He’s speaking on the term “same sex marriage” which isn’t specific — it makes sense to those keeping up with the debate and for those wanting to be more inclusive, not less, but it would be clearer, perhaps, for someone outside the circle of discussion to refer to inclusive marriage as gay and lesbian marriage. But beyond that, I can’t see how you arrive as incest even from “same sex marriage.” What I will say, as an older person who grew up in a time when my friends couldn’t even say they were gay out loud, I was quite moved to have attended my daughter’s high school fundraiser last night to have seen several openly gay couples holding hands and walking around campus with no one staring. I think it will take some time for people in my generation and older to catch up. But they will. Eventually.
Either way, in Irons own words:
I am deeply concerned that from my on line discussion with the Huffington Post, it has been understood that I hold a position that is anti gay. This is as far from the truth of me as to say that I believe the earth is flat.
I was taking part in a short discussion around the practical meaning of Marriage, and how that institution might be altered by it becoming available to same-sex partners. Perhaps rather too flippantly I flew the kite of an example of the legal quagmire that might occur if same sex marriage entered the statute books, by raising the possibility of future marriage between same sex family members for tax reasons, (incest being illegal primarily in order to prevent inbreeding, and therefore an irrelevance in non reproductive relationships). Clearly this was a mischievous argument, but nonetheless valid.
I am clearly aware that many gay relationships are more long term, responsible and even healthier in their role of raising children, than their hetero equivalents, and that love often creates the desire to mark itself in a formal way, as Marriage would do. Clearly society should find a way of doing this.
I had hoped that even on such a subject as this, where passions run high, the internet was a forum where ideas could be freely discussed without descending into name-calling.
I believe that is what it could be, but it depends on all of us behaving, even behind our aliases, in a humane, intelligent and open way.