Reviving the tradition of local marriage laws

It also ignores the fact that in the legal systems of most of our closest allies marriage law is made at a local level.

In Canada, provinces decide who can marry, and in the US it's the states.

Even in a unitary nation like the UK marriage laws are local with the result that same-sex couples will soon be able to marry in England but not Scotland, in Wales but not Northern Ireland.

Indeed, the localism of marriage law stretches right back to classical times when, yes, the Romans, actually left such an important matter in the hands of the widely disparate peoples they conquered (at least up until the church insisted on a single imperial marriage code).

Closer to home, white Australians happily married under different colonial and then state marriage laws for almost two centuries without anyone thinking it "unnatural".

Australia's founding fathers understood the importance of local marriage laws.

When writing the Constitution they made the deliberate choice to share the power to make marriage laws between the states and the Commonwealth.

This allowed for a balance between the tradition of local marriage laws and the need for some consistency across the federation.

It allowed for the possibility that if marriage law lags behind changing social expectations at one level, reform can be taken up at another.

It made our federation what the best federations should always be, dynamic.

In 1961 Australians opted for a uniform national marriage law.

It was a time when national reform was almost a heroic project, but that time has long passed.