3AW – Derryn Hinch – “Equal, but not that equal”

Derryn Hinch comes out in favour of Same-Sex Marriage in a fabulous way.  Well done Derryn.   Listen to the audio where he gives that homophobe Jim Wallace a serve.  It is gold!

I want to talk about gay marriages. Should they be legal? It’s one of the most controversial issues around and it won’t go away. Even though Prime Ministers and Presidents wish it would.

I want your opinions on it but before I do I want to go back to something I wrote several years ago in a book about personal relations. A book called You Are So Beautiful – the Passion and the Pain of  Relationships.

I included a chapter on homosexual rights and the legal discrimination against gay people. And, to do that, I had to look at my own prejudices. My own ignorance.

I wrote: ‘I will admit that I have had difficulty coping with the nontraditional idea of a marriage between two men or two women. I have disappointed my wife, my ex-wife and gay friends when I have admitted that to them. And I have had no defensible argument. But I am learning and I know that the day will come soon when it is as accepted and as protected as any other union.’

Now, some countries do give full marital rights but those marriages are not recognised as legitimate in Australia. There are many heterosexual people who accept (and applaud) the rights of gays when it comes to superannuation and income-sharing for tax purposes but still balk at the idea of the word ‘marriage’ meaning anything except the union of a man and a woman.

There are also many heterosexual people who totally approve of gay marriages and gays raising children. Or simply don’t care.

One legitimate argument, apart from equality, is that a loving gay home is better than some of the drunken, physically and mentally abusive, loveless climates hurting children in some traditional marriages. But that is not to say this sad situation can’t happen with gay unions too.

Increasingly, same-sex couples are adopting children. Some are conceived through surrogate mothers or IVF or the sperm implanted in one lesbian partner through the crudely named ‘turkey baster’ method.

One thing that people have trouble coping with, especially older Australians, is the terminology. Calling a gay male parent ‘a mother’. He is not. Peter Ellwell and Peter West, a gay Victorian couple, who have surrogate twins born in India, describe themselves as ‘mother, father, the parents’. Well, they are the parents, but neither of them is the mother.

They tacitly acknowledge there is a difference because one is listed on the birth certificate as the biological father but they won’t say which one.

Gay marriage is an issue that has been avoided at the ALP conference with a group called Rainbow Labor dropping plans to force a vote on same sex marriages.

Instead they will have to accept that Labor, like the Liberals, will not let states or territories got it alone and ‘create schemes that mimic marriage or undermine existing laws that define marriage as being between a man and a woman’.

You can be equal but not that equal.

[Link: Original Article]