金融时报:同性婚姻的真实影响

同性婚姻的真实影响

左翼人士认为同性婚姻不会对社会有什么影响，而右翼则认为它对社会有破坏性。在阿姆斯特丹举办的史上第一例同性婚礼至今已有12年，在荷兰这个“试验田”上，我们已经可以看到一些影响。本文作者FT专栏作家西蒙·库柏。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

hetero['het(ə)rəʊ] n./adj.异性恋的，异性恋者；也称straight；反义词为bent

bourgeois style 小资情调的；

bourgeois['bʊəʒwɑː] n.资产阶级，中产阶级

stolid ['stɒlɪd] adj.迟钝的，冷漠的

burgher ['bɜːgə] n.市民

Christian Democrats 西欧等国的基督教民主党，是社会议题上较保守的政党 banal|陈腐的；平庸的

liberal['lɪb(ə)r(ə)l] n./adj.一般翻译成“自由派”，在社会议题上比较开放的（西方）左翼人士

euthanasia[,juːθə'neɪzɪə] n.安乐死

Open Society Foundations 开放社会基金会，乔治·索罗斯创建的基金会，得名于他的老师卡尔·波普尔的名作《开放社会及其敌人》

Gay marriage: telling it straight (839 words)

A few seconds after midnight on April 1 2001, the first gay weddings on earth took place in Amsterdam town hall. Four couples were simultaneously married by the city’s mayor, Job Cohen. I grew up in the Netherlands, and re-watching the scenes, I found them that typically Dutch thing: sexual revolution, bourgeois style. The newlyweds exchanged the traditional kisses while ageing fathers in suits and ties beamed from the town hall’s benches. When the couples signed the register, they looked just like the stolid burghers of 17th-century Dutch paintings, except gay.

Nobody suspected then that by 2013, half the western world would be following them. Already one in five Americans lives in a state with gay marriage, and now Barack Obama’s government is asking the US Supreme Court to overturn a federal law banning the practice. The British and French parliaments voted for gay marriage in February. Yet in these countries, gay marriage is often debated as a leap into the unknown. It isn’t. As with so many social issues, the Netherlands is a laboratory. Twelve years on from Amsterdam town hall, we have a pretty good idea of how gay marriage changes a society.

The first thing to note: it doesn’t change much. Almost as soon as gay marriage was introduced, it faded from Dutch political debate. The unprecedentedly angry political arguments in the Netherlands since September 11 2001 have been about Muslims, Brussels and social class. Even when the Christian Democrats re-entered government in 2002, they never tried to ban gay marriage. Only one in nine Dutch people now opposes the institution, says the state’s Social and Cultural Planning Bureau.

Gay marriage has become so banal that Boris Dittrich, a politician who helped introduce it, reports hearing a woman on the bus tell a friend that she’s just got married. The friend shouts across the packed bus: “To a man or a woman?”

Nor does gay marriage seem to affect heterosexual marriage. The conservative American pundit Stanley Kurtz has long claimed that Dutch and Scandinavian straights began abandoning marriage after gays “devalued” the institution. But this is plain wrong. Kurtz correctly notes that since gay civil partnerships and then marriage came in, the rate of Dutch out-of-wedlock births has soared. However, he fails to note that Dutch out-of-wedlock births have been soaring since the 1970s – long before anyone ever thought of gay marriage. In 1970, 124,000 Dutch couples married. By 1983 fewer than 80,000 did. Since 1983 the decline in Dutch marriages has been far more modest: 71,000 couples married in 2011. Most European countries have experienced similar trends, with gay marriage or without.

Kurtz seems to be operating on the familiar presumption that you can say what you like about the Netherlands because nobody knows what happens there anyway. In a similar vein, the US Republican Rick Santorum claimed last year that half of all cases of Dutch euthanasia were “involuntary”: old people were being massacred.

