Australia’s LGBTI community will soon face the most difficult choice we’ve had to make
Image: Image: Andy Miller.
The Australian LGBTI community will soon face the most difficult choice we have ever been called on to make.
If Australia votes Yes for marriage equality, LGBTI people will be told to accept new forms of legal discrimination in return for our right to marry, or continue to be excluded from marriage altogether.
We can fairly easily predict what these new forms of discrimination will be and how they will be sold.
The marriage amendment bill unveiled by Senator Dean Smith gives religious organisations and “religious” civil celebrants an out from dealing with marrying same-sex couples.
It’s true that these new exemptions apply to all couples but the fact they are being granted in response to the prospect of same-sex marriages reinforces the negative message that there is something uniquely threatening about these marriages.
Beyond the Smith bill there will be a range of even more concerning exemptions flagged by opponents of marriage equality.
These will include commercial companies owned by people of faith being legally able to deny us wedding services, through to faith-based hospitals and schools being able to legally sack us or turn us away if we are married.
They might even include government bans on school diversity programs and a federal override of state hate-speech laws.
With far right MPs promising up to 100 amendments to any marriage equality bill, we can only guess how far they will go in rolling back existing anti-discrimination laws.
But there are two things we can be sure of.
First, the push to undermine our discrimination protections will come under the cover of the radical right’s mantra of “religious freedom”, “free speech”, and “parental rights”.
These terms are the opposite of the truth. They are about conservative Christians being “free” to impose their values on everyone else.
Voters understand this and don’t seem to have given the “freedom” scare-campaign much credence during the postal survey.
But politicians across the political spectrum continue to pay lip service to this false freedom narrative because they are too afraid or ignorant to call it out as yet another nasty, imported American culture war.
Second, we can be sure the push will gain traction beyond the radical right.
Despite the religious carve outs I’ve already mentioned, Dean Smith’s bill is not enough even for some supporters of marriage equality in the Coalition, let alone those who oppose it.
Coalition strategists will also demand more carve outs to stop Coalition voters from defecting to far right parties like Cory Bernardi’s Conservatives, and to wedge Labor.
The upshot is that LGBTI people will be presented with what looks like a Sophie’s Choice: continue to be treated badly in the law or lose the reform we have fought so hard to achieve.
In January, the largest survey ever conducted in the Australian LGBTI community found that a majority of LGBTI Australians are willing to wait for full equality.
But now we have all been through trial by post, the pressure to accept compromise will be greater.
That’s why I have written a book about the issues at stake – what “religious freedom” actually means, the impact of proposed discrimination carve outs, when compromise makes sense and when it doesn’t, and who has the right to make the decision.
My conclusion is that we should not compromise.
If we introduce new laws allowing discrimination against LGBTI people, if we allow the new, virulent “freedom’ narrative to gain a foothold in Australian law, we will rue it for a generation to come.
But my vision is not a bleak one.
I believe the Sophie’s Choice we will be presented with is a false choice.
If LGBTI history shows anything, it is that we can take our destiny into our own hands.
As outsiders we can exercise the kind of political imagination that changes the political landscape.
As strong, proud people don’t have to play the cards we are dealt. We can demand a new hand.
To do this, we must show that the freedom narrative is actually a bid by conservative religious leaders for greater power and privilege.
We must remind Australia that anti-discrimination laws are not feel-good concessions to minorities, but the very cornerstone of a fairer and more just society for everyone.
Most of all we must demonstrate that if and when Australia votes Yes, we collectively voted for all Australians to be treated equally without caveat or compromise.
Rodney Croome’s new book is “Devil in the Detail: The choice between true marriage equality and new forms of discrimination against LGBTI Australians”. It is available in the Bookshop Darlinghurst in Sydney and Hares and Hyenas bookshop in Melbourne.
Rodney Croome, David Marr, and Brenda Appleton will address a forum on religious exemptions in marriage equality legislation, titled “What Happens After Yes”, at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne from 7pm to 8.30pm on November 13th. For more information and to book a seat click here.
‘Religious freedoms’ of speech need to be curtailed!
#MakeChurchesPayTax
It must be always remembered. If you provide me with good service, I will more than likely return and also recommend your business if prompted. Provide great service all of the above enthusiastically.. Provide shit service I will tell everyone who will listen.
Your choice
my partner and I have been in a relationship for 33 years.we shifted to the country 17 years ago.the town accepted us no problems,since all this plebiscite and media mongering has started,well completely a different story.we we will be so happy to see the the end of it all,then to find out about our true friends and how will this town react after it’s all finished.hasn’t the government got more important things to do,like run the country.
As an occasional reader of the SSO I thought I may comment from an outsider and supporter perspective.
While this doesn’t directly affect me or my immediate family, the issue does affect my friends and it affects my children’s view of the world they live in and affects how I see the community at large. Are we going to continue allowing bigoted laws and values to prevent equity?
If religious groups say things like they wish to refuse to symbolically marry people (which is what religious weddings are) then shrug. That’s an argument that can be taken up later. It doesn’t prevent people getting married and having the exact same rights (personally I’d ban all discrimination by religious groups in general).
If the suggestion is that businesses trading in the public sphere can discriminate then I think it’s ‘all hands to battle stations’.
I don’t ‘do’ religion but I think that having rights in the real world is more important and the right to equity in the real world is not negotiable.
“But (AU) politicians across the political spectrum continue to pay lip service to this false freedom narrative because they are too afraid or ignorant to call it out as yet another nasty, imported American culture war.”
THIS^^^^^^
Hard to not feel utterly embarrassed & ashamed to say I’m an Aussie with these backwards, blow-hard wankers so busy arse-kissing those Neanderthals “in-charge” (of the USA) asylum.
Malcolm & Tony & that Smith idiot need to ALL move there.
I think that the Liberal and National party had better not forget that thousands of LBGTI people have a vote at the next election and the LNP could find themselves on the other side of the house and not in government (they are nearly there at the moment) because I won’t be voting for them (I never have)
Australian politicians fall into two categories. One are the haters. The second are those who are gutless people who should go back home and curl up in their bed.
In New Zealand where I was born, several attempts were made to decriminalise same-sex relationships prior to the 1986 Homosexual Law Reform Act brought by Labour whip Fran Wilde. This had the full support of LGBT lobbyists because it had an equal age of consent with heterosexuals and there was no Sword of Damocles threatening amendments.
Earlier attempts with an unequal age of consent and negating riders were at one point sabotaged by LGBT lobbyists who circulated a fake white paper to all members of parliament misrepresenting the bill’s aims, to ensure it would fail. The bill was duly withdrawn until the political climate matured. Three decades later, and I can now marry the same man I could have gone to jail for loving in 1985.
Senator Dean Smith’s private member’s bill, that the government will most likely allow to go ahead following a Yes majority, could pass loaded up with amendments. If this threat materialises, then I think LGBT lobbyists must withdraw support and pressure Senator Smith to shelve his bill and wait for a propitious change of government.
Even if law reform is not achieved, at least a Yes vote will have clarified that that problem is not Australian animus against same-sex marriage, thereby paving the way for a future government to pass the bill unamended.
Agreed. Great comments from Rodney, also a shout-out to Doug Pollard who made similar comments in response to an article on the Star Observer a few days ago.
Dean Smith’s bill was arguably a reasonable effort before this “statistical survey” was imposed on the Australian community despite it failing to pass Parliament. But now it’s going to be the people who have spoken because they have had this forced upon them and the conservatives in Parliament can go fuck themselves. They had their chance to do this much better and cheaper than they have, they blew it, they can only blame themselves for what happens next.