Gay Marriage – what the plebiscite question should be, by Terry Barnes.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the 2011 census found about 33,700 same-sex couples in Australia. About 17,600 couples were male and 16,100 female. These represent about one per cent of all couples in Australia.
Last year, Roy Morgan Research asked how many Australians are homosexual. They found that in 2006-08 about 2.4 per cent of people identified themselves as homosexual. In 2012-14, this increased to 3.4 per cent. …
[W]hile it’s important to be tolerant of different lifestyle choices and different political views – that’s pluralistic democracy after all – it is utterly wrong for a tiny, selfish segment of the wider Australian community to put their obsessive cause ahead of all the other, more important, problems facing our nation after Saturday. …
There hasn’t been a question set for the plebiscite yet, and naturally the same-sex marriage advocates want a wording that guarantees a ‘Yes’ vote. So allow me to suggest:
Do you favour rewarding the incessant, self-absorbed bleatings of an intolerant vocal minority within a minority who demonise anyone who disagrees with them, if it means they shut up and go away?
‘Marriage’ used to mean an economic deal between a man and a woman, where a woman would forgo her economic role in order to focus on having their kids, and the man would economically support the resulting family. After women got the vote, the state has partly replaced men as the breadwinners of families, entirely so for welfare recipients. Women no longer need men economically and (traditional) marriage is no longer the necessity it once was.
Out of politeness, men and woman who were not going to have children — perhaps because they are too old — can also get “married.” Now we are extending “marriage” to gay couples, who cannot have children, with fundamental implications for economics and fidelity. The meaning of “marriage” has changed hugely if a gay union is called “marriage.”
Maybe the government should get out of our relationships and not define “marriage” at all. If government wants to define a civil union or some such for government handouts that its business, but to call it “marriage” is annoying — what then do we call it when a man and women get together for having kids, are faithful to one another, and he brings home the bacon while she raises the kids? Or is that the whole point for our word-smithing, politically correct elite who want to fundamentally reform our society to suit themselves?
