The definitive guide to the gay marriage debate

THERE is a real danger the campaign for marriage equality will ultimately fail and it doesn’t come from the other side.

THE other night a former ALP election strategist and political advisor sent me a link to a story about a high-profile yes campaigner complaining that despite a raft of new legal protections specifically drafted for the same-sex marriage postal vote, there would still be some hurtful comments.

“I feel like voting no,” he said.

He was, of course, joking. He will naturally be voting yes, as will almost everyone I know.

As will both the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader and the AFL and the NRL and everyone from Alan Joyce to Alan Jones.

Virtually no political issue these days has such vocal and high-profile support.

And yet there is a real danger that the campaign for marriage equality will ultimately fail and, like all the most real dangers, it doesn’t come from the other side. It comes from within.

But before we get to that, let us deal with the No campaign.

The argument against gay marriage is so irrational and hypocritical that left to its own devices it would self-combust from a collapse of its own internal logic even if there were no opposing side.

It includes so-called libertarians who would deny people the liberty to choose who they marry.

It includes conservatives who believe in the power, sanctity and social benefits of marriage and yet want to stop people from participating in it.

It includes Muslims who claim to be marginalised and yet seek to marginalise others.

And it includes Christians who in one breath complain about the loss of religious freedoms and in the next say we should ban the burqa.

From any reasonable standpoint, their position is untenably weak and they know it.

That is why their strategy is to deliberately muddy the waters and claim that the same-sex marriage vote is really a referendum on free speech or political correctness or safe schools or transgendered lesbian whales.

But just because they are irrational doesn’t mean they are stupid.

Because part of this strategy is to provoke an equally irrational response from the Yes campaign. And unfortunately, as my political savant friend observed, it appears to be working.

The fact is that those opposed to gay marriage are in the minority.

Various polls have previously shown support at up to two-thirds of the population, with a heavy skew towards the young.

And so even the minority that was outnumbered two to one is dying off and support growing at the other end of the life cycle. Harsh but true.

Yet since the campaign began the level of support has been slipping. Percentage wise, where once it was in the 60s, it is now in the 50s.

If it continues at this rate the vote could be lost — and that is to say nothing of the wholly unpredictable nature of a voluntary postal ballot.

So what is going on?

As noted, a key part of the No campaign is to argue the poll is a vote on free speech. This is an absurd misrepresentation and yet many on the Yes side seem to be going out of their way to prove it.

How else to explain some of the hysteria surrounding the skywriting stunt, in which the words “VOTE NO” were temporarily scrawled over Sydney.

One media figure described it as “bullying” and another said it was “deeply offensive” and not appropriate for the debate.

This is precisely the sort of crazed response the No campaign is hoping for.

Firstly, bullying is a cruel and sustained attack on an individual and a practice which is now rightly illegal in schools and workplaces.

And yet now to merely advocate a vote for one side over another in a postal ballot is branded bullying?

Likewise we have the claim that to even express an opposing view in a democratic ballot is offensive and disrespectful.

Clearly this is someone unfamiliar with the basic premise of democracy itself. Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t make them a hate criminal.

Indeed, for those who think that even having any kind of vote causes too much distress, consider this: A century ago the Australian government held two plebiscites asking for the power to conscript young men and march them to their deaths on the fronts of World War I. That is a traumatic vote.

We also have debates on whether to let asylum seekers drown at sea or rot in detention centres, whether to give disabled people enough money to survive or oppose a universal tax hike, whether to restrict remote communities’ welfare payments or turn a blind eye to alcoholism and abuse, whether to put money into disadvantaged schools that could transform lives or subsidising medicines that could save them.

In other words, almost every political battle is ultimately a matter of life and death. We have debates about euthanasia for Christ’s sake – about literally killing people.

The whole point of democracy is that it’s a contest for control of our lives. So let’s all just have a nice warm bowl of harden-the-f**k-up and get on with it.

Moreover, by opposing having a vote or a debate, the Yes campaign drifts from a position that is overwhelmingly popular and almost inarguably sensible to a position where it can indeed appear anti-democratic and anti-free speech — which is precisely the corner the No campaign is trying to paint it into.

Indeed, the No campaign is already so marginal that it has nothing to lose by going extreme. What it hopes for is to provoke an extreme response from the Yes campaign, a trap that sadly many activists have already fallen into.

