This blog has started to change. I first started it simply because I could. I had just ditched my dinosaur Mac that had been upgraded to its limit and still had a browser so old, it wouldn't support the requirements necessary for most blog sites. So when I got the iBook, I started to do all the things that Safari let me do that Netscape (a rickety v 3, it was, I think) wouldn't and one of them was to start a blog.
The blog at first was great for sticking all the pictures of our new flat as we were renovating it at the time, thus saving my friends' inboxes from being swamped with jpgs.
Then it became a place to put pictures of the new puppy and talk poopy.
Now, the puppy pictures have decreased (even though the puppy is still poopy) and the blog entries are in danger of lapsing into ranting at worst, and navel-gazing at best. Ah well, it's my blog and I'll soapbox if I want to.
This entry has been ruminating for a long time and like the World Aids Day entry (http://snugpug.blogspot.com/search?q=world+aids+day), it took a while to fester. Maybe it was the no-man's-land period in the week between Christmas and New Year, when it's been monsooning for days non-stop and it's cold and wet outside, the turkey has been digested and you're wondering about the year ahead and the one left behind that festering thoughts start to take shape as you start to write.
In end-November, the Ministry of Law quietly said through a late evening release faxed to the press that it was updating the Penal Code to move with the times. By that they meant including regulations for cyberspace and updating fines and penalties to match today's disposable income. But Section 377A is non-negotiable and remains in place. That means that "unnatural" sex between same-sex couples is a criminal offence.
December rolled round with World Aids Day and all the angst that came with it. Dec 1 was also the day that the South African parliament signed into law same-sex marriages.
This was the government, that back in the 80s, was subject to a student economic boycott in the redbrick university I went to in the UK. We didn't bank with Barclays (I think it was) and we didn't buy South African oranges in Sainsbury.
That was also when a classmate of one of my friends had her boyfriend visit her and we put together a wedding for the couple in less than a week. They were South African, she was black and he was white and they couldn't marry in their country. I'm no longer in touch with any of them but I still remember the wedding. It was at the Chaplaincy, which is off a busy path running through the centre of the campus. There was a lot of people using the path and all were invited to join in the wedding celebrations. Complete strangers came in to wish the bride and groom joy and rejoiced with them that they could finally marry. It was one of the best weddings I'd ever been to.
Here, we've had the "regardless of race, language or religion" drummed into us since we started reciting the the Pledge at primary school and we pride ourselves on being multi-racial and all-inclusive.
But are we, really? Not when friends -- people born and bred here and would probably have stayed -- have to leave the country to get married because they can't do so here.
They are ordinary people, and all they wanted to do was to live like other ordinary people. To marry and to live their lives together. I don't know which part of that is mad, bad and dangerous and threatens the fabric of (straight) marriage.
It would be a crazy full circle if somebody went to South Africa to get married.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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