It's a sad, sad day for our nation's proud opponents of marriage equality. And that's especially worrying since those people don't typically seem all that happy to begin with.

It was jubilantly announced on Wednesday that the Taiwanese courts had knocked down the current law defining marriage as being between a man and a woman on the grounds that it "violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection."

What's more, the court added that the "creation of a permanent union of intimate and exclusive nature for the committed purpose of managing a life together by two persons of the same sex will not affect the application of the Marriage Chapter to the union of two persons of the opposite sex" – almost as though the extension of civil rights to same-sex couples will have zero effect on opposite sex couples. Why, can you even imagine?

And this is going to cause sorrow in some marriage equality opponents, especially its parliamentary poster boy: Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz.