Pyne to oppose any strengthening of religious freedoms in SSM bill

Christopher Pyne is set for a showdown with the PM after saying he will oppose any religious safeguards being put in the SSM bill.

Christopher Pyne and Malcolm Turnbull may be set to butt heads over proposed changes to the SSM bill. Picture: AAP

Leading Liberal moderate and senior cabinet minister Christopher Pyne will oppose any amendments to a same-sex marriage bill aimed at strengthening protections for religious freedoms.

The position puts him at odds with Malcolm Turnbull who indicated earlier this week he would support several safeguard amendments, warning there was “sincere, heartfelt anxiety” about how the bill would affect religious freedoms.

In his speech to the lower house this evening, Mr Pyne — one of the government’s leading champions for same sex marriage — said the separation of Church and State was at the foundation of Australia’s “civil order.”

The South Australian MP said the separation of Church and State would be undermined by denying the “equal right of all citizens to contract civil marriage simply because of the sacramental restrictions that apply to holy matrimony.”

“It would also be hypocritical,” he said. “We do not deny civil marriage to infertile couples or divorcees, even though these too are traditional impediments to Christian marriage. That is because it is plainly wrong for the law of the state to disqualify citizens from secular rights by reference to religious laws.”

Mr Pyne said that he was an “observant Catholic” and noted the legacy of Christian ethics lay at the heart of Australia’s system of government, but warned against religious tenets becoming the “prescriptive basis of our law making.”

“That way lies oppression,” he said.

He said he would not be supporting amendments in defence of religious freedom because there was already a protection enshrined at Section 116 of the Constitution. He argued the proposed additions were “superfluous”

Mr Pyne said the bill before the parliament already contained concessions allowing religious marriage celebrants and religious organisations to decline to participate in same sex marriages.

“I am satisfied that these changes protect religious freedom in this country,” he said. “I do not support the insertion of unnecessary amendments.”

“As a matter of principle, acts of parliament should not contain superfluous clauses. Especially superfluous clauses based on the opinion that Australia’s laws don’t adequately protect the religious freedoms that we have cherished since Federation. I firmly believe that they do.”

Mr Pyne attracted the criticism of his party colleagues earlier this year when audio leaked of him boasting that same sex marriage would be legalised “sooner than everyone thinks” at an address to Liberal moderates at a meeting of the so-called “black hand” at Star Casino’s Cherry Bar in Sydney.

Tempers flared over the statement, with Mr Pyne also revealing that he voted for Mr Turnbull in “every ballot he’s ever been in” and bragged that the moderates were now in the “winner’s circle” in government.

Echoing one of the key justifications for Mr Turnbull’s support of the same sex marriage bill proposed by Western Australian Liberal Senator Dean Smith, Mr Pyne said he was backing the legislation “because it is the conservative thing to do.”

“Conservatism should not be the enemy of change. The spirit of true conservatism is about keeping what is best in our institutions — and improving what is not,” he said.

Mr Pyne also used his speech to dispel suggestions that same-sex attraction was a disorder to be reversed or an illness to be cured.

He told gay and lesbian Australians the same sex marriage bill was aimed at bringing to an end “all the unthinking denigration and casual condescension” they may had been forced to routinely endure.

“It behoves us in this place to ensure that these same tired and destructive prejudices, which have wrought enough wretchedness and suffering in their time, should not be permitted to continue to disenfranchise any Australian from participating in the one institution of society by which our law responds to our greatest virtue — by taking love and enhancing it with the social status it inherently deserves.”