There’s a little place right down the bottom of Australia called Tasmania. It’s the tiny island that everyone always forgets about when they draw a map of Australia, and it’s the state that Australians love to publicly ridicule for being a little bit backwards when it comes to, well, everything.
But this week, Tasmania surprised us all when it became the first Australian state to have parliament formally pass a motion in support of same-sex marriage. Tasmanian Greens Senator Nick McKim summed up the motion by eloquently stating “we should value difference and diversity, and devalue discrimination”. Not a bad motto to live by.
There’s absolutely no legislative force behind the motion, primarily because marriage is legislated by the federal government in Australia, but it is arguably a very important gesture. To put the motion into context, homosexuality in Tasmania was only decriminalised in 1997. That’s right, 1997.
The same-sex marriage debate has saturated the Australian media and political debate for most of the year, and there has been an outpouring of commentary on the issue encompassing everything from the ridiculously detailed to just plain ridiculous.
The debate has illustrated that despite a considerable amount of Australian law mandating that there should be no discrimination against sexual or gender minorities, there is still considerable political reluctance to afford same-sex couples the same symbolic rights as heterosexual couples.
Recent polls have shown that up to 68 per cent of Australians are in favour of formalising same-sex unions, which is a pretty good indicator that the politicians are (shock-horror) out of step with the will of the Australian community.
I’d say that most of the 68 per cent of Australians that support marriage equality understand that the debate is not about religion or the institution of marriage, it’s actually about community and our democratic choices.
In a democratic secular society, if we are all going to participate equally in the community, then we all need to be able to exercise the same choices. And the choice to get married to someone that you love regardless of gender seems like a pretty damn important choice to me.