Doctors show support for marriage equality
More than 1000 Australian doctors and medical students have signed a petition calling on the government to legalise same-sex marriage.
Doctors for Marriage Equality founder Dr Amanda Villis was inspired to create the petition after hearing spokespeople for Doctors for the Family – which has about 150 supporters – claim that medical evidence supports ongoing discrimination within the Marriage Act.
“As doctors, it is our duty to advocate for the rights of all of our patients, regardless of their sexual orientation,” Villis said.
“I am pleased to announce that in only a few weeks our petition has been signed by over 750 doctors and almost 400 student doctors.”
The petition states that legalising same-sex marriage is in the best interests of public health and outlines the physical and mental health benefits of marriage equality.
It cites medical research showing that rates of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, are reduced when monogamous relationships are promoted in the homosexual community.
Doctors for Marriage Equality also countered arguments that children will suffer if same-sex marriage is legalised.
“30 years of medical research comparing children raised by same sex couples with children raised by opposite-sex couples has not shown any significant difference in any outcome, including personality, peer-group relationships, self esteem, behavioural difficulties, academic success or any other measure of a child’s emotional, psychosocial or behavioural adjustment,” Villis said.
“The majority of Australian doctors, like the majority of Australian citizens, are in favour of marriage equality. it’s time for the federal government to listen, and make same-sex marriage legal.”
Representatives of Doctors for Marriage Equality have begun lobbying federal politicians and will travel to Canberra next week to meet MPs face-to-face.
A list of the doctors involved with the group can be found here.
INFO: drs4equality.com
I don’t disagree with the possibility that there could be some positive health effects if marriage is made officially available to same sex partners, such as the mental health effects mentioned. But the logic used in this piece (monogamy prevents STIs therefore promoting monogamy is a good public health strategy for the prevention of HIV/STIs) does not follow, as anyone who works in the field of HIV prevention will tell you, and it should be dropped.
It also sets a dangerous precedent: the moment marriage equality turns (spuriously) to medical authority in order to promote sexual moralism is the moment marriage equality starts producing sexual stigma, rather than combatting it. And that is not a good outcome at all.
Mr Race, fair call on the success of Australia’s initial response to HIV/AIDS, but this article suggests that other physical and mental health benefits are mentioned in the petition though it doesn’t go into them. Do you know what they are? Could they be justification for “public health grounds”? Has the landscape in Australia changed significantly in the lasts 30 years? Could voluntary monogamy within the framework of marriage on an equal footing actually result in a positive way on STI figures without requiring an ad campaign? Would there be harm in finding out? Has anyone suggested replacing other strategies for combatting HIV/AIDS with weddings? I will hunt down a copy of your 10 year old article, it may shed some light.
Addressing this issue as being an important part of stabilising society in general is one of the few ways in which you can reach a conservative point of view. Social stability, general social health standards, moral convergence and a predictable family model are all things that tend to be more valued by conservative thinkers. Bringing same-sex marriage to them under that guise may be the only way they’ll listen. It’s more a psychological barrier rather than a purely logical position to take in the argument, and unfortunately human beings don’t always respond to logic.
This is a nice gesture, and generally welcome as a response to those other doctors. But while same-sex marriage is an important step for equality, it isn’t a public health solution and shouldn’t be framed as such. As Sue Kippax and I show in Sustaining Safe Sex (a 2003 article published in Social Science and Medicine), the reason Australia’s initial response to HIV/AIDS was so successful was that it *didn’t* pose monogamy as ‘the’ solution. I think the use of public health reasoning here looks pretty bad and the argument should be made on other grounds.