Hi again Glen,

First up, apologies for the misspelling. Saw it too late. Sorry!

Pretty sure we are in accord mostly.

Re: “Perhaps a large majority of people will come to regard same-sex relationships as being no different from two-sex relationships, but they haven't yet.”

Depends where, Glen. They have in parts of Europe. From what I read, it’s close to a majority Downunder. Though not large yet.

Re: “Your assertion that we had foisted upon us in 2004 a legal requirement to stop accepting gay couples as married in the normal sense implies that we had always regarded gay couples as no different from heterosexual couples.”

Hmmm. Well, certainly wasn’t the intended inference, Glen. Just noted that legislation pre-2004 actually did permit same-sex marriage. The Howard Government legislated to prohibit it. Certainly, back then, fewer people supported same-sex marriage than now.

Re: “In fact, it confirmed that, legally, the word meant what we had long taken it to mean; what it had long ago evolved to mean.“

Yes, perhaps, Glen. But how long ago? M1W1 marriage is actually quite recent, historians tell us.

Hi Jason. Thanks for joining us.

Pretty sure you have nailed precisely the problems with most research published to date – as noted by GrahamY and others, above.

Re: “It would have been good if the author of this opinion piece had actually stated a plan [to] improve the overall health of gay people - such as the extremely high gay teen suicide rate in Australia.”

Agree with this absolutely, Jason. I hope to do something directly on this soon. Just waiting for the final verdict on that notorious Regnerus study from the University of Texas.

Meanwhile, Jason, if you get a chance to read other contributions here on same-sex unions, you’ll probably get the drift of my plan – to have all same-sex behaviour and relationships treated exactly the same as opposite-sex behaviour and relationships.

Agree with your observations from Massachusetts. Same in California, I believe. Same here in Europe I know for certain.

Thanks for the BBC link, Jason. Excellent.

Cheers, AA

...Well AA, I always avoid going down “baited trails; which is the open door into the room containing the "evil thirteen" list, from which you factiously beckon, it appears to me. Your attempt to demean the opposition is a failure!

AA, I was about to say that "foisted" was your word and I was merely responding to its aggressiveness but a quick check back suggests otherwise. Ouch!

If, as you say, same sex marriage used to be sort-of legal by default in that no pre-2004 legislation actually ruled that it wasn't, I hadn't appreciated that. But I still need to take issue with your statement: "Legislation was foisted on Australians in 2004 when the definition in federal legislation was changed to exclude gay couples." Even if that statement is true, it's misleading. I wasn't referring to the traditional legal meaning of "marriage" but the meaning that it was commonly believed to have by me and the rest of the great unwashed. I think your statement can be read to imply that in 2004, we had foisted upon us a requirement to change what we believed and the way we spoke. I insist that 2004 actually confirmed, not changed, the meaning we had long assumed "marriage" to have. Perhaps I inferred something from your statement that you had not meant to imply.

You question about how long is a "long time" is easy to answer from my standpoint — it's as long as I can remember (and if our mean entitlement is really four score and ten, I'm already on an overdraft). Further, for almost all of us — I'm thinking 99% plus —"marriage" has meant traditional M1W1 coupling for the entirety of our remembered lives. When appraising the effect of a forced meaning change on us, what the word might have meant centuries ago is irrelevant.

In short, you are asking a lot of us when you expect us to make a categorical change in what a sensitive word means, especially when, for most of us, that change is the only part of the gay marriage log of demands that we baulk at.

How hard would it be to come up with another name for same-sex "marriage" and go with it until the meaning of "marriage" does evolve, as you optimistically suggest it already has?

Thanks for response Alan Austin,

It's often very difficult to have a discussion on homosexuality online, as people have formed a set opinion on homosexuality in there mind. Deep down they know that there views on homosexuality are wrong, yet they need justification for there discriminatory actions towards gays and lesbians - so when you start to have a discussion on homosexuality they quickly become hostile and often abusive towards others (especially gays) because they know that there bigotted views on homosexuality is about to be proven false and shown for what they exactly are, misleading lies. For example you have people claiming that it says in the bible that Jesus was against gay marriage, and you even have some that claim gay people cause earthquakes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7255657.stm or that we gays cause hurricanes: http://www.advocate.com/politics/religion/2012/08/31/gays-get-blame-hurricane-isaac

AA, me again. I meant to question your statement, "Certainly, back then, fewer people supported same-sex marriage than now" but ran foul of the limit on the number of posts per topic in a 24 hour period.

At the risk of repeating myself boringly, I think that all you can say from opinion polls and the like is that most Australians support the rights of same-sex couple to have access to legally protected marriage-like relationship contracts. I'm not aware that any research specifically establishes that most Australians are also happy for those contracts to be called "marriage".

When, as in your statement above, you leave unqualified statements that most Australians now support gay marriage, you are implying that most Australians support having the meaning of "marriage" changed by law. If there is evidence to support this implication, please put it on display. Being a sceptic, I'll support propositions for which there is credible, replicable evidence.

But if there is no such evidence, same sex marriage activists should stop using language which implies that there is.

Btw, Mr Deity has something important to say about marriage (all kinds) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2fYt42kyKE

>>In short, you are asking a lot of us when you expect us to make a categorical change in what a sensitive word means<<

It's not that much of change unless you consider homosexual relationships to be radically different from heterosexual ones. And I'm not sure I buy that idea: as far as I can tell the only thing that's radically different is the sex. And in my experience relationships which tend to last - marriage like relationships - are about a whole lot of other things besides sex. As a comfortably heterosexual man I can say that I wish they were sometimes a bit more about sex than some of those other things but if wishes were horses there'd be a lot of horse dung everywhere.

>>that change is the only part of the gay marriage log of demands that we baulk at.<<

Log of demands? What log of demands and why haven't I seen it yet? It's not one of these made up documents is it?

>>How hard would it be to come up with another name for same-sex "marriage" and go with it until the meaning of "marriage" does evolve<<

They already did that: a 'civil union'. It has its supporters and its detractors. I think it could be a lot worse but it doesn't have much of a ring to it does it? Skywriters must like it though: 'Will you enter into a civil union with me?' must pay a lot more highly than 'Will you marry me?'.

The pragmatist in me likes it but the romantic does not: 'will you enter into a civil union with mne' sounds so bland and bureaucratic. Why should we keep the nice version - 'will you marry me?' - to ourselves and only allow gays the cheap shoddy version? What have they done to deserve that kind of treatment? And what terrible fate awaits us if we allow them to have our nice things?

Cheers,

Tony