Fri 18 Jan 2013 In: Our Communities View at Wayback View at NDHA
What are our relationships with our elderly parents like? And how does that affect our personal lives and political advocacy? For once, Bob McCoskrie of thr right-wing religious advocacy organisation Family First, with whom I rarely see eye to eye, was right about something when he commented that there were other divides about marriage equality within New Zealand than religion alone. Because LGBT communities tend to be metropolitan, there's more opposition in rural towns and provincial cities because many country dwellers haven't encountered sizeable LGBT populations. There probably might also be greater opposition amongst some age cohorts of Pacific Islanders, particularly those with strong religious affiliations. However, neither of these demographic factors particularly confers any advantage on the Christian Right. Most New Zealanders are inhabitants of large metropolitan centres, even though Auckland has become the hub of much-reduced religious social conservatism in New Zealand. Most Pacific Island New Zealanders are younger than the national average and are poorer, which means that any mass mobilisation is offset by the hamstringing effect of absence of material resources. There seem to have been fewer identifiably Pacific Island submissions over the Marriage Equality Bill than first thought. Age is similarly subject to cross-pressures. In its case, there are questions of past political attitudes to contemplate. Take my own situation, for example. I've just turned fifty and have lived with my partner for the last decade or so. Both sets of our parents are still alive. His live in Wairarapa, mine unfortunately live in Brisbane, so I don't get to see them anywhere near as much as I'd like to, given my professional responsibilities and parental ones, although the latter have lessened now that our daughter is studying medicine at Otago University. My own parents are seventy eight and eighty-one, respectively. They're still bedrock Labour voters, still advocates of the welfare state and trade unionism, still won't cross picket lines and still contribute to strike funds if they spot them out on the street. Dad might have flirted with Social Credit or New Zealand First once upon a time, but to both of my parents, "Tory" has always been an obscene four letter word. They live in their own second home, retired, and spend a life of leisure. Dad used to have a small mowing business to keep active, but has given that up due to developing health issues. I keep nagging them to get out more, enjoy their retirement and spend more time with their own age group. They're still in possession of their full faculties in both cases. Insofar as religious social conservatives go, my parents don't like them much either. Mum's a lapsed Catholic and when she walked past a pack of anti-abortionists complete with rosary beads outside an abortion clinic one day, she growled at them: "Honestly, you rotten buggers make me ashamed to be Catholic!" Dad actually tore up an empty antigay petition page when a homophobe approached him outside a shopping centre and threatened to call the centre management. More worryingly, Mum gets a mercenary gleam in her eye whenever I talk about marriage equality with them. I suspect she's picturing me walking down the aisle with my partner, although it'll probably have to be in a registry office. With elderly voters, there tends to be an inevitable shrinking lid effect as age cohorts grow older, develop infirmities, become cognitively and behaviourally impaired and dependent on either their adult children or professional carers, and ultimately pass away. This does raise an interesting ancillary issue, which is how many of those adult offspring are LGBT? Put simply, it's difficult to tell. Most LGBT family research deals with the other end of the lifespan cohort, and focuses primarily on parent-child interaction and development. By contrast, there are fewer such research pieces on the lives of LGBT adult child carers for dependent parents or other elderly relatives. From comparison to the experiences of my own parents and my Alzheimer-impaired paternal grandmother twenty to twenty five years ago, however, I suspect there are some dilemmas present. Single adult LGBT children may be unable to form durable relationships, particularly if they need to work to support both themselves and their elderly relatives. In the case of couples, there may be stresses and strains placed on relationships if the dependent elderly person becomes difficult to manage, given questions of funding and availability of respite care and/or eventual rest home placement. There are additional complications if the carer himself or herself is trying to deal with her or his own health concerns, such as managing HIV, depression or bipolar disorder, diabetes, cardiovascular or respiratory problems and other personal health issues. In the case of my own parents, my mother's diabetes led to cardiovascular problems in later life. Unfortunately, faced with different but still perceptible workplace and personal life stresses of my own, I seem to have inherited both. Fortunately, I've also inherited my mother's practical and focused approach to managing diabetes. This does tend to lead to some particular related concerns. Is there adequate support for LGBT adult children carers for elderly dependent parents and/or other relatives? Do existing support groups meet their needs? What about organisations like Greypower and Age Concern? Are they easy to contact for advice? Or should we establish our own such support groups and focus on our own primary needs? What