THE legalisation of gay marriage in New York has touched off another heated round of debate over the hot-button issue. Here are two opposing points of view.

Gays have just as much right to marriage

By Karen Brooks

A BILL legalising same-sex marriage has been passed in New York, prompting celebrations and the usual outburst of homophobia.

The passage of this Bill draws attention to the issue in Australia where, despite our sense of social democracy and progressiveness, same-sex marriages are still illegal.

<a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=796620c767" >Legalising gay marriage. Join Dr Karen Brooks and Dr David van Gend to discuss this issue</a>

When asked about her stance, Prime Minister Julia Gillard monotones the definition given in the Marriage Act, which states: ``Marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.''

In other words: homosexuals need not apply.

The other reason most often given for refusing same-sex marriage is based on religious principles. I always feel this flies in the face of basic sacred tenets, which generally espouse universalism, acceptance and love. Here it's a case of words speaking louder than actions.

That we're still discussing these kinds of issues and framing them in such reductive ways in the 21st century is a disgrace. I'm not alone in thinking this either.

A recent Galaxy poll indicates 75 per cent of Australians feel the Act should be changed to include same-sex marriage.

So why won't the Prime Minister listen? Is it simply gutless populism and pandering to the religious Right? Or are their more complex issues involved?

Why do some people feel drawn to fiercely protect heterosexual marriage, making it an exclusive custom when it fails in 50 per cent of cases?

According to British academic Frank Furedi: ``Gay marriage has become one of those causes through which the cosmopolitan cultural elites define themselves and construct a moral contrast between themselves and ordinary folk.''

He writes about the moral superiority of those who support gay marriage and their tendency to silence opposition by asserting their enlightened stance and comparing it to the prejudices and homophobia of the majority.

Apart from the selectiveness of Furedi's argument and his appalling generalisations about why the ``elite'' support fellow humans' rights to access a legal institution, he's wrong about so-called ``ordinary folk''.

Ordinary folk are not a bunch of prejudiced bogans; nor are the ``cultural elite'' in agreement.

We're diverse and divided, but most want this antediluvian law overturned.

What Furedi overlooks is that many arguments for gay marriage embrace ideas about love, spirituality and emotional equity. Whether we're homosexual or heterosexual, we all have the right to succeed or fail in the love stakes. That one type of love is legally sanctioned through a public ceremony, legislation and the rights these accrue and another is not, is an anathema to many.

When public outcry around gay marriage enables comments such as those posted on Foxnews.com to circulate after the New York Bill was passed, allowing bigotry a global audience, then this isn't simply an issue about a person or group feeling superior or another being intolerant. It's about systematic and thus sanctioned abuse and discrimination practised because of an entrenched and reductive notion of mainstream values and the maintenance of these.

On this site, gay people were described as ``freaks'' and marriage to toasters, pets and blow-up dolls were likened to homosexual unions. Others felt empowered enough to write: ``If there was a test to know when a fetus was gay, I would support abortion.''

I want a government that isn't held to ransom by fundamentalist lobby groups or redundant populist bandwagons.

I want a leader who moves Australia into a future where a person's sexuality isn't erased (as Bob Katter naively attempts, stating that there are no homosexuals in his electorate), but irrelevant; where respect and tolerance for difference is enshrined in legislation and daily practice.

Marriage is not a gay/straight issue any more. It's about human rights to access, benefits, legitimacy, recognition, and public acknowledgement of mutual love.

Dr Karen Brooks is an associate professor of media studies at Southern Cross University

brookssk@bigpond.com

Brace for a new stolen generation

By David van Gend

IF you hold to the old-fashioned idea a baby deserves both a mother and a father, the president of the Queensland branch of the Labor Party, Andrew Dettmer, calls your views "abominable".

The state Labor conference recently voted to destroy the timeless meaning of marriage and redefine it to include a pair of men or a lesbian couple, and Dettmer slurred opponents as being no better than racists: "Discrimination against people on the basis of their gender or their sexual orientation is just as abominable and just as unsupportable as discrimination on the basis of race."

Yes, it is discrimination to prohibit the "marriage" of two men, but it is just and necessary discrimination, because the only alternative is the far worse act of discrimination against children brought artificially into the world by such men, compelled to live their whole lives without a mother. Now that approaches the abominable.

His analogy with racism is false because a black person cannot stop being black, but a gay person can certainly stop being gay, as a large number of formerly gay men and women around the world have demonstrated.

Homosexual people are able, where motivated, to modify unwanted homosexual attractions and even achieve complete transformation to a heterosexual orientation, as documented in peer-reviewed clinical papers, such as that published by American psychiatrist Robert Spitzer in 2003.

Against critics who say that attempts to change sexual orientation can cause emotional harm to homosexuals, Spitzer noted: "For the participants in our study, there was no evidence of harm".

The success of gay "anti-discrimination" activism has largely been due to portraying gays as another persecuted minority group like blacks, women, Jews.

This illusion cannot survive Spitzer's conclusion, that being gay is a potentially treatable psychological condition like any other, not an inborn identity. The only true analogy with racism is to compare the Aboriginal Stolen Generations with Labor's proposed "gay stolen generation" of children forcibly deprived of a mother. The offence is the same; only the justification changes. This time round the justification for separating a baby from the love of its mother is that it meets the emotional needs of homosexual men.

One of Australia's leading human rights lawyers, Frank Brennan, shows the way forward: "I think we can ensure non-discrimination against same-sex couples while at the same time maintaining a commitment to children of future generations being born of and being reared by a father and a mother."

Non-discrimination against same-sex couples is exactly what federal Parliament achieved in 2008 when more than 80 pieces of legislation were amended by a bipartisan majority. Homosexual couples now enjoy effective equality with married couples in every way short of marriage. The process must stop short of marriage, because marriage is about something deeper than civil equality; it is about a natural reality - male, female, offspring - which society did not create and society's law cannot alter.

The greatest anthropologist of the 20th century, Claude Levi-Strauss, notes that throughout recorded history the human family is "based on a union of two individuals of opposite sexes who establish a household and bear and raise children".

That is the truth about human culture and human nature and that is the context in which any child deserves to be born and raised. Queenslanders should be dismayed at the truly abominable Labor attempt to trash this truth and rob marriage of its objective meaning and honoured purpose.

* Dr David van Gend is a Toowoomba GP and a spokesman for the Family Council of Queensland

Originally published as Gay marriage - the case for and against