Vanna: thank you for your response. May I suggest you open your ears a little more often and you will hear that sort of message repeatedly?

I do find it laughable, truly laughable, that you claim that IVF is "fatherless". Unless you are aware of some medical procedure that has found a way to reproduce a human embryo without sperm then that statement stands condemned as false and malicious. (Same goes for the comment about "IVF clinics with single women as the majority of recipients of treatment" - please - if you have reputable, identifiable figures to support that claim, then share them.)

Martin: what on earth are you on about? Could you provide some link to the first statement you made? (Something to do with someone embarrassing themselves publicly I think you were saying, but it is hard to decipher.) Speaking of hard to decipher, the rest of your post goes into equally odd territory. (Your two links go to some very strange places.) However, when did environmental policy enter into a debate on marriage equality? For that matter, Philo, vanna, Martin et al - when did child bearing and rearing enter a debate about marriage equality? The whole issue about bearing and raising children has nothing to do with marriage equality. If you wish to argue about the rights and wrongs of parenting, then confine it to that debate, not this one.

Those of us arguing for full marriage equality are asking for one man or one woman to be free to marry the one man or one woman of their choice, given that both are of legal age and capable of giving consent and freely do so, not currently legally married and that there should be no impediment based on the gender of that couple seeking marriage. Nothing more. Please argue on those grounds and I will have greater respect for what you are trying to say.

Perkin the real question is what on earth are you on about?

Your tribe want to completely re-order society from the ground up, want to persuade us that heterosexual marriage is a source of irrational prejudice and deserves to be legislated away. Yet you don't know the major lines of argument that your people put up nor the common rejoinders?

The George, Girgis, Anderson article is famous, http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/ some replies are here and and the original http://library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1102279285913-6/GGA+-+What+is+Marriage.pdf

Eve Tushnet http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/us/05beliefs.html is among the most well known commentators on marriage in the US. She and Maggie Gallagher run the marriagedebate.com website. Her arguments are well known to readers of The Australian newspaper that published Dr Sommerville's op-ed. How can you not know all this?

The second link is a beautiful summary of the thought of the likes of Philip Blond (adviser to Cameron, Abbott and US Congress) it is you that is strange for taking pride in your ignorance. It means you don't understand the ecology reference, and so can't see marriage for what it is: a pre-political natural institution, something the state may recognise but for God's sake cannot arrogate to itself the authority to redefine it. Give the state that power and you loose hell. Prof. Deenen explained how. Read.

Martin Ibn Warriq,
Thanks for joining this debate. Obviously homosexuals do not understand that marriage exists exclusivily for family and the continuance of the human species. Of course the Greens find there are too nany humans so homosexuality meets their eco-agenda

Philo you may not be aware but you do not have to be married to breed, and it is hoped that your religous morals extend to your dipping into your pocket, and giving to the many thousands of Somalians that are starving.

Dear Philo,

Lets look at the facts as things exist in
our society. The great majority of both
men and women begin sexual activity before
marriage. Many Autralian births
are to an unmarried mother, usually a teenager.
Many pregnancies end in abortion.
The number of unmarried couples living together
has tripled in less than two decades. Australians
are staying single longer than ever, and more
than one adult in five now lives alone.

Many Australian marriages are expected to end in
divorce. New alternatives to traditional marriage,
such as the single-parent household, are becoming
steadily more common. And to complicate matters further,
children can now be conceived through artificial means,
sometimes in a laboratory dish.

What does all this mean? It means that your rigid idea
of marriage does not fit in with reality. It is based on the
middle-class "ideal" so relentlessly portrayed in
TV commercials, one that consists of a husband, wife,
and their dependent children. This particular pattern
however, is far from typical. A more accurate conception of
marriage must take into account all the many different
forms that have existed and still exist both in this
country and in other cultures.

Each society views its own patterns of marriage, family,
and kinship as self-evidently, right and proper, and
usually as God-given as well. Much of the current concern
about the fate of marriage stems from this kind of
ethnocentrism. If we assume, as you do, that there is only
one "right" marriage form, then naturally any change will
be interpreted as heralding the doom of the whole institution.

It is important to recognise, therefore, that there is an
immense range in marriage, family, and kinship patterns.
That each of these patterns may be, at least in their own
context, perfectly viable; and above all, that marriage,
like any other social institution, must inevitably change
through time, in our own society as in all others.

Lexi,
So are you proposing all these social situations are best environment for children and family and are therefore to be normalized? Society has then descended into jungle behaviour under what you consider good practices for children and family. Aren't we supposed to be civilized creatures?

Teenagers who engage in having children must register their child, and that child is best raised by its genetic parents. In a civilized society this is marriage and should be registered. Current social pressures ignore the need for some to marry younger as happened previously in society. The thing is society has thrown social responsibility out and normalized anarchy - drugs, violence, abuse, promiscuity etc