I voted ‘Yes’. Not because I wish to marry a man – in my age group there are not many left, and we are not a pretty sight – but because of a principle enunciated by John Howard when he first became prime minister. The government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation, he said, before he went terribly wrong.
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Make no mistake, it is John Howard who is responsible for the awful political mess which has bedevilled us for so long, and which the Australian people have so decisively ended.
Howard, towards the end of his time at PM, was responsible for the legislation defining marriage as between a man and a woman. He was presumably acting on religious advice, but he should have known better.
When religious teaching, whether it be canon law or the sharia, is given legislative force, the suffering is immense. The Spaniards admit to 15,000 murders, which has a modest sound to it. In Goa before the Indians evicted them, they burnt about 450. In Britain, during the reign of Bloody Mary, it was 283, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and William Tyndale who translated the Bible into English.
They took the inquisition with them to South America. One conquistador unleashed his dogs on 40 homosexuals. The bull-rings that dot Spain were built over the sites of the areas where heretics were burnt. And all this was before we even get to the murder of 6 million Jews by the Germans during the Second World War.
The struggle to establish the Common Law over canon law in Britain had a notable beginning with Henry II, who famously said “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest.” His knights then put Thomas A’Becket to the sword, with the result that Henry failed, leaving the task to Henry IV. That is what Howard blundered into.
Malcolm Turnbull is delighted and is determined to get a new bill through before Christmas. I hope I don’t have to see more film of men kissing each other on the ABC.
