Our beloved gnome of a Prime Minister appears to be vote hunting in a peculiar way. For some stupid reason he’s channelling the US right wing and pushing for Cabinet to override the ACT’s decision to allow same-sex civil unions. Crikey rightly points out that this isn’t likely to work in the same way it does in the US because of compulsory voting and the more generally mellow population here. It seems to be yet another step towards turning the Liberal party into the AsiaPacific chapter of the US Republican party. Howard and friends’ attitudes towards immigration, Iraq, terrorism and civil liberties have been drifting steadily towards the right wing nutcase worldview.
I’m a pretty centrist guy. I lean left on a few issues, and right on others. I’m right in the middle on this one: I lean left because I believe in individual liberty and right because I want the government to stay the fuck out of people’s personal business. I have yet to hear a logical or sane reason why gay couples should be denied the right to be legally recognised in the same way that opposite sex couples are. Call it civil union, call it marriage, call it whatever. The government should just pick one and use that phrase in all legislation about the concept.
There is no coherent, sane or logical argument for why same sex couples should be denied the same legal recognition of marriage as straight couples. It’s just that simple. Any attempt to exclude gay folks from marriage is wrong on its face and all this mealy-mouthed language used by gutless fence-sitting politicians is tacit approval of the institutional bigotry that excludes humans from relating to other humans. Either marriage is something two consenting adults can do, or it isn’t. Excluding gay couples from being able to marry is to define them as sub-human.
Will someone please replace the Labor party with something vaguely competant? I’d get utterly nailed as a politician, and don’t have the right temperament for a start. Then again, the only way I could do any worse would be to join the Democrats.
To lighten things up a bit, here’s a rebuttal of some of the common arguments against gay marriage, found via zestyping’s blog.