THE ‘Vote Yes’ text on same-sex marriage sparked fury among some Australians who hated receiving a political message on their mobile phones.

Now the No side has done the same thing, with a leading figure in the campaign sending out a mass SMS reading: “Vote NO for SSM. Please watch this brief video and pass it on to your contacts.”

The attached five-minute video shows the sender Daniel Nalliah — national president of the far-right Rise Up Australia Party — telling viewers that as soon as this “very important issue” was mentioned, “they shout ‘foul, foul, discrimination, you’re homophobic, you’re a racist.’”

He added: “No one is thinking about the children and their future, so I’m taking my gloves off because we are ready for a fight.”

At this point, he literally takes his gloves off.

Mr Nalliah, an evangelical pastor from Melbourne, told news.com.au he sent the message to 1000 of his contacts and asked them to send it on to their contacts. “The feedback has been very good, on email and Facebook, saying it was very good, and they didn’t understand it’s much more than meets the eye.”

By that, he explained, he meant that the vote was not just about legalising same-sex marriage but education — something the Marriage Equality campaign say is patently untrue, since the question is simply: “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?”

Mr Nalliah, who founded Rise Up Australia in 2011, also claims in the video that the issue is about same-sex parenting — which is already legal. “This is about the children and their future,” he says. “A mother and a father is so needed in child’s life. Two mothers cannot fill the vacuum of a father and two fathers cannot fill the vacuum of a mother.”

He also links the vote to polygamy, paedophilia and bestiality, saying: “You want to live with another man or another woman, that’s your own mission. Now if you try to make that legal then how about those who cry out loud right now, I’m being discriminated, I want to live with four wives, polygamous marriages. How about those who come out and then say, I want to be a paedophile I want to have a 12-year-old bride ... how about the guy who got married to a dog?



“Where does the slippery slope stop?”

Mr Nalliah, a Christian conservative and climate sceptic, says in the video that he knows of many homosexuals who openly declare they do not want marriage “because they themselves know the number of partners they change is a huge number, more than a hundred, some people perhaps 100 to 800 partners in a lifetime. Now this is really counter-productive for a child.”

The party leader said his message was not a problem like the Yes text because “I only sent it to people I know” and had them send it to their contacts. “I think I only had one negative reply,” he told news.com.au. “I would say most would have been voting no anyway, some would have been wondering whether to vote yes or no.”

He concludes the video by urging viewers to stand up to “left-wing morons” and not be “selfish” by voting Yes. “Vote no for same-sex marriage, they do not need that same privilege as straight marriages,” he says. “Two men two women in a relationship it’s not like a man and a woman in a relationship ... think of the child.”

It comes as Brisbane’s Catholic archbishop cited society’s refusal to accept the marriage of parents to their children in urging Australians to vote No to same-sex marriage.

Archbishop Mark Coleridge says that while the love of same-sex couples must be respected, society has always discriminated about who can marry.

“I mean parents can’t marry their children. Children can’t marry their parents. Sibling marrying sibling has always been ruled out,” he said in comments broadcast on ABC radio on Tuesday.

The comments echo those he made in a position statement on the same-sex marriage, released earlier this month as the Government prepared to launch its postal survey on marriage reform.

He wrote that only the love of a man and a woman was nuptial.

“Other forms of love may indeed be love and often are. That means that they have value, yes; but it doesn’t mean that they are or could become marriage.”

He said all human beings were equal “but that doesn’t mean they are the same”. “Same-sex marriage ideology implies that equality means sameness. But it doesn’t.”

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, a staunch Catholic, has also urged Australians to vote ‘no’ to “protect the family” and says they should view the survey as a vote against political correctness.

— With AAP