gaita

Gay Marriage: As Important as Race?

This lecture was introduced by Jon Stanhope, former Chief Minister of the ACT. Jon Stanhope's government can be credited for putting gay marriage firmly on the Australian political landscape when it introduced the Civil Union Act in 2006 only to see it swiftly disallowed by the federal government.

When gays ask to be granted the right to marry, they are not asking for something that can be adequately conceptualised by an ideal of equality that demands equal access to good and opportunities for all citizens of a polity. Nor do they ask for something that can adequately be expressed in classical liberal ideals. They ask, I believe, for the recognition, by their fellow citizens, of the depth and dignity of their sexuality; and they ask it from those of their fellow citizens who appear to believe that gay sexuality does not have the kind of depth that deserves to be celebrated in marriage. Married love, such people believe, deepens sexual love, but it can do so only for sexuality that has the potential for such deepening. They believe, therefore, that gay marriage is a kind of conceptual absurdity, even when they do not find it morally distasteful. There are many kinds of opposition to gay marriage: this kind has, limited but interesting, analogies with the incapacity of racists to see depth in the lives of the victims of their denigration.

Raimond Gaita was born in Germany in 1946. With his parents he migrated to Australia in 1950. Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Gaita's books, which have been widely translated, include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception , Romulus, My Father which was nominated by the New Statesman as one of the best books of 1999 and was made into a feature film starring Eric Bana and Frank Potente; A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, which was nominated by The Economist as one of best books of 2000; The Philosopher's Dog, short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's Award and The Age Book of the Year, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics, After Romulus, and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality Law and Politics, Muslims and Multiculturalism and (with Alex Miller and Alex Skovron) Singing for all He’s Worth: Essays in Honour of J.G Rosenberg. In his new collection of essays, After Romulus, he reflects on the writing of the Romulus, My Father, the making of the film, his relationship to the desolate beauty of the central Victorian landscape, the philosophies that underpinned his father’s relationship to the world and, most movingly, the presence and absence of his mother and his unassuaged longing for her. Because he believes that it is generally a good thing for philosophers to address an educated and hard-thinking lay audience as well as their colleagues, Gaita has contributed extensively to public discussion about reconciliation, collective responsibility, the role of moral considerations in politics, the Holocaust, genocide, crimes against humanity, education (the nature of teaching as a vocation, the role of love in learning) and the plight of the universities.