role could the Families Commission or Law Commission play in strategic research on general and specific adult child care for dependent elderly parent issues, or advocacy? Once upon a time, it tended to often be the case that we were estranged from our families of origin (but not always). For Maori and Pacific Island takatapui, whakawahine, tangata ira tane, fa'afafine and fakaleite, this must have been extraordinarily difficult and painful, given the centrality of whanau and hapu ties to Maori and Pacific Island societies. However, it should be noted that given improvements in medical care and active citizenship in defence of pension entitlement and retirement earnings, there are politically active elderly people around. However, they don't seem unified against marriage equality- Greypower hasn't stated any firm opposition to marriage equality, possibly because there are parents and grandparents of LGBT adult children or adolescents out there who object strongly to any such move. New Zealand First has, but even they may find that counterproductive- they perceive that most of their core supporters oppose marriage equality. In the process, they're losing non-elderly supporters of marriage equality as well as elderly marriage equality advocates who want the best for their adult children and any grandchildren. They may want to reflect on the fact that the senior citizens community is not monolithic and obstinate opposition to marriage equality may mean that they're unable to get past the five percent threshold at the next election. Unfortunately, as Winston Peters has voted against every LGBT legislative reform from homosexual law reform onward, I am not hopeful. And then there are elderly LGBT community members to consider in this context. When they watched a news programme on San Francisco and marriage equality, my parents saw a couple of elderly lesbians, one in a wheelchair and the other with a walking stick, lining up to be married. This made a deep impression on them, given that Mum and Dad are an "interracial" couple themselves (Mum's of Ngai Tahu descent). If people their own age were being subjected to discrimination, that was wrong. When a retired gay couple moved in a few houses up the road, Mum turned up with a cake to welcome them and discovered that one of them used to be a hairdresser- so she now gets free quality hairstyling, as do the other women in her bridge club. Dad staked out the couple's property when they were having problems with local tearaway brat vandals, caught the evil little ratbags in the act, and sent his cellphone image of them to the local police. Moreover, too, as an LGBT community, we could do much more to support our own older age cohorts. LGBT elder care homes would be an excellent idea, as would HIV/AIDS prevention material specifically targeted at older men who have sex with men, or inclusive of them, acknowledgement that older gay and bisexual men have the right to sexual freedom, relationships and intimacy, and some research attention to LGBT senior suicide in New Zealand. Older lesbians tend to be feminists, so at least they have those collective networks to assist them. However, older transwomen and transmen may be particularly vulnerable to accomodation and care service discrimination. Added to which, the attrition factor needs to be considered in the context of social conservative political activism. It's significant that apart from Graeme Lee and John Banks, none of the other elderly cohort of diehard fundamentalist and conservative Catholic opponents of homosexual law reform are still alive. In the case of opponents of the Human Rights Act and Civil Unions, Graham Capill, Bruce Logan, Richard Worth and Don Brash all experienced 'falls from grace' and the end of their respective parliamentary and activist careers, resulting in the current situation where Bob McCoskrie and Colin Craig are the current frontline of opposition to marriage equality. Elderly Christian Right leadership and activists, and the attrition factor, have both had consequences for the fortunes of Family First and the Conservative Party as well. They mean that if the Christian Right is reliant on the reduced incomes of the elderly primarily, then constant requests for donations are cutting into the retirement earnings of the same age cohorts, during a time of severe recession. Don't forget, as their bodies age, elderly New Zealanders require increased medical care and resultant costs, as well as home and transport alterations to deal with their life needs. This may explain why Family First is unable to field placards, television or radio advertisements, billboards or even bumper stickers in opposition to marriage equality. They do not have the resources available to permit such an outlay. Moreover, they may be confronting technological inertia amongst elderly age cohorts that hampers their mobilisation to oppose marriage equality- although New Zealand First, Greypower, Age Concern and other senior citizens rights organisations do have their own websites. One wonders how we can counter this. Could one solution be to engage in targeted advertising and outreach to senior citizens, with a future marriage equality advertisement that specifically includes older supporters of marriage equality? Can Greypower, Age Concern and our communities even work together perhaps, to insure that our (and others) dependent elderly parents get the social and medical services and best practise care that they deserve and need? Recommended: Michael Dickson: "Generations divide over marriage equality" New Zealand Herald: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/enws/article.cfm?c_id=1