An evening with a revolutionary

“To destroy abuses is not enough; habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there."
Victor Hugo

I shall be honest. Geneva as a city has yielded few of the secrets I had hoped for as I made my way here. Not because I haven’t looked, but because I don’t think it really has any. Everyone here moves on – after a few months, like me and the thousands of other interns who make their way through the system each year, or after a couple of years. No one really stays too long; there is then little investment in the life and soul of the place.

Neither has the United Nations proved too inspiring. An unwieldy, cumbersome megalith tethered to bureaucratic nonsense by paperwork and economics. To paraphrase a world-weary friend, ‘Gaza burns, Goma falls, but the UN stamps all its documents in triplicate’.

The life and soul for me, then, has been the people I have met here. The extraordinary, challenging, infuriating and loveable friends I have come across are the lifeblood of this place. And perhaps nothing represents both these people and their vitality and passion than the evening a lucky few of us spent listening to a story told by a revolutionary.

As I prepare to move on to pastures new, it would be hard to find something more inspiring than the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. A thirty-year dictatorship was overthrown in just eighteen days by peaceful protest. And while there is much still to be achieved, Lamiaa, a young Egyptian doctor who tended to the wounded of Tahrir Square, painted a picture of a country on the ascendant, given time and space to re-build.

Lamiaa was living in Cairo when the revolution began. The Egyptians watched Tunisia overthrow their own unwanted governors – and the death of Khaled Saed, beaten to death by police, was a rallying call for the young, the disaffected and the marginalised. Tens of thousands poured into Tahrir Square in spite of the desert cold of the Egyptian winter, lack of food and sanitation, and violent responses by police – and after a few false starts (Mubarak promising first reforms, then a hamstringing of his own power within office), the revolutionaries won.

She described the men of the neighbourhoods banding together to protect homes from looters (by prisoners released by the government to spread chaos – watch the Dark Knight Rises and you’ll get the picture); old men in their jilabayas, young men in their jeans, the doormen, the doctors, the dry cleaners, stood in the cold and defended their homes. She described the sheer togetherness as volunteer doctors fixed bones and handed out medicines; as she saw sick men take only what they needed even when in dire pain, aware that someone else might later need those painkillers more.

It’s a powerful image. I watched the news roll in as Mubarak finally stepped down, and saw the joyful images of celebration in Egyptian streets. I saw the names and images of those who died on my screen.

Now, I am admittedly still caught up in a misty-eyed post-Les Misérables fever. I am aware that revolutionaries who fall do not get up again when the camera stops rolling. And I am wary of rose-tinting life or death choices that I am grateful with every breath I have never had to make.

But the narrative of change is essential, and so wholly refreshing. It’s something I felt I had lost sight of a little during my time here – the UN is so vast, and its reach simultaneously so wide and so flawed, that transition seems impossible. I am not (officially) suggesting a violent revolution overthrowing the UN, nor indeed the UK for that matter. But I think that the spirit of these words, written by Upton Sinclair in the Preface to Hugo’s Les Misérables, is as necessary now as it always has been:

‘So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilisation of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny…so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.’

The spirit of fighting injustice is alive and well – and I can think of no greater lesson to take with me as I move on from the turgidity of the United Nations in the hope of being part of something truly exciting. So it is why I am so grateful for this final inspiration to be gleaned from my time here - the opportunity to meet a person capable of flooding you with hope is to be grasped with both hands.

Noses and Fists

So, the debate over whether gay couples should be allowed to legally marry is (almost) over. The Commons have voted overwhelmingly in favour of extending this right to gay people, and all being well, this will be codified and passed in Parliament later this year. While some are asking whether this ought to be a priority for the movement (a very good argument describing the impact of the cuts on mental health services for gay teenagers can be found here), there is a general consensus that this is progress.

However, 175 MPs still voted against the draft. Some have made eloquent if misguided attempts to explain their nay saying (cue much ‘soul-searching’); I am going to use an example from Jim Dobbin, a Labour MP, to exemplify why the arguments against gay marriage are so weak:

‘We should be promoting equality, not uniformity, and be able to celebrate difference.'

While he manipulates the words 'equality' and 'difference' I'm not sure that Dobbin understands their meaning. There is to be an inherent contradiction in the way Dobbin uses the terms. Yes, difference surely is the proverbial spice of life, and must of course be celebrated and supported. But when a ‘celebration of difference’ becomes an excuse for discrimination, it crosses a line.

