My mother was an alcoholic given to arbitrary changes of mood which made her harrowing to live with. She gave birth to me, but, as a child, I wished my parents would divorce so I would no longer have to live with her. The act of giving birth does not mean one is fit to raise a child. Writing of the 'sacred mother-child bond' is nonsense. It is theology brought in to deny choice in marriage.

I am a man happily married to a woman. However, those who wish to have a formal bond with another of the same sex should be allowed to do so and to raise children.

I vote we just ban marriage.

Draw up legal contracts for looking after the children.

Half of marriages fail anyway, and a lot of them just stay
together because of financial reasons and because they are
used to each other and too old to start again.

At the very least, have separate abodes, from the very start.
close enough so that the children can just walk around the corner to visit.

amazing how many judge marriage by their own failures. I guarantee you would ban all homosexual relationships if you used the same standard. Grow up.

This law does not "guarantee" that surrogacy and/or adoption will take place. What we should be doing is placing much tighter restrictions on different ways of "creating a family" to ensure that the best interests of children are always the top priority.

Hasbeen,

No it isn't. Some people involved may have originally regarded it as about money, particularly overseas, but in Australia there's very little financial difference remaining, and legislation to remove the rest would be far less contentious than legally recognising gay marriage.

Some of the comments about gay people are truly bizarre but Bazz's has to be the winner of the most ridiculous comment prize. Seems to me Bazz doesn't know any gay people. All the ones I know are quite happy and many would be even happier to have the equal right to marry their partners. To me it is people who make stupid comments who are the truly 'sad' ones.