Same-sex marriage vote is occurring without details

Many Australians already have cast votes — for want of a better word — by filling out and returning postal survey forms on whether to change the law to allow for same-sex marriage. Most people are likely to do the same in coming weeks as a debate that has bubbled along for almost a decade and has been a prominent political issue for at least two years reaches something of a crescendo. Given the issue goes to the building block of society, the family, the discussion has been superficial. Heated and protracted arguments about the process for delivering the change have competed with thrust and parry over equality and religious freedom. There has been little calm examination of what is really at stake, how this change may alter how society operates or the extent of our personal freedoms.

Sadly, discrimination against gay and lesbian Australians has occurred openly and officially until recent times. Laws cannot eradicate prejudice — we know intolerance over sexuality still exists — but state and federal measures across five decades have made it clear our society decries such discrimination or vilification. Change has been relatively rapid given homosexual acts between consenting adults were a criminal offence until South Australia became the first state to decriminalise in 1975. Victoria and NSW acted in the 1980s and it took Tasmania until 1997. Since then laws also have been passed to protect same-sex couples from all forms of discrimination and to ensure their financial interests are treated the same as that of heterosexual couples when it comes to de facto relationships, superannuation and the like. More controversially, all states also have acted to provide gay and lesbian couples the same rights when it comes to foster parenting, adoption, IVF and surrogacy.

Many of these reforms were introduced with little or no public debate or acrimony. Perhaps this is why the issues of family and parenting have been injected so robustly into the gay marriage debate. There is clear logic in the argument that says these issues have already been resolved and that the issue of marriage is therefore discrete from any redundant debate about same-sex parenting. Yet, in the real world, it is perhaps unrealistic to expect that the legal endorsement of gay marriage would not imply an added endorsement for same-sex parenting. Lesbian and gay parents understandably have hit back at suggestions their families are other than ideal. They argue marriage will not only help to affirm their relationships but also will provide legitimacy in the eyes of their children. Yet just as we should not question the love and care gay couples afford their children, neither should we diminish the devotion to children in families where couples choose not to marry or, indeed, where there are single parents or other permutations. Within all the variables of gender, sexuality, family breakdown and happenstance, we surely would agree the best interests of children are served by one crucial and non-variable ingredient: loving parenthood. Yet the extent to which we can discuss these issues, or will be after any change to the law, remains a bit of a mystery. Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous once was hauled before the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission for defending traditional marriage and families, so there are legitimate concerns that if same-sex marriage becomes law, state and federal human rights bodies could overreach on this issue, as they have on so many others.

This is why legislative detail is vital. It is not a matter of defending the so-called rights of a baker who doesn’t want to cater a gay wedding — such discrimination is illegal now and should remain so — but we must deftly protect the rights of Christians, Muslims and others who may oppose gay marriage to espouse and apply their moral codes without impinging on the rights of others. It is no easy task. What of the rights of teachers in Catholic or Muslim schools who wish to marry someone of the same sex? What of the rights of parents at that school? There is an intersection here between the public and the personal, the legal and the religious, that will be difficult to codify. This is why former prime minister John Howard has been right to say that the detail of the reforms should have been thrashed out before the public survey. Voters are being asked whether they support a reform to the law but are not being shown the precise nature of the changes. Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten, in unison, are asking for public trust while opponents, such as former prime minister Tony Abbott and the Australian Christian Lobby’s Lyle Shelton, have taken the chance to run a similar line to the anti-republican argument of the 1990s: if you don’t know, vote no.

The Australian is a newspaper that holds a strong predisposition towards personal liberty and responsibility. We want the state to involve itself in the personal lives of the people as little as is necessary. We also support the primacy of family in the life of the community and the nation. We believe marriage can strengthen families, even though many loving and successful families, by choice or circumstance, thrive and endure without it. We have been disappointed by the partisanship that has tarnished this debate and how arguments about process have delayed, demeaned and complicated the national discussion. This is an innately personal question. So we await with interest to see whether support for this reform as expressed in the privacy of the postal survey matches the strong endorsement recorded by most opinion polls in recent years. Yet we cannot endorse such a proposal sight unseen. We cannot abide the possibility of replacing one form of discrimination with another. If the public, as expected, indicates an appetite for change, the onus will fall on the Prime Minister to ensure the task of allowing the contract of marriage to be extended to same-sex couples can occur without silencing or intimidating those who hold a contrary view about legal arrangements or what they view as a religious sacrament.