Hi kids!
Welcome to the first instalment of Learning Time with Dr. Bullshit Pissblather.
Today we're going to be talking about a very important topic you've probably been hearing a lot about from the kids at school.
That's right—our subject of the day is gay marriage. Or, same sex marriage. It has many names, but what we call it doesn't really matter.
So what is gay marriage, you ask? Well, there is now a new law that means men can marry other men, and women can marry other women.
I'm sure this sounds very silly and confusing, and I'm sure you have lots and lots of questions, so lets answer some of the simpler ones first.
• Why would a man want to marry another man, or a woman another woman? That's silly!
Why would anyone want to marry anyone at all?
I'm sure you have lots of friends, some of them boys, some of them girls, and I'm sure you've noticed that boys and girls are different. When you get a little older, you'll find that most men like women in a very special way, and most women like men in a very special way too. Next time you have a chance, hide in a closet and watch your mummy and daddy together when they think you're not looking. You'll see what I mean!
And like your mummy and daddy, when a man and a woman like each other especially well, they sometimes get married and have children like you.
But some men and women aren't like this. Around 1 or 2 men out of every 100 men like other men in that same special way, and around 1 or 2 out of every 200 women like other women in that same special way. Nobody knows why—it's just how it is.
We call these people "gay". (Some people call them this in a mean way, but that's because they're nasty horrible people.)
When two gay men or two gay women like each other especially well, now, they can get married too.
But unlike your own mummy and daddy, they can never have children together. Isn't that sad.
• Why can't two men or two women have children together?
Having children is a little bit like making chocolate chip cookies.
I'm sure your mummy has her own recipe, but there are two important things that you need to make chocolate chip cookies—chocolate chips and cookie dough. The chocolate chips can be milk chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate, any kind of chocolate you like, as long as they're chocolate chips. And the cookie dough—that can be vanilla flavoured, chocolate flavoured, strawberry flavoured, any flavour you like, as long as it's cookie dough.
However, if you have lots and lots of cookie dough, but no chocolate chips, or you have lots and lots of chocolate chips, but no cookie dough, you can't make chocolate chip cookies.
In the same way, you need a mummy and a daddy to make a child. You can't make one with two mummies or two daddies. It just doesn't work.
• Why couldn't two men and two women get married before?
To understand this, you need to know what marriage is. And to understand what marriage is, you need to know about the government.
The government is the group of people that decide what everybody is and isn't allowed to do, and they do this by making laws.
And we know what happens to people who break the law.
A long long time ago, they decided that men could marry women, and women could marry men. This means that when a man and a woman get married, they become a family, ready to welcome their own children.
If you have a good family, you'll grow up to be polite, helpful, well behaved, and always try to do the right thing. People who don't grow up in good families often become bad people. I'm sure you've seen them yourself.
The government certainly have. Many of them are in prison!
The people who make the laws think all children should have a good family, and that way in the future, there will be lots and lots of good people and the country will be a nice place to live. So that's why they decided a long long time ago that men and women could marry each other.
But a few years ago, things began to change.
Now the people who make the laws don't care about children, and don't care about families. And they don't care if you become a good or bad person when you grow up.
Now, they just want to make the grown ups happy.
• Why did they stop caring about children?
Who knows? Maybe they had a bad morning; stepped bare foot on an upturned comb, burned their toast, or put salt in their tea. Who knows why any of these things happen?
But one thing we do know, is that they didn't used to like the gay people very much. For many many years, hundreds of years even, the people who make the laws were very mean to gay people, and bullied them horribly. This made a lot of people very very unhappy.
One day though, they realised that bullying gay people was wrong. So they stopped being mean to them, and they changed the laws so that other people couldn't be mean to them either.
But this wasn't enough. You see, they really were very very mean to them, for a very very long time, and they felt very very very bad about it.
So, they decided they would try to do nice things for gay people instead; try to make them happy, to show them how very very sorry they were for all the nasty things they did.
And it was at this time that somebody noticed how sad many gay people were that they couldn't get married to the people they liked. Surely if they could get married, then that would make them happy, so they changed the law. Men can now marry other men, and women can now marry other women.
Of course, even though they're married, they still can't have children together. But that isn't important, because the people who make the laws have decided that marriage isn't about giving you a good family; it's about making the grown ups happy. The grown ups are all that matter now.
