You have every right to challenge the idea of whether the government should issue marriage licences.

However the question that is being asked is should marriage be restricted to hetro couples only from a government point of view?

My answer to the actual question being asked is. If we are saying that Homosexual relationships are okay, and that has been the case for sometime now. Then there is no logical reason not the allow homosexual couples access to government marriage in my view.

The real indignity for Australia is the time taken up by by 1.6% of the population identifying as homosexual, 0.8% of the population identifying as lesbian. What a ratty, air- brained country we are.

Dignity? Whose? Yours? If people could CHOOSE their sexuality as the article infers? Then your spurious argument might have some merit!

Given they don't, I believe, it is little more than barely veiled gay bashing, using ideological rethoric as the weapon? And likely to continue/ramp up in all the most undignified forms (hallelujah, we'll sock it to ya, hallelujah) until the plebiscite is conducted, if only to end the ill-founded belief that yours is a majority view?

Don't you folks know that you've already done far too much harm, that you have blood on your collective hands? Hallelujah and praise the lord, there will be a day of final reckoning! "Inasmuch as you do to the least among you, you also do unto me"!
Alan B.

Cobber

"My answer to the actual question being asked is. If we are saying that Homosexual relationships are okay, and that has been the case for sometime now. Then there is no logical reason not the allow homosexual couples access to government marriage in my view."

That's the not an answer to the question being asked, which is "Where is the dignity?".

The answer is, the dignity in marriage is, and has always been, in the act of the parties in exchanging vows of faith - and in carrying them out! - not in the government creating and registering a certificate for gossake.

The issue of same-sex marriage, so-called, cannot be confined to homosexuals, since it raises the same questions of rights and ethics as all other excluded sexualities, both legal and illegal. Legality is no touchstone: homosexuality was illegal in my lifetime. It only begs the question, as the gay lobby has successfully agitated, of why consensual private sexual relations should be illegal in the first place. This applies just as much to polygamous and sexually-mature consenting so-called underage relationships as well.

The general issue unavoidably boils down to this: What is the basis of deciding whether government should register a marriage?

If you can't defend it, then stop trying to extend it!

Dear Cobber,

«If we are saying that Homosexual relationships are okay, and that has been the case for sometime now. Then there is no logical reason not the allow homosexual couples access to government marriage in my view»

The logical reason has nothing to do with homosexuality, but with the fact that the proposed legislation-change would expand, rather than abolish, an immoral government "service" that should not have existed in the first place.

My hope is, that the current government's refusal to expand this service (for reasons that happen to be other than mine) will lead to more popular and political pressure to repeal that Marriage-Act and abolish marriage-registration altogether. This is the way forward for marriage-equality!

Michael,
This dispute is not about rights.

Under the Personal Relationships legislation of the States same sex couples, on death, and relationship breakdown, have the same rights as married spouses, to claim property.

This is a dispute about what marriage is.

Our society's cultural fundamental norm is that marriage is an institution established for the nurture and education of children- the institutionalised monogamy which established the nuclear family as the basic building block of our society.

Countries that have based their societies on the nuclear family constitute the rich First World.

Every invention and innovation from the steam engine to computers and rockets to the planets have come from that nuclear family based culture and no other.

That culture has, through such innovations and inventions, given rise to the huge multiplication of human productivity without which 90% of the present world population could not exist for lack of the ability to of produce, transport and distribute the means of feeding clothing and sheltering that population.

We should foster the nuclear family by allowing procreation capable couples and couples who have in fact taken on the long term support of children to be taxed as a unit. The tax for the unit should be twice the tax payable on half the unit's income less an amount for each child supported.

We risk destroying the basis of our wealth production.

That basis is maximum of children's potential created by the nuclear family which has given rise to all those innovations and inventions.

If we destroy the concept of marriage to satisfy the feelings of gay couples we have no case to refuse a marriage certificate to the Muslim male and his wife 2 , 3 or 4.They are just as capable of "loving" one another.

We will have detached procreation from the parental responsibility which our society imposes and leads to our huge attainments of productivity.