Rodney Croome
In Baghdad, a young woman cowers by her window watching US troops and Iraqi fighters killing each other in the street, and she wonders why.
In Tasmania's ancient southern forests, helicopters firebomb another clearfelled, poisoned valley. Locals hear the choppers fly low over their houses and they wonder why.
In a park in Sydney, a little boy asks his two mums why some of the other kids aren't allowed to play with him. They tell him that there are some people who think his type of family isn't as good as others, and he, too, wonders why.
Never doubt that fallen soldiers in Iraq, Tasmania's fallen trees and a little boy's sinking heart are intimately connected.
They are connected by greed, corruption and a hunger for power that tramples unheedingly over life's dignity and hope.
We've gathered to protest the Howard Government's attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people: its loud condemnation of Playschool for showing a loving two-mum family; its attempts to block same-sex couples adopting children from overseas; and its crusade to carve a discriminatory heterosexual definition of marriage into legislative stone.
Much has been said about these attacks. They have been condemned as cynical wedge politics — as an attempt to divide the Labor opposition and corral socially conservative voters in marginal seats. They have been derided as yet more mimicry of the Bush administration in Washington.
There is truth in this. The Coalition government has a long record of beating up minority issues into threats to middle Australia and then presenting itself as the only solution to these threats.
First it was Aborigines and Wik. Then it was refugees and the Tampa. Now it's homosexuals and marriage. Pink is the new black.
There is also truth in the claim that Canberra is just copying Washington. There are too many parallels between US President George Bush's and John Howard's attempts to "stop activist judges re-defining marriage". There are too many examples of yesterday's White House press releases becoming tomorrow's Australian government policy.
But there is much more to the government's homophobic attacks than electoral game playing and political plagiarism.
Many of the men behind the government's queer-baiting have a genuine ideological commitment to a purely heterosexual society — if not a society from which sexual and gender minorities are erased, at least one in which they are silent, unseen and unknown.
Marriage is the battlefield on which they have assembled their armies because they believe it is here that the political terrain gives them their greatest advantage.
Unfortunately, far too many people agree with them.
The Labor Party has abandoned the field, caving into the government on marriage, even echoing its absurd views on Playschool. The ALP failed to learn the lessons of Wik and the Tampa: that Australians admire strong leaders even if they don't always agree with them, and that they do not reward timidity.
With every opportunity Labor misses to establish a strong social reform agenda it not only alienates itself from forward-thinking Australians, but makes winning office much harder.
In the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community itself there are also people who want to walk away from the marriage debate.
I do not stand here to lambast these folk. I myself once dismissed marriage reform as a non-issue
But I've come to be an ardent supporter of same-sex marriage for several reasons.
Firstly, I believe the overwhelming majority of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people support the right of same-sex couples to marry, even if they themselves may not wish to.
Secondly, I believe the right to marry is one of our society's primary markers of adulthood, citizenship and community participation. To be deprived of the right to marry the person you love is to be told that your love is second-rate and your commitment worthless. It is to be told that you are not mature enough to take responsibility for your own life. It is to told that you do not belong.
Thirdly, I believe that symbols matter. Tasmania's new partnership registry has confirmed this for me. Couple after couple have walked into the registry office in a practical frame of mind — seeking easy proof of relationship or access to parenting rights — only to emerge in tears because they've been suddenly struck by the symbolic importance of having society's approval.
In the words of Bec, a friend of mine from Launceston: "It wasn't till we were in there that we realised this is the real thing. I never thought it would make a difference, but it does. Now it's like we really belong and we really are equal."
Of course not everyone needs or wants society to tell them that their relationship is okay. But in a world that has persecuted and maligned same-sex relationships for centuries, marriage is the fastest acting antidote to the poison of prejudice.
Finally and most importantly, I believe a successful, broad-based campaign for marriage equality has the potential for great social renewal.
It can renew the institution of marriage by making it more relevant to a pluralistic and diverse society. It can renew the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community by focusing us on the many disadvantages and inequities that still confront us and giving us hope for a better future.
Most of all, same-sex marriage has the potential to renew the nation as a whole by becoming a symbol of something far greater than itself — an Australia which is open of mind and generous of spirit.
What gives me this hope? In a word, Tasmania. Over the past decade, my island home has transformed itself from a byword for homophobia into a beacon of social inclusion. In the eyes of all Tasmanians the symbol of that remarkable transformation, the issue upon which our history pivoted, was the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
I believe marriage equality can serve the same purpose for the entire nation.
Last weekend I went bushwalking with a group of LGBT friends and what we saw amazed us. In the middle of the coldest winter for years, and two months earlier than usual, Tasmania's ancient rainforest trees have begun to bud.
Thanks to Howard, the winter of 2004 is one of the chilliest on record for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. But in defiance of the cold political winds whipping through this nation's heart, our communities are flowering. We are coming out, speaking out and marching out like never before. We are staking a claim on justice that cannot be denied.
We are declaring that a bright, warm Australian spring will soon be here.
[This speech was delivered at the Community Action Against Homophobia rally at Sydney Town Hall on July 25. It was inspired by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan.]
From Green Left Weekly, September 1, 2004.
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