Interesting article. I have an acquaintance facing a similar issue – an Australian citizen who entered a same-sex marriage overseas which broke up, and is now planning a (two-sex) marriage in Australia without the overseas marriage being formally dissolved. Is this bigamy?

There are surely precedents of treatment of people entering marriages that are lawful in some countries but not others – for example polygamy is still practiced in some countries, or marriage at a younger age than is permitted here.

Anyway, I agree with Melody that it’s in everyone’s interests that the situation be clarified, regardless of which side of the gay-marriage debate your are on (personally I support it)

For someone who calls herself a libertarian, arguing in favour of more governmental regulation of private consensual sexual relationships seems to ignore the obvious option: that governments shouldn't be in such business in the first place. Since any change the author advocates presupposes the need for legal change, why not legal change in the right direction: more freedom and less control?

For example the problem as posed arises from one jurisdiction registering and recognising homosexual marriage, and other jurisdictions not. To assert that the solution is for all states to dream up a one-size-fits-all marriage law for everyone tends in the opposite direction to liberty.

A marriage convention will not solve the problem of "state based marriage laws". On the contrary, it will entrench it internationally, and make it that much harder for people who don't want their private lives dictated by the state, to find any escape.

It appears confused or disingenuous to refer to governmental registration of homosexual marriages as "marriage equality". The basal underlying error is the assumption that marriage is something constituted by the state. This is not correct. Neither the church nor the state ever claimed that marriage is constituted by anything other than the act of the parties.

So why not approach the problem from the side of liberty, instead of from centralised statist dictate? The discussion needs to be, not how to accommodate gay marriage, since this only begs the question why other forms of sexuality, even more discriminated-against now than homosexuality, should not have the same freedom and rights. Why should it be a closed club? The question should be rather, why should government be keeping a register of people's sexual relationships, and arbitrarly conferring favours on some favourite forms of sexuality, and imposing disabilities on others?

Straight or gay marriage doesn't need a convention: it needs governments to mind their own business and stop trying to engineer other people's consensual sex lives.

I don't want to blow the wind out of your sails, but there already is two international conventions that do this and are already part of Australian law.

They are the Hague Convention on Celebration and Recognition of the Validity of Marriages and the Hague Convention on the Law Applicable to Matrimonial Property Disputes, both done at the Hague in March 1978. Many nations are signatories to these and they form a stable part of the corpus of international law.

Look, Melody.

I think that the overwhelming majority of people in democratic countries do not approve of homosexual "marriage". Nor do they approve of homosexual behaviour, but they are liberal enough to say that it should not be illegal. Just because homosexual behaviour is no longer illegal does not automatically mean that it is socially approved.

Now, I may be wrong about the populations attitude to homosexual "marriage', but I am happy to go to a referendum on that, and I will accept he decision of the electorate on this issue. The question begs, will you?

Don't give me any of that crap about "the tyranny of the majority", this is a democracy, and in a democracy, majority rules.

The more that people like you keep this issue alive, and the more success your side has at by passing the people's parliament to get what you and your sexually confused friends want, the more the rest of the population will despise you. Get the rest of the population angry enough and maybe we will rethink our decision to make homosexual behaviour legal

LEGO,
True enough, we tolerate Homosexuals, we're under no obligation to accept them or enable their lifestyles, freedom to/freedom from.
There is no support for Homosexual marriage outside a very narrow sector of White, Middle class, northern Hemisphere dwelling populations, maybe 1 or 2% of the world's population.
We all now know that the Anthropological studies which asserted that "Primitive" cultures accepted Homosexuality as normal were faked, that the people making those assertions were deviants who spent their days exploiting the subjects of their research.
Google "Secrets Of The Tribe", anthropology is utterly corrupt, it's a tug of war between Marxists on one side and Socio biology advocates on the other, nothing they say can be trusted.

BTW, Democracy isn't really "majority rule" it's mob rule, mob actions are steered by demagogues who serve special interests, usually their own or those of an elite.
The unbreakable sequence of events in the cycle of a society is
-Revolution
-Rule of Law.
-Democracy
-Chaos
-Totalitarianism

...then the cycle begins again

Lego and Jay it would be interesting how you would cope if a child of your was Gay!