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 ?