Do Australians Want Gay Marriage?

I am bemused by the logic of a recent poll in Australia that was touted as evidence that Australians are in favour of Gay Marriage.

The Galaxy Poll asked the question whether ‘it was inevitable that Australian laws would be changed to allow same-sex marriage’.
Apparently 75% of respondents said yes. But this isn’t what I am objecting to. What I object to is the conclusion that Gay Marriage advocates draw from this. They triumphantly claim that most Australians are in favour of Gay Marriage!

Just in case you fail to see the absurdity of this conclusion (which I didn’t pick up straight away either), I will explain using an analogy:

If a poll was conducted in Australia or America asking the question whether ‘it was inevitable that a terrorist attack would occur on your soil in the future’, I’m sure most people, if not all, would respond with ‘Yes’.

But does that mean we want it to happen? Or think it is a good thing? Of course not!

So neither is the conclusion true that Australians want Gay Marriage just because they think it is inevitable!

The secular case against same-sex marriage

I just found this great article titled “The Secular CaseAgainst Same-Sex Marriage”. Of course I don’t agree with the author with a few points, him being an atheist and I being a theist and all. But I fully agree with the general argument that he outlines.

Here are a few choice quotes:

“At the most basic level, our survival as a species requires the coming together of male and female gametes.

“In human societies the way this essential union is symbolised is in the institution of marriage. This is how the centrality of the male-female partnership is celebrated in our culture and, in a non-religious sense, it is sacred; that is to say, heterosexuality is so important to our survival, so fundamental to the continuation of the species, that we have an ingrained sense that marriage as a heterosexual union should not be tampered with.”

“In a just society, no-one should withhold such privileges from a person or a couple simply on the grounds of their sexual orientation. But to solve this problem by introducing same-sex marriage is to strip marriage of its deep meaning as a symbol of the male-female union that it is quintessentially a part of nearly all animal life, including human life, on this planet, and to pare it down to the status of a civil union, a merely legal arrangement. This is why I feel queasy about the idea of same-sex marriage. It is achieving equality for some by taking something important away from many others, and that, I think, is not just. The just way to give equality to homosexuals is to acknowledge their relationships in civil, unions which give them the recognition and legal rights they want and deserve”

“But we must also recognise that there is a sense in which homosexual partnerships are not the same as heterosexual ones and this difference should also be celebrated.

“I sometimes think that some members of the homosexual community are playing a game of “Let’s Pretend” – “Let’s pretend we’re heterosexual”: Heterosexual couples have children, so let’s get ourselves a baby. Heterosexual couples get married, so let’s get ourselves married. This seems to me to be at one level a denial of one’s homosexuality, of what makes homosexuality unique. Freedom is not the ability to become like other people, freedom is the ability to become more fully yourself! Isn’t this what “Gay Pride” means. There is no pride in making believe you are just like everyone else.”

Gay Marriage

The issue of gay marriage has recently been given significant attention in the parliament and media by the radical Green party in Australia.



The most common word that is heard alongside the term ‘gay ‘marriage’, is ‘progressive’, a term which is also used to justify it. But what is never defined is what ‘progressive’ actually is. The word is just crudely swung around in an attempt to cudgel those ‘backward’ traditionalists who dare to hold tight to old fashioned religious values.



But the real question is if gay marriage is progressive, then what about polygamy? What about incestuous relationships? Why would these not be progressive ideals too?

The only criteria that these self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ are advocating for defining ‘marriage’, is ‘love’, that’s it! So if reciprocal love is the only defining criteria, then on what basis do they reject brothers and sisters from demanding the same rights to marriage? What basis do they then have for rejecting the claims of discrimination against those who want to wed into polygamous marriage? None.



As soon as you redefine marriage away from the obviously harmonious match between one man and one woman into a cohabitation of only ‘love’, then you open the flood gates to any and all variations of cohabitation. If rejecting gay marriage is discrimination, then so isn’t rejecting all other forms such as polygamy, incest, bigamy, bestiality, objectophilia? What is stopping a landslide of subsequent marriage redefinitions to encompass all these different forms of cohabitations? Nothing, in fact according to the logic of the gay marriage advocates, discriminating against all the above forms of relationships who wish to marry is just as bad as discriminating against gay marriage.





Even if marriage is only redefined to include gay unions, then this has a significant impact on those people who don’t want their own marriage vows to be diluted to include gay unions. There are many people who don’t want the marriage bond that holds them together to be some motley hotchpotch union that lacks any form of coherent meaning or significance. They certainly don’t want to be married under a form of union that they find offensive!



This raises the obvious solution of having a totally separate form of union distinct from heterosexual ‘marriage’. It is certainly feasible to have a separate form of union that the ostensibly named ‘progressives’ find comfortable. This would seem to me to be a win-win scenario. It would keep the traditionalists happy as well as those advocating gay marriage.



But what I really don’t get is why those advocating gay marriage, who would almost exclusively be secular atheists, would want to adopt the Christian tradition of marriage anyway? The institution of marriage in the West has always been a Christian tradition, one deeply rooted in Christian ethics, morality and tradition.

Why would those advocates of gay marriage want to hijack this explicitly Christian institution when they openly ridicule every aspect of Christianity? They routinely mock the conservative values of Christianity and even more severely mock the people who hold them. It is for this reason that I simply do not see any sense in them adopting marriage in the first place.



The most diplomatic and practical solution seems to me to create another distinctly separate form of union that encompasses gay unions, heterosexual unions if they wish and every other form of union that they deem progressive.

They would obviously have the same rights as traditional religious marriage, but would have a legal union that they find far more appropriate to their ideas of ‘social progression’. This would certainly keep the vast majority of the religious population happy, giving them the important distinction between hetero and homosexual unions.