What a surprise in the United States last week when the Supreme Court gave the green light to gay marriage; who would have thought? With a Bible belt thicker than anything seen on a disco jumpsuit, I figured the US was going to be the last country on earth to make such a decision.
Ironically, my home country Australia, liberal in so many other ways, looks as though it is going to assume that last-country moniker, thanks to a prime minister who sees nothing wrong in shipping refugees off to Cambodia.
Upon hearing the news I, like a million other people apparently did in those first few hours, changed my Facebook profile picture to include the rainbow filter. I also wrote a post wondering how anybody, other than religious nuts or closeted homosexuals — often one and the same — could oppose two grown people tying the knot regardless of gender.
That comment spurred a response from a former Australian business acquaintance forced to flee Thailand a few years ago, who by accident remained a Facebook friend of mine, and who turns out to be an ardent Christian. By “ardent” I really mean “rabid”. He expressed his disappointment in my celebrating something that clearly contradicts the Bible, to which I complimented him on the closeness of his facial shave, something that clearly contradicts Leviticus 19:12, then unfriended him for life.
Such a magnanimous event had a ripple effect around the world, with more enlightened countries uplifted and less cerebral or more religious states predicting the end of the world.
The Philippines, for example, vowed never to go down the gay marriage path. Denmark had street celebrations. So too did Turkey, only they were blasted by police water cannon (resulting in a lovely rainbow filter in the mist).
Everybody seemed to have had a reaction … with the exception of Thailand. The news simply passed Thailand by.
It was hardly even reported in the local press and if it was, it was a news story that didn’t have legs. Here Saturday, gone Sunday.
“Why is everybody putting a rainbow on their Facebook pages?” was a question asked by more than one bewildered Thai Facebook friend over the weekend. One student of mine thought it meant the Thai drought had broken; the rainbow was a sign that rain had fallen, which called for global celebrations.
What caused this lack of response? I have a theory and yes, you’re about to hear it.
You see, I don’t think Thais get too worried about women marrying women, or men marrying men. For all its faults, Thailand is a country of remarkable tolerance when it comes to gender issues. That, and the fact that there have been marriages here far more bizarre than boring old same-sex ones.
This country’s national religion probably has a lot to do with that. Christians and Muslims go into a frenzy when it comes to gays, thanks to religious texts that claim God says homosexuality is a sin. Buddhism is blessed with not having a god.
That frees it up from the burden of attracting violent types who kill and maim under the pretext of God. There is no point in strapping explosives to one’s chest while fantasising about virgins in heaven if your religion does not have a god, let alone a heaven.
This explains why Buddhists don’t engage in mass extermination, especially those of other religious persuasions, unless they are Myanmar Buddhists attacking Rohingya, but let’s leave that country out of the equation for the sake of this column’s brevity.
While Buddhism does not condemn homosexuality, it is still illegal in this country for two men or two women to marry, and with drought and corruption and illegal fishing stealing the headlines, this military regime isn’t going to jump on the gay bandwagon any time soon. But you watch. Thailand won’t take too many years to turn.
Besides, what’s so surprising about it when in this country we have out of the ordinary marriages all the time?
I remember reporting on the wedding of Sathien and Sitthida Khenkudrang in Udon Thani a few years back. Sathien had been a monk and after five years, at the age of 35, he decided to leave the temple.
Soon after he met Sitthida in a nearby rice field and fell in love with her. An elaborate wedding ensued in his home town of Na Kha.
How lovely, and how memorable, especially since Sathien is a man and Sitthida is a four-metre-long python. A local soothsayer claimed the snake was inhabited by the soul of a princess who had fallen in love with her bodyguard and was put to death.
Her soul roamed the fields of Udon Thani for 653 years before deciding to be reborn as a python. Clearly she hadn’t got the roaming bug out of her system; two weeks after the wedding she slithered out of her cage and disappeared forever.
Meanwhile, a 39-year-old factory worker in the northern city of Lampang, known simply as Pu-pay, had been unlucky in love, with many women cheating him out of money. He vowed never to fall in love again — that is until he first cast eyes on a bitch named Olay. I’m not being rude; Olay is a poodle.
Pu-pay pleaded with Olay’s owner, an elderly woman known as Aunt Kik, to marry the dog. He even agreed to a bride price of 999 baht. The ceremony took place, but it must be noted villagers found nothing romantic in the story. Neither did the Thailand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
There have been all sorts of other weird weddings. In Surin a man married his dead girlfriend after she was killed in a car accident. A Samut Songkhram bachelor couldn’t decide which of two twin girls to marry, so he married them both.
An Isan man married a chicken. Two fighting cocks got hitched; in Songkhla Zoo two orangutans tied the knot … and you expect the locals to get excited over same-sex marriages?
Like I said, all these weird marriages are not legally recognised, but then again, most Thai marriages between men and women aren’t either.
The latest figures show that a little under 300,000 couples registered their marriages in the entire Kingdom of Thailand for the year 2013. That’s not a lot compared to the actual number of people who went through the ceremony of getting married.
So same-sex unions are already common here, but without legal registration. The most unique occurred earlier this year in a story that briefly commanded the world media’s headlines, including the BBC and CNN.
On Valentine’s Day, a gay wedding ceremony took place, but nothing as boring as two guys. This was a marriage of three men.
Dubbed as the world’s first three-way same-sex marriage, three young men from the province of Uthai Thani tied the knot in a ceremony that went viral. Like good Thai sons, one of them only agreed to marry the other two if they asked his mother for his hand in marriage. The mother said yes.
One of the grooms, whose name is Joke, made this comment to the world press: “In Thailand we see many same-sex marriages appearing in newspapers, television shows and in the social media, so we feel more accepted and able to come out.”
That is no joke, to excuse the pun.
Thailand doesn’t need a veneer of rainbow filter over its Facebook picture. It’s kind of extraneous. Thais are on the whole a tolerant bunch on such matters, and get on with their lives without having to get bogged down in the gender of two strangers who love each other and want to tie the knot.
No wonder it’s such a nice place to live — and love. n