To understand this balance, we can turn to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle; we are free insofar as our freedom does not get in the way of anyone else’s, and vice versa, and freedom should only ever be limited to prevent harm to others. We are all party to and complicit in this concept every day of ours lives. Do you have freedom to drive on a road? Yes, but only insofar as your driving does not affect anyone else’s freedom to, well, live. Do you have freedom to drink? Of course, but the notion will posit that you should only be allowed to do so as long as it doesn’t affect another person’s freedom to get home safely without being attacked by an aggressive drunk. It makes logical and moral sense that your liberty to swing your fists ends where my nose begins.

Dobbin is free, of course, to pursue whatever ends he wants, including legal marriage to the woman of his choice; should his freedom extend to his right to bar other people from doing the same? Absolutely not. To legislate based on this notion would be to create a society in which legal demands and claims can be predicated upon a terrifying ‘might is right’ principle (this is not to say that our society doesn’t de facto work in this way – I only mean to say that at the very least, it is not legally mandated that those with the religious/cultural/social monopolies should have the last word in issues affecting the bodily or emotional integrity of another person).

Legal standards also create equality before the law, meaning that the same options must be open to everyone, at which point it becomes a personal choice as to how those are utilised or not. In this way, laws are written with the view in mind that, excluding obviously the legal right to harm another person, people may do as they please. Abortion is legal, but people are of course free to choose not to use that freedom. Gay marriage will be legal; those opposed are free to avoid it. Equality before the law is not uniformity; I doubt that Dobbin would argue against the right to representation in a court of law, nor that the equal right of every person to adequate housing, clothing or food has resulted in a society of bland, identikit automatons. 

It is certainly true that in the UK, civil partnerships, which have been legal since 2004, offer the same benefits as marriage, which is a major improvement on the laws in the US, where spouses are not allowed to visit their dying partner in hospital, nor receive the benefits of a pension to support them after the partner’s death, and a whole host of other despicable restrictions on love and dignity that heterosexual couples do not have to face.

In the light of this, many opponents to gay marriage, such as Sarah Teather, have been asking why gay movements seek the appellation of ‘marriage’ when their needs have already been provided for:

“Virtually no new protections are offered to same-sex couples on the basis of this legislation on marriage, and any that are could easily be dealt with by amending civil partnership legislation.”

Legally speaking, the two types of ceremony are very similar.

But think about what the word ‘marriage’ means. It is a deeply embedded cultural and social institution – religion has no monopoly on the word, and never has – and therefore culturally, socially, personally, the word has connotations and implications that are extremely significant above and beyond legal benefits. Equality before the law must then offer the choice to imbue one’s relationship with this meaning. Barring this choice on the grounds of personal preference is unacceptable; it is a nonsensical as saying that because one doesn’t believe in evolution, it shouldn’t be taught in schools. Welcome to the southern part of the United States.

Many who oppose access to this powerful institution do not seem to have made up their minds which excuse to go for: that gay couples marrying will destroy the social fabric of the country (to which a nice facetious answer gives that gays would never destroy any kind of fabric); that it ruins a religious sacrament; or that allowing gay marriage will lead us into some dreadful grey Orwellian marital conformity, as Dobbin implies.

Well, which is it? It doesn’t really matter – none of these answers are increasingly archaic; neither, too, are they a) true or b) good enough excuses to limit equality of opportunity.

I am not arguing that all gay people– or all straight people, for that matter – should get married. Not all of them will. There have and always will be people who don’t chose that path – and as Simon Jenkins points out, given the way in which clergymen and legislators have always craved to bring society’s sexual mores under church or state control, ‘It is perhaps odd that gay people should want to associate themselves with so overt a symbol of that control’, and I certainly know some people who wouldn’t want to align themselves with it. I don’t think I want to align myself with it.

But the difference is that I have always had the choice available to me to go one way or the other. For Dobbin to talk about celebration of difference and equality, this choice has to be on offer. I am arguing that for the celebration of difference to be meaningful, there has to be a choice. Within an absolute, equal standard of rights on offer, people, with all their glorious, multifaceted quirks, will always celebrate difference. The differences that Dubbin advocates are not differences but restrictions. The celebration should not and must not be an excuse allowing fists to go swinging into the noses of the celebration of love.