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We got an automated response from one of the Labor Senators, John Faulkner.  Basically he pointed to his website which quoted some Labor party positions and stated that he was “pro-equality”.

I found that to be a bit lame, as he didn’t directly address the arguments against same-sex marriage.

Lame, yeah, I thought mealy-mouthed weasel-words.  But clearly he supports ‘gay marriage’.
 
I didn’t expect arguments to be addressed - I considered the idea is to add to the weight of numbers who are prepared to say that heterosexual-only marriage is important to us.  It seemed in this case some weight was given to the numbers on the petition, as it is now recognised there are many in the community who are strongly opposed.

I just received a form letter from Alex Hawke MP Federal Member for Mitchell.

Dear Mrs Burgess
   
Thank you for your correspondence regarding an important issue facing our society today - same sex marriage.
   
You are not alone with your views and many constituents have raised this issue with me over the last few weeks.
     
In Parliament, I spoke on same sex marriage in the House of Representatives.  I am fundamentally against same sex marriage and agree with your argument that marriage is a tradition between a man and a woman and that tradition must not be altered.
   
Please find enclosed a copy of my speech in Parliament regarding same sex marriage and the newspaper articles that followed.
   
Thank you again for sharing your views with me.

   
The parliamentary speech was just over one page long.
There were three articles, two from the Australian and one a local, that reported…
“right-wing Liberal backbencher Alex Hawke lashed out at the Greens push to legalise same-sex marriage and questioned whether gay couples would provide an appropriate environment in which to bring up children”, and
(quoting Hawke)“Marriage has been one of the foundational aspects of our society, especially for the bringing up of children” and similar
   
If I’d been in Parramatta electorate, as I used to be before redistribution, I could have sent my message to a Labor MP.

Interesting.  I recall from reading somewhere that my local member for Reid, John Murphy (Labor member sitting) was also against same-sex marriage.  Haven’t received a personal response like what you got though.

I was sent this link (below) to an article with an opinion poll about ‘gay marriage’.  Seems endless.  I ‘voted’ - why not? But there has to be a better way, to reframe the debate.
 
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2011/09/20/262641_tasmania-news.html
 

Green light for gay marriage
  September 20, 2011 12.01am

TASMANIA’S Parliament is set to become the first in Australia to vote in favour of same-sex marriage after Premier Lara Giddings indicated she would support a Greens motion on the issue.

Greens leader Nick McKim will today table a motion in support of marriage equality and calling on the Federal Government to reform marriage laws.
 
He says he will push state-based legislation if Canberra does not act by the end of the year.

Another petition you can sign ahead of the early December Australian Labor Conference:

http://www.australianmarriage.org.au/petition

Not too long till this is to be handed in at the Labor conference - get signing before the end of November if you feel strongly about this.

So gay marriage is stopped for now…a conscience vote will lead to failure when the legislation is voted upon in the Lower House due to the Coalition + some Labor MPs voting against it.

I signed the petition, Arthur.  Thanks for encouraging us to act.  Not that the petition did much good! 
 
I don’t think the ACL being against a conscience vote is a good look - and may backfire in the future.  Christians are sure to want the freedom to act on conscience, so how can we deny this to others? 
 
The more important issue (and least publicised) is the ALP platform has actually shifted, even though they’ll allow a conscience vote.
 
Tony Abbott has suggested the LNP may also have a conscience vote - perhaps, perhaps not.  There are some on that side of politics who are pro- ‘gay marriage’.

Same sex relationships will not end, but I disagree that such unions should have recognition in marriage. I am tolerant of gays and have love for these people as I have towards all others.

“Civil unions” would be more appropriate. The problem with me is the word. “marriage “. Marriage is a state blessed by God. Called holy matrimony. God created us man and woman, one to help the other. God’s word speaks clearly against the sin of homosexuality (and heterosexual licentiousness.)

Marriage is a wholesome, holy and natural state which is the foundation of the family, and ultimately all society. It is there to give a loving natural habitat for children. Children belonging to homosexuals will surely suffer in their minds by having same sex parents. Other children are also cruel, and legislation will not stop this practice.

Other sexual unions are sinful in God’s eyes, heterosexual and more so, homosexual. To see otherwise is to reject and rebel against God. I will never recognise a gay couple as being “married”, no matter what the law may say in the future. I reject the concept.

Is the gay lobby in any way in awe of God, or are they mainly atheistic?

I think that consenting adults should be able to more-or-less form any relationship they like and call it what they want. Similarly, no one should be forced to accept the validity any relationship.

Lee, The main issue is whether Christians can accept gay marriage.

I dont see God’s word saying it is OK, so that is why I have made my point on the issue.

It is all about what God wants.

I don’t accept homosexual marriage, nor does God’s Word, but on the same token, we’re talking about the appropriate policy response by a secular government to marriage. I don’t see anywhere where the Bible commands non-Christians to live a certain way, nor anything that would hint that Christians should interfere with how non-Christians want to run their lives. Our response is to preach the gospel lovingly and call on them to repent, not to try to tell them how to live.

I think the fairest and most moral position for government to have is that they are to protect against aggresion and coercion of unwilling parties. Beyond that, the general principle should be that consenting adults should be able to do as they see fit.

Might I add that I am yet to see a big fuss made by the conservative Christian community about de facto marriage and that is far more corrosive on how marriage is seen by society. Live and let live, I say.

To me, the concern that once gay marriage is allowed in legislation (which is likely to happen), the next step is to compel churches to marry homosexuals.

Any step towards that is repugnent.

Of course, notwithstanding, all religions (not just Christianity and even the Eastern ones) I know condemn homosexuality and gay marriage.

link

March of the gay penguins

205 Comments

Brendan O’Neill
Why has there been such a furore over Toronto Zoo’s decision to split up a “gay” penguin couple and make them canoodle and mate with females instead?

