Those religous extremists who believe in the invisible being, will always deride and mock the reality of life.

Indicating that life is what they believe it should be, without any consideration to others, that may think otherwise.

To Runner and Leigh, at the last election, Family First came last and no one knows where Fred Nile is!

Interesting UK survey:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008.jan/23/socialtrends

Kipp, I saw that this morning too. Unfortunately your link went spastic. Hopefully this one will work: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/23/socialtrends

The term gay marriage is an oxymoron.Marriage is about procreation of the species.Let the gays have their multitudinal sexual unions, but they don't have the right to pervert the foundation of civilsiation ie the family unit,with their unbridled indulgent sexuality .They can have all the legal rights of sexual couples and call their unions all manner of terms,but never santify their deviations from the norm with the title "marriage",that is the cornerstone of all civilisation.

Arjay - no one really cares to hear your opinion about the morality or otherwise of homosexuality, which has been with us forever and ever will be, whether you like it or not. That WAS NOT THE POINT OF THE ARTICLE. If you have some sort of reason to want to keep the actual "institution" of marriage exclusive to heterosexuals, then fair enough, I don't really care about that either.

Do you think your little rant above contributes to societal harmony in any way? Do you think if you keep making hateful statements like the above, gay people will all just disappear? Why can't you just say "I think marriage is for straight people" and then give some reasons which don't denigrate that portion of society? Do you feel better by calling them "deviant" and "indulgent"?

We already know gay marriage does the institute of marriage no harm: it's existed in the Netherlands for 7 years (and Spain and Canada for 2), with no evidence that heterosexual marriages have been negatively affected. However I'll allow it does rely on the majority of the population accepting the legitimacy of gay marriages. Polls have shown Australians to be overwhelming in support of gay civil unions, but still somewhat divided on actual marriage, but the trend is indisputable, and I would be highly surprised if within 10 years Australia had not fallen in line with the rest of the world in legitimising official recognition of same-sex unions.