The statement that “Freedom to marry regardless of race was near the top of their list of demands in the lead up to the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights, above child custody and access to traditional lands and second only to the right to vote” is misleading. The 1967 referendum had nothing to do with the right of Aborigines to vote, something they had in the nineteenth century in Victoria and South Australia and which they kept in those states continuously at the state level and continuously at the federal level if they had voted in 1901. Federal voting rights were extended to all Aborigines in 1962, five years before the referendum.

Gays already have the right to marry; i.e., the right to form a lifelong and exclusive union with a member of the opposite sex. They and non-gays cannot marry someone of the same sex for the simple reason that that is not marriage. There is no discrimination involved. Gays do not want not to marry at all. They want to take the word that describes the thing they would most hate to have and use it to describe the thing they actually want. It’s bizarre.

just out of curiosity, when normal people get pronounced man & wife, what do gay couples get pronounced as ?

Being an aging lefty myself I can see exactly where Pilger is coming from and endorse his position entirely.
I can't speak for Pilger but I think this, <In his use of the phrases like “lifestyle liberalism” and “bourgeois acceptability” I hear echoes of the old left’s suspicion of homosexuals> and most of the article's left-bashing is nonsense.
I agree with Pilger that gay marriage is mostly "lifestyle liberalism", but that doesn't make me or Pilger homophobic or intolerant.
I have absolutely no problem with gay marriage, in itself, and I don't believe Pilger does either. What I object to in this civil exercise, and others currently prominent, is the patronage it seeks from the state, thereby implicitly validating it, when the state presides fundamentally over drastic and institutional inequities.
I don't doubt for a moment Obama is using the issue as a smoke screen, and grooming the electorate, perhaps not cynically, but certainly opportunistically.
The most disturbing issue though for me, and I suspect leftists generally, is it's a smokescreen not for politicians, but for the State.
On any ethical criteria Western capitalist states stand utterly condemned, and such minuscule concessions to "equality", as gay marriage, lend it spurious validity; allowing the bourgeoisie to feel good about itself into the bargain, while the real discrimination and the other diabolical enormities continue to be ignored.

Chris C,

In addition to Pilger's getting it wrong on voting rights, he also has it wrong on rights of access to land. In all states and territories (here in SA, since 1851), all pastoral leases had to include a clause which recognised the rights of Aboriginal people to enter, hunt on, gather food on, collect water on, carry out ceremonies on, camp on, and otherwise enjoy, the land which was subject to the lease 'as if this lease had not been made'.

In other words, full use-rights. Not land-ownership, but the right to use land in traditional ways, so it is still a form of terra nullius. In this sense, the rights of Aboriginal people, as ordered by King William IV or whoever in his 'Letters Patent', to have unrestricted rights to use the land, were honoured. Of course, one has to be on the land to use it, not huddled around a ration station.

This land-use clause was still in Schedules to the Environment Act here in SA, at least into the 1990s, until lawyers hired by Aboriginal groups believed the hype that "We got nothing'! Nothing!", dispensed with due dilligence, and 'helped' those Aboriginal groups to negotiate away those rights: one now needs a permit from a committee to do what could be done freely before.

Cheers,

Joe

It's comforting to see that Pilger remains reliably wrong on everything, although he might have a rival soon: I hear there are rumbling noises coming from the tomb where they buried Helen Caldicott...

Pilger remains reliably wrong on everything.
Jon J,
He does however, represent the views of a large percentage of voters. Scary eh ?

Everyone must have had an experience of a small, aggressive dog snapping at their ankles. First you feel amusement but, as it continues to nip and bark, you start to feel annoyance. Eventually you feel anger and you might even launch a kick in the dog's direction.

That's the way I'm beginning to feel about the constant harassment coming from the Gay Lobby. It's on the television, the radio, in the newspapers. It's as if it's the only thing in the world that has importance!

Yes, forget about the GFC, Climate Warming, the collapse of the EuroZone, the nuking of Iran by Israel, the Government of Australia by a few Independents, etc.

What's important is whether gays, who make up 2% of the population, should be able to marry and have children!

