Yes, I’m extremely angry myself and I know a fair few of my gay friends are as well.
Conservative nay-sayers continually whinge about political correctness gone mad and then as soon as we (the subjects of this rubbish plebiscite) get rightfully pissed off and call them utter cunts (how politically incorrect), they act all offended. Hypocritical fuckers.
Another good comment piece by Fairfax Media’s Mark Kenny:
Inadvertently, Abbott, who complains we are being “frog-marched” into change, had strayed into the realm of the reductio ad absurdum in which the fatal weakness at the heart of an argument is laid bare per force of its assertion.
The proposition that an institution must not be changed because it has resisted change in the past, surely strains repute.
…the exclusive male franchise, which claimed democratic virtue even as it denied women, even ordinary workers, the right to determine their own government, might also have stood the test of time. Nobody would support that discrimination now.
And this:
…if you want to stop a change happening, make the argument about the process.
Another nice article from Mark Kenny:
Conservatives railing against the AFL or Qantas need to remember that they pushed hard for the unhindered public debate, hoping to at least delay same-sex marriage, or better, kill it dead in the court of public opinion.
…
It is telling that opponents of its free declaration, would silence the governing body on the grounds that it has no direct stake in marriage, and should thus remain schtum.Given this survey relates to a secular contract and asks a simple yes/no question on a federal statute, perhaps they could apply the same gag to the churches?
PS:
“…as for people’s concerns about role play, Madam Speaker …who do they think plays Mary in a nativity play at an all-boys school?”…
Awesome!
And now some dick has gone and headbutted Tony Abbott. Disgraceful.
Oh no, this is what happens when chicken little thinks the sky will fall in if SSM gets the go ahead.
On Australian Conservatives twitter account you will get this. A picture of George Soros
I had to Google him because I’ve never heard of him. What’s he got to do with SSM?
What’s that got to do with SSM?
Because it says on the picture
VOTE NO
Which they are referring to SSM postal survey.
Conspiracy theory is that he funds GetUp! - draw your own tenuous link there
Absolutely disgraceful. Curious though why his immediate reaction was to run to Sky News and 2GB and not call police:
Just another furphy the conservatives are spreading.
George Soros is a multi-billionaire investor who uses his wealth to fund progressive causes. Far right conspiracy theorists have made up all sorts of crazy things about him because they see him as the figurehead of the liberals and SJWs, even though his involvement is from what I understand, a fairly small slice of the liberal movement. The fact that he’s rich and not very well known makes it easy for them to give him a bond-villain sort of image.
It’s happened again:
Oh and the headbutt wasn’t about SSM:
The Daily Telegraph still used a “Gay Marriage” tag on this story but now changed it to “Headbutt Fallout”.
They’ll still keep using the ssm tag for it just like how some gay bashings are just regular thugs/muggings/random street violence against a person who happens to be gay and same for when an indigenous or foreign person is also randomly assaulted and it’s claimed as racially motivated.
It didn’t take long for them to turn on one of their own. It wasn’t long ago that Samantha Maiden worked for them but now they’ve turned on her for actually being reasonable.
The guy basically confirmed everything that Abbott said - that he was wearing a Yes badge and did it under the guise of a handshake.
Imagine if the same thing happened to a left wing politician in the exact same circumstances. Do you really think people would believe the person if they were wearing a No badge and then after the fact when questioned by the media said “oh, it’s got NOTHING to do with same sex marriage…”
Who wears these badges when out in public anyway other than when they’re campaigning?
A great contribution from Peter Hartcher:
Except for the fact that the definition of marriage has not stood since time immemorial. In fact, the definition is always evolving… The Marriage Act has been changed 20 times since it was introduced by the Menzies government in 1961."
Marital practices that Australia today finds abhorrent were perfectly legal until relatively recently. Did you see the news this week about the 35-year-old man jailed for marrying a 14-year-old girl in Victoria last year? County Court Judge Lisa Hannan told a sobbing Mohammad Shakir that “what you did was legally wrong and morally indefensible”. By today’s standards, that’s true. But “if he’d done it in Tasmania in 1941 it would have been completely fine”, points out an associate professor of modern history at Macquarie University, Shirleene Robinson. The minimum legal marrying age for females in Tasmania was 12 until it was raised to 16 in 1942. And it stayed at the age of 12 in Western Australia even longer, until 1956.
…
A man could rape his wife with impunity in Australia even as recently as the 1990s in some states. “The common law ruthlessly reinforces woman’s subordinate position in marriage,” wrote an advocate for reform, the lawyer Helen Coonan, who went on to become a Liberal Party senator for NSW. “Community attitudes and values have evolved gradually,” wrote Coonan in 1980, “while the law has remained unchanged.”
…
Yet it was a controversial reform at the time: “Some conservatives were horrified that it could be made illegal for a man to rape his wife - ‘it would change the very nature of our society’,” says Robinson.…The Northern Territory’s Protector of Aborigines blocked the marriage of a white man and an Aboriginal woman in 1959…
…journalist Paul Daley writing in The Guardian in 2015. “In federal parliament the Menzies government, after a barrage of questions from MPs of all persuasions in support of the outback Romeo and Juliet, gave an assurance that no form of discrimination would ever be written into the new national marriage legislation.”
Until, of course, John Howard wrote in a different kind of discrimination in 2004, inserting the stipulation that marriage could only be between a man and a woman…
Howard and Abbott can concoct legal and political obstacles, but, like rocks in a river, ultimately they cannot change the flow of social attitudes. Other evolutions of marriage include the recognition of women’s rights to property, and changes to the divorce laws to allow no-fault divorce…
Thousands of people got SMS messages today urging them to vote yes. Many of them were not happy because of privacy concerns. Did you get one today?