Rhrosty,
Au contraire, if the Irish referendum showed us anything is that the support for homosexual marriage in that country accounted for somewhat less than 40% of the adult population. The marriage equality movement in Ireland was able to bank on a low turnout based on the falling rate of voter participation in that country and are we really so keen to follow in the footsteps of a failed state like Eire? It's interesting to note that opinion polls mean nothing to Labor politicians when they show their party to be at a disadvantage but opinion polls upon which they can capitalise are evidence of a "mood for change" even though the same professional pollsters provide both sets of figures. Australians have already voted against homosexual marriage by installing the coalition as our government and if Labor were still in power and freed of their obligation to the Greens we wouldn't even be having this conversation, Plibersek and Shorten don't support homosexual marriage and neither do the vast majority of Australians.
It's a stupid issue which boils down to whether or not a few hundred Lesbians each year get to play dress ups for a day.

Babette may have her Christian, 'traditionalist' views on marriage, and that is her opinion. To my mind, the less religious people in our society have been bullied into accepting old religious rubbish for way too long now.

Babette lies about kids of all ages not being bullied at school.
It is a well known fact, and I know several people personally, that kids are definitely bullied at school for showing any difference to other kids at all.

How many times has everyone heard kids at school yelling at others that they are 'poofters', in a nasty way? Anyone would have to have been both deaf and blind at school not to notice this form of bullying.

They certainly did that when I was at school, and I heard it again when my daughter was at school.
My best friend's son had a very sensitive, soft manner all through school, and was teased constantly about being gay from a very early age.
He lived in a church-going home, with a very homophobic father, and he didn't know anything about homosexuality until later in his teens.
He 'came out' at the age of 19, and his father has come to terms with it now.

As for Ireland, the fact remains that of those that voted , the majority voted for gay marriage, and the rest of the population who didn't vote, obviously didn't mind if it was voted in or not, so it still appears as though the majority of the strongly Christian Catholic Irish people WERE either supporters, or didn't really mind, if gay marriage was made legal.
Everyone needs to get over that fact, and move on.

I certainly get annoyed at people referring to those opposed to gay marriage as bigoted or homophobic. Surely there is nothing wrong with a conservative approach to these kind of things. It is only in the very recent past where people have lived openly in homosexual relationships and raised families under such arrangements. Until the seventies or eighties homosexual activities were illegal almost everywhere in the world. In the short space of a couple of decades, we are supposed to not only accept these as legitimate relationships, but also bestow on them the title of marriage. Nowhere in the whole history of the world has marriage between individuals of the same sex been recognised until the last couple of years. It is not unreasonable for people to say "hey, this is all pretty new. Why don't we wait and see how this experiment pans out before embracing it?"
The experiment with the recognition of gay relationships may well work out fine. But I don't think that believing we should take things slowly makes me either bigoted or homophobic.

The article shows that introducing Same Sex Marriage has led to serious problems for people connected with marriage as an occupation. These problems should be dealth with if we are to have SSM.
This issue has now become very much a central issue of the parliament due to Bill Shorten's bill. That bill may well be supplanted by another bill "owned by the parliament" and sponsored widely by different political parties. If we are to have SSM it will probably come from the second bill which looks like having a conscience vote for all sides. In my view we should first have a referendum on something so fundamental to our society. This has been sprung on us without warning. Two weeks ago this issue was not even talked about. Now it is THE ISSUE OF THE DAY. There should be a debate and a vote for the whole community with a draft bill available so that everyone knows what the proposition is that they are voting for.

Dear david f,

>> The article smells the same to me as the former opposition to equal pay for equal work for women.<<

I reread the article but could not find any analogy between what the author - rightly or wrongly - calls bullying (by LGBT activists, not homosexuals as such) and fights for equal pay for women. She is personally opposed to same sex marriage (SSM), but the article is not so much about this but about people being not allowed to run their business, or be employed, in a way that does not endorse it.

There is the case of the fundamentalist Christian baker - silly in my view - who was punished for not providing a kind of service requested of him (not for discriminating against LGBT customers since he would probably have refused irrespective of who asked for the inscription). On the other hand, you have the case of the jeweller who made wedding rings for a lesbian couple but had to refund them when they found out that he was personally against SSM.

Would a computer shop be punished for not wanting to repair my MacBook because they specialised in Windows based computers only? Not likely. Would a conservative Christian bookshop be forced to sell, or a Christian printer forced to print, material they saw as pornography? Today if you wish to sell or publish these sort of things, but also political material, slogans on paper or on a cake, you have many possibilities without having to request the service from those providers who for whatever reason are against the content of what you want to have printed.

There are many examples you could think of, where a business could be made to sell products or provide services they cannot or would not for whatever reasons. This is what, I think, the author was worried about.

Censorship means you must not publish certain things, but what do you call being forced - by law or by pressure groups - to publish certain things, whether you like it or not ?

Dear George,

I was writing about the article not the obligation of a business owner to sell to all customers. I wrote how the articles smells to me. I think the baker was in his rights to refuse the cake.

You are taking issue with things I did not write.