The slippery slope to homophobia

After heterosexual couples began to get hitched it was all down hill. First they got us ejected from Eden, then men started marrying lots of women at once.

Pretty soon we had forced marriages, child betrothals, wife beating and wife burning.

And don’t get me started on the kids: forced labour, abandonment, infanticide - all practiced by heterosexual married parents.

Clearly, the only way to stop these barbarities is to ban straight people from marrying.

If you think that’s silly and not a little offensive then welcome to the world of those Australian same-sex couples that want to marry.

We are told that if we are able to legally wed marriage and society will fall apart.

There’ll be a stolen generation of fatherless and motherless children. Christians will lose all their freedoms and be “fed to the lawyers” (as evangelicals like to joke).

The latest fear is that the recognition of multiple-partner relationships like polygamy (one man married to several women) and polyamory (several people together) are “the next logical step”.

Of course, they aren’t.

Nowhere have these relationships been recognised as a result of same-sex marriage.

In Australia there is no movement or public support for their legal recognition. Our family law is constructed for couple relationships and would find it impossible to handle multiple-partner relationships.

Our shared cultural understanding of marriage as an equal, stable, exclusive sexual relationship between two people can accommodate same-sex marriages but not multiple-partner relationships.