Give me a break! Please!

I find myself agreeing with Squeers and by default Pilger and I'm not even an "Old Leftie".
Homosexual unions are a political issue, an affair of state, the people pushing it are mainly statist in outlook.
It's even being pushed in a sort of Nationalistic fashion, do "we" want to be a backward Nation in the glare of global scrutiny on the issue.
It's supremely amusing that these so called "Hard Left", Trotskyite and Anarchist groups are supporting Bourgeois morality and capitalist state authority in this matter.
Furthermore I want to know when the Communist stance on Homosexuality changed from the view that it was a decadent, bourgeois perversion?
Anarchists get a bit of a free pass on this since they are traditionally aligned with Homosexuals, Inverts, misanthropes and other asocial personality types and arrayed against the ruling and middle classes but It's laughable that they and their Hard Leftist colleagues would put pressure on parliamentary delegates and what's more publicly endorse them.
I've stood among a group of wide eyed young lifestyle Anarchists and Neo Trots at a rally and watched them applauding and cheering Adam Bandt, it's hilarious.

I'm a bit confused about the extent and scope of what constitutes 'marriage': are de facto relationships recognised in Australian law as a form of marriage,in any way ? So if gay marriage was recognised, and if two gays were in a long-term relationship analogous to a de facto relationship between two heterosexuals, would that constitute a marriage ?

So if someone were having a long-term relationship with someone as well as the partner that they were formally married to, would that constitute bigamy ? If a person was in a formal marriage, and developed a long-term relationship a same-sex partner as well, would that constitute bigamy ? Would the bigamy laws have to be modified to include same-sex marriages ?

And don't get me started on polyamorous arrangements !

My paranoia may be slipping out, but is this discussion just a stalking horse for polygamy, and ultimately for recognition of Shari'a law ?

Joe

@David G: "Give me a break! Please!"

It's incredibly easy to stop the 'gay lobby' (or the atheist lobby, or the feminist lobby) snapping around your ankles or anyone elses's, David: just give them your wholehearted support in their struggle for equal rights.

That's all it takes; pity that some people find it so hard to do.

Other sick people with any kind of illness can get married so why not the queers ?

Just to go back to the very first posting on this thread, that " .... Freedom to marry regardless of race was near the top of their list of demands in the lead up to the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights .... "

In South Australia, and perhaps in other states, white men were discouraged from associating with Aboriginal women under the 1939 Act: they could be fined or jailed. But if a white person and an Aboriginal person wanted to get married, they were able to: I don't think there ever was a prohibition on that. I think that if an association was discovered, then the white person was interrogated as to his/her intentions and ordered away if marriage was not on the cards. What the authorities seemed to be guarding against were so-called half-caste children primarily without fathers.

But even as late as 1966, an Aboriginal person was supposed to get permission to marry. My wife and I didn't, in 1966, but only because we didn't know that we were supposed to. We then went inter-state to Victoria, for which we were also supposed to get permission to do, but didn't know about that either. Then we went to New Zealand in 1969, and again didn't know that we were supposed to get permission to leave Australia (back in the days before travelling to NZ required passports).

As I recall, at that time, many of my wife's cousins had married non-Aboriginal partners, going back to the mid-fifties. There was certainly nothing unusual about it, quite the reverse.

What is common in this case between Pilger's assertion and reality - something which is admittedly pretty rare - is that it may have still been the case in Queensland. It certainly had been illegal well into the sixties in the NT for a white person to marry a 'full-blood', a ward of the state, but I think that law had been overturned by the time of the Referendum.

[contd]

This Sunday marks the 45th anniversary of the Referendum. One had to be 21 to vote back then, so everyone who voted would be now sixty six or older. How much has changed in that time ? Who remembers the terrible conditions of life that Aboriginal people had to put up with in many places ?

The 1960s were in many ways a time of very great change, in living conditions, in policy, in hope, and the Referendum certainly pushed that along, thanks to people like Faith Bandler and Doug Nicholls, and Gladys Elphick here in SA. It should be a National Holiday.

Joe