Well, sorta Hasbeen, if you define marriage as a sexual relationship. When two people cannot perform sexual intercourse then they don't have a sexual relationship, even infertile or disabled couples who can perform the act of coitus can be said to have sexual relations, two people of the same gender cannot "have sex".
I suppose in the past a marriage which was not consummated was seen as void, or at least one party might leave themselves open to annulment and divorce proceedings however chaste marriages did persevere.
Those considerations aren't really relevant since the introduction of no fault divorce but a chaste marriage or a marriage where the parties engage in err, how to put this.. "physical recreation resulting in orgasm" as an alternative to sexual intercourse will still persist as a minority of all marriages.
As stated above though it's all just trivia for the amusement of people with time on their hands and bored internet addicts like me, Marriage equality is last years meme, this year it's "Racism", in order to be relevant Rodney Croome needs to change hats at this juncture, swap his Gay Rights wimple for his Anti Racist hoodie and bandanna.

Rhrosty,
There's no evidence that the "voting public" support Gay Weddings, in fact Rodney Croome has in the past given his reasons as to why there should not be a vote or a referendum on the issue. The Gay Rights activists want the change to come via act of parliament because as a path of least resistance they can bully or shame individual politicians in lieu of trying to gain grassroots voter support. How many people can a Marriage equality rally in a major city gather? 200? sometimes 1,000 if it's on a sunday and the weather is good and these rallies are not welcoming or open to the public, try going there to debate them and see how far you get.
The reality is that this is a non issue, it's something that pertains to an extreme minority of an extreme minority and which has no bearing whatsoever on the health, security or moral bearing of a nation. We're talking a few hundreds of couples nationwide who may for a time be married in the legal sense, the fad will pass just like the "golden age" of 1980's Gay club life has passed.

Obviously it's not the libertarian thing to add government services or to extend existing ones.

I see no connection with freedom because everyone is already free to marry whoever, whatever and as many as one chooses to. So what if the government wouldn't provide the service of registering some of these marriages? They shouldn't be providing any similar services in the first place!

Complaining about the loss of freedom to have the government register one's marriage is like complaining about the loss of freedom to have the prime-minister clean one's house.

Rodney
As others have suggested you are entirely free to form and maintain any sort of sexual relationship you please with any consenting adult in this country, you can even expect the freedom to do so openly and with out any sort of artifice. That is the epitome of personal freedom and You would be very hard pressed to find anyone who objects to that in any way shape or form in contemporary Australia.

The result is that being openly Gay is essentially uncontentious in our society.Long may that be so but being able to call a same sex union a marriage is just a bridge too far and something that smacks too much of a small tail trying to wag a large dog for many of us. When we have activists vilifying anyone who dares to say that they object to "gay marriage", calling us bigots homophobic or worse it does your cause no good service especially when we have an otherwise supportive attitude to homosexuality.

If the author can convince islam of his point of view then I'll listen to him. In the meantime he should shut up and enjoy the legal equivalence he and his partner have with married couples.

"The state has no right telling me, you or anyone else who we can and can't marry."

Rodney whilst I'm of the view that if the state is in the business of registering relationships they should not discriminate the fact that it is a state recognition does give them that right.

I have not seen any case to suggest that the push for same sex marriage is any more critical than a fight against one of the last official flags of difference.

If I've understood the legal lack of ramifications to the marriage/de-facto issue correctly then what you are after appears to be for the state to tell you that it's OK for you to marry who you want to rather than a rejection of the states right to tell you "who we can and can't marry".

I've also noticed a tendency from some gay activists to stand divided on the issue of the state telling people "who we can and can't marry" by rejecting the case of people seeking unions involving more than two consenting adults. Not sure where you stand on that but it's not helped the credibility of a rejection of state authority.

I'd like the government out of the business of registering relationships and if the existing mostly meaningless registration is continued discrimination regarding the choices of consenting adults should be removed (and for the christian fundies who have those particular fantasies children and alsations can't consent in a valid manner).

The current marriage act seems to be a farce, defendants of the status quo talk about procreation but the act has no requirement for that and readily allows the marriage of people where that is neither the intent or in some cases a possibility.

R0bert