Because if the great expanse of suburban middle Australia stops seeing this as a modest commonsense reform and instead a battle between two extremes people will either vote for the status quo or simply withdraw altogether and not vote at all.

Either would be disastrous for the end goal of marriage equality and yet that appears to be what the receding polls show is happening.

And that is what my political savant mate is worried about. And what worries me is that he was one of the very few serious analysts to predict the election of Donald Trump.

This is not to say, however, that the ballot isn’t excruciatingly dumb. As I said on national television when it was first announced, they might as well decide the issue with a hot dog eating competition.

Yet this farce was in many ways depressingly predictable. The initial positions of both major parties were ridiculous.

Liberals, supposedly the party of individual freedom, voted to deny MPs a free vote. Labor, supposedly the progressive party, opposed same-sex marriage even under the prime ministership of the left-wing feminist icon Julia Gillard.

Now the party of solidarity is offering a free vote, only to be replaced by a binding vote if the free vote doesn’t get the result it’s preordained to get. Both parties have bathed in so much hypocrisy they need a change of trousers.

At any rate, up until only a few weeks ago there were basically two options on the table for same-sex marriage: A free vote in parliament – which would be guaranteed of success if the Libs allowed a conscience vote – or a comprehensive national plebiscite which Malcolm Turnbull went to the election with – against his personal wishes – and won with a wafer thin majority. And which would also be guaranteed of success.

But wait, as the great Tim Shaw once said, there’s more.

Both the parliamentary vote and the plebiscite had their merits. One would be quick and easy and cheap – much like a night out at Ken’s – and the other would be long and painful but ultimately fulfilling – also much like a night out at Ken’s.

However our political leaders have performed yet another miraculous coup: Faced with Options A and B, of which one was slightly worse than the other, they managed to end up with an Option C that is far worse than both. Only modern Australian politics could engineer such a perfect clusterf**k.

The Liberals should have just allowed a free vote in the parliament but they didn’t. Failing that, Labor and the Greens should have allowed a plebiscite but they didn’t. Now instead of a compulsory national vote by the AEC that would have been painful and expensive but effectively binding, we have a voluntary postal vote by the ABS that will be painful and expensive and carry virtually no weight.

Unlike a compulsory plebiscite which any self-interested politician would have to adhere to — and many no-voting MPs said they would — the voluntary postal vote has no such electoral sway.

And why? Well for one thing, the people who are overwhelmingly likely to win it have already declared it to be illegitimate.

Even in third world dictatorships they usually wait for the results to come in before disputing them but here the Yes campaigners have already argued in the High Court that the government had no legal authority to hold the vote, even before the first ballots were posted out.

Just think about this for a second: Assuming the vote comes in for the Yes side, marriage equality campaigners will be demanding MPs abide by the results of a ballot that they themselves have tried to eliminate on the grounds that it is illegal.

Honestly, did anybody @#$%ing think about this?

Yet again a progressive cause has been sabotaged by hardliners not on the other side, but the side they’re supposed to be on. When you oppose the good because it’s not perfect you don’t end up with something better, you end up with nothing.

This is a constant pattern in Australia. During the last referendum the direct electionists weren’t satisfied with the republican model proposed and so teamed up with the monarchists to defeat it. Two decades later we have no republic.

And during the first Rudd government the Greens weren’t satisfied with the emissions trading scheme model proposed and so teamed up with the Liberals to defeat it. One decade later we have no emissions trading scheme.

The enemies of progress aren’t at the gates, they’re in our midst.

And so now we have a postal vote that somehow manages to combine all of the drawbacks of the plebiscite with none of the benefits. It’s enough to make you ask Flight Centre about their packages to North Korea.

But despite all this I will be voting and I will be voting yes and I urge everyone to do the same. Ironically, this is because both the voting model and the debate have been so compromised that only an overwhelming turnout and an overwhelming yes vote will carry the necessary political weight.

The result needs to be massive and unequivocal for it to be accepted as a mainstream mandate.

No, it’s not perfect, it’s probably not even good, but it’s all we have. And as my mum’s friend Don said at the vet’s shortly before he killed my dog: “Well, we’re here now.”

But the most important reason is far more simple: If someone wants to be happy, and that happiness doesn’t hurt anyone else, then who among us has any right to stop them?

That is the only argument we need to have and it is an argument that should be impossible to lose.