Alongside some rather predictable jokes - American TV host Jimmy Kimmel refers to the whole thing as “Brokeback Iceberg” - some gay activists seem genuinely peeved that Buddy and Pedro have been forced to end their “bromance” and that Buddy now has a new female playmate called Farai.

The gay online magazine Queerty wonders if it is right to force gay penguins to “participate in the patriarchal sex-trade industry”. It says the de-gaying of Buddy and Pedro has further reduced “queendom” levels in the animal kingdom.

Toronto Zoo says it has had angry phone calls from a group calling itself the Canadian Society for Gay Animals. Even in the mainstream media coverage, the mostly tongue-in-cheek commentary has been tinged with sadness, as captured in a headline in Time magazine (no less): “Soap opera at the zoo: a female comes between gay penguins.”

This bizarre response to a simple and sensible attempt by Toronto Zoo to get rare African penguins to procreate is more than just a silly-season story.

The reason it’s become a big issue is because these allegedly gay penguins, alongside other animals that have been observed taking part in same-sex shenanigans, have been held up by gay-rights activists as irrefutable proof that homosexuality is “natural”. And if it now turns out that Buddy and Pedro were just experimenting all along, like people do at college, perhaps, then what does that do to the gayness-is-biological argument?

In recent years, gay activists and writers have developed a very strange habit of pointing at allegedly gay beasts humping in the wild and saying: “See? It’s perfectly normal to have gay sex.”

We’ve had stories about gay monkeys, gay dogs and gay sheep (who indulge in “ram-on-ram action”, according to one gay writer), leading observers to conclude that “gay sex is perfectly natural”. One recent report claimed that “every species, from beetles to shrews to chimpanzees, has a consistent minority who prefer their own sex”.

None of these gay activists ever seems to stop and think about how screwed up it is that they try to justify their own lifestyles by pointing to allegedly similar behaviour amongst dogs and insects. It’s a bit like a teenage boy saying “I saw an ape masturbating at the zoo, so it is okay for me to wank”, or an adulterer saying, “Well, if male hyenas can have multiple partners, why can’t I?”

There is something profoundly backward and defensive in the attempt to define human homosexuality as “natural”, to depict it as a biological trait, born of a certain genetic disposition that is as likely to be found in a shrew as a human being.

Throughout history it was traditionally the most conservative (and even bigoted) wings of society which sought to depict certain human behaviours as the product of some inescapable nature or biological instinct. So women were said to be naturally weaker and more fragile than men, and thus ill-suited for the hurly burly of work or politics. Black people were said to be genetically less intelligent than white folk: good at dancing and throwing things, yes, but not so good at writing poetry or running nations.

Some of the most positive and progressive leaps forward of the past 200 years have involved people shrugging off their apparently “natural” roles and demanding a bigger stake in life and society. People have continually tried to wriggle free from the prison of “nature”.

Yet now, some gay-rights activists seem keen to crawl back into that prison, by effectively saying: “We can’t help being the way we are. It’s biology, innit?”

The shift in the gay movement away from demanding equal rights and towards calling for recognition of the idea that gayness is “natural” occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Feeling under attack from a conservative backlash, gay-rights activists in the West started to argue, very defensively, that being gay was a simple biological trait and therefore it should not be criticised.

So in 1991, the Californian neurobiologist and gay-rights campaigner Simon LeVay caused waves around the world when he claimed that research carried out by him and others proved that the cause of homosexuality is biological. LeVay unleashed a global scientific hunt for “the gay gene”, which continues to this day.

LeVay said he hoped that by “proving” that homosexuality was hardwired into certain people, he might generate a “better understanding of the innate differences between gay and straight people” and in the process bring about “a rejection of homophobia based on religious or moral arguments” (Guardian, October 9, 1992).

This is the ultimate aim of the gayness-is-natural lobby - to undercut anti-gay sentiment by presenting gayness as a normal biological function which should be beyond reproach. Yet as the veteran gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has argued, this is an extraordinarily defensive, not to mention scientifically illiterate, argument.

Tatchell says the gay movement’s embrace of gay-gene theories suggests a “terrible lack of self-confidence and a rather sad, desperate need to justify queer desire”. He says there is a “pleading, defensive sub-text” in the pro-gay gene thesis, which is: “We can’t help being fags and dykes, so please don’t treat us badly.”

Indeed. The aim of those who bang on endlessly about how beetles and penguins are just as likely as humans to be gay is to avoid testy moral debate about homosexuality in favour of effectively presenting gayness almost as an animalistic instinct, which therefore cannot be helped or “corrected” and which should not be criticised.

Homosexuality is not “natural”. It is not a mere biological instinct. Rather, like all human relations and interactions, it is a complex mix of desire and choice and love and lust. The campaigners who hold up the grunting antics of penguins and dogs as evidence that being gay is okay imagine that they are doing gay people a favour.

In truth, it is extraordinarily insulting to compare the loving, human bonds forged by gays and lesbians with the opportunistic instinctual thrill occasionally pursued by a confused wild animal.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked in London.

The cry that being gay is encountered frequently in the animal kingdom is a hardly surprising response to hundreds of years of being told that it is unnatural. Quite simply put, the argument says “Oh yes it is”
I don’t think it is insulting, any more that it is insulting to hold up assorted species and note how these mate for life, as if this also is somehow morally admirable for penguins, swans or elephants.
I think the article’s logic is specious.
I also think that whatever the morality of homosexuality, it is appropriate to remember that being beaten up for being gay is still not unusual. It seems folks at the moment like to spout a bit about how gays are aggressive about their position and will level abuse etc. Hardly surprising, it may not be right, but hardly surprising.