The liberal temptation, then, is to say that gay marriage doesn’t affect national life. But that would be wrong. Mark Gevisser, an Open Society Foundations fellow researching “the new global struggle for the rights of sexual minorities”, has convinced me over large lunches in Paris that gay marriage makes two big changes. Firstly, it slaps the churches in the face. When a country introduces gay marriage, it’s in effect telling its churches, “What you say about moral issues isn’t that important any more.” That’s partly why British and American churches have fought so hard against gay marriage. They’re not just losing a battle. Their national relevance is in question.

. . .

The other impact of gay marriage is on gay life. Recently I visited Gert Hekma, historian of homosexuality, in his apartment overlooking Amsterdam’s dinky city centre. This was long a classic gay habitat: the homosexual left his hometown, and his often uneasy relationship with his family, for Amsterdam’s “gay scene”. He didn’t have kids, and often drifted apart from heterosexual friends after they did. Gradually, many gays came to inhabit a mostly gay world.

But that is changing. Amsterdam’s gay scene – the cafés, nightclubs and bookshops – was “collapsing”, said Hekma. That was partly because of the internet but also because gays were increasingly integrating with straights. Young gay men now hang out with their parents, or go clubbing with heterosexual friends, said Hekma. “Lots of straights come to a gay parade – sometimes too many.”

Many gay teenagers are still persecuted at school, Hekma added. But gay marriage had improved integration by sending a clear message: “Society accepts homosexuals.” Nowadays, said Hekma, some parents nag their gay children to marry. “I think the wedding itself is a means of integration,” he mused.

So far, relatively few Dutch homosexuals have had children. But as more do, and gay families retreat to suburbia, they will enter a hetero world of kids’ playdates and freezing parents watching Saturday-morning hockey games. It’s an unglamorous life. But as most straight parents will testify, that’s what marriage does to you.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.Why does the writer specifically describe the gay weddings in Amsterdam on April 1, 2001?

A. The issue was quite unusual in countries like Holland.

B. Because the author grew up there.

C. Those weddings were the first gay weddings on earth.

D. To provide a depiction of bourgeois style.

答案(1)

2.Which of the following institution is not supportive of gay marriage?

A. The Obama administration.

B. US Supreme Court.

C. The British Parliament.

D. The French Parliament.

答案(2)

3.What does the writer imply by citing a story that someone shouted to her friend on a bus “To a man or a woman?”

A. Gay marriage is devaluing the institution.

B. Churches are losing the battle.

C. Gay marriage is becoming ordinary.

D. Gay marriage doesn’t affect national life.

答案(3)

4.Amsterdam’s gay scene – the cafés, nightclubs and bookshops – was “collapsing”.

This is not because?

A. Homosexuals often have uneasy relationships with their families.

B. The spread of internet access.

C. Gays are increasingly integrating with straights.

D. The society is accepting homosexuals.

答案(4)

* * *

(1) 答案：A.Those weddings were the first gay weddings on earth.

解释：着墨讲述这场集体婚礼，是因为这是世界上前无古人的事。作者说，荷兰以sexual revolution和bourgeois style著称。

(2) 答案：B.US Supreme Court.

解释：作者在第二段中说，在2013年，半数西方国家会允许同性婚姻。目前已经有1/5的美国人住在将其合法化的州里。 奥巴马政府正在要求美国最高法院推翻此前的一项禁止同性婚姻的联邦法案，而英法两国在今年二月均投票通过了相关法案。

(3) 答案：C.Gay marriage is becoming ordinary.

解释：Gay marriage has become so banal that...也就是说荷兰人已经不介意在公开场合讨论这个问题了，他们已经觉得习以为常了。 A是美国保守人士Stanley Kurtz的观点。D是liberal人士的观点，而作者表示这是错误的，一是教会在道德教化上不再重要，二是阿姆斯特丹这样的城市会出现同性恋人士聚居区。

B正确但并未回答问题。

(4) 答案：A.Homosexuals often have uneasy relationships with their families.

解释：这恰是gay scene诞生的原因，而BCD则是这种景观慢慢消失的原因。