On Australian same-sex marriage

(yes, I know this post should have been on Saturday. It took a while)

On Saturday, I attended Melbourne's Equal Love rally, to show support for same-sex marriage. There were some great speakers, including Senator Hanson-Young and a spokesperson for the Radical Women. However, what bothered me was that several speakers mentioned that 60% of Australian's supported gay marriage, like that was a genuine reason. Personally, I don't care if the 4-5,000 who attended the rally are the only people in all of Australia who think that same-sex marriage should be legal. The political views of the majority should absolutely never impact on the rights of any minority group. We saw this happen in California, wherein the majority voted to remove prevent Californian gays from marrying. Go back 54 years, to 1954, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Any intelligent, intellectually honest person with a firm knowledge of black American civil rights knows that if racial integration were up to a popular vote, it would have taken decades for the population to forego their prejudices.

All arguments to discriminate against gays are farcical. Traditional? Preventing women from voting was one of the longest-standing traditions in Western democracy, and stood for centuries until the Suffragette movements. Not natural? Asides from being false, almost everything in our day-to-day lives in unnatural. Cars, harnessing electricity and modern medicine are all unnatural, yet we'd be insane to pass them up. We shouldn't redefine marriage? Marriage has been redefined countless times. Anti-Biblical? Asides from being unconstitutional, why should we follow that particular interpretation of the Bible? Why not a more lefty view? For the children? Firstly, marriage and children have nothing to do with each other. You can marry and not have children, and vice versa. Secondly, gays are fine parents. It will lead to polygamy? That's a red herring; every person who's used that argument has failed to state why polygamous marriage is so bad in the first place. They can't procreate? Neither can the elderly. And so on and so fourth.

However, despite all this, for this term, I don't think the ALP should change the marriage laws immediately. Namely, because as a part of his election campaign, Rudd stated that he wouldn't allow gays to marry. And if there's one thing I loathe, it's a political leader changing his position on an issue mid-term, before they can be voted on that issue. Hence, I would rather Rudd state that if reelected, he would change the marriage laws, rather than change them now, even at the cost of equality.

Personal principles; they can be a real pain at times.