It's time to draw the line on discrimination exemptions in marriage legislation

If any more discrimination exemptions make their way into marriage equality legislation, that legislation should be voted down and we should start again.

The Dean Smith bill already has more exemptions than most LGBTI Australians can tolerate.

Anything more would make a joke of our collective effort to achieve full equality and would not be worth the right to marry.

Let's start with how unpopular the Smith bill is and why.

A recent survey of 3,300 LGBTI Australians across all demographics showed around 70% opposition to those sections that allow discrimination by civil celebrants who nominate themselves as "religious" and by commercial services that are tied to religious organisations.

A majority said they would rather wait than accept marriage on these terms.

The concerns many LGBTI people have about the Smith bill relate to both principle and strategy.

The exemptions set bad precedents for allowing discrimination in the name of religion and they give new life to old prejudices about same-sex marriage being a threat to faith and freedom.

According to the above study, over 70% of LGBTI people believe the Smith exemptions will be used disproportionately against LGBTI people even though they don't exclusively target us.

Black letter lawyers defend the Smith bill saying nothing really changes because its exemptions echo existing exemption in the Marriage Act and other acts.

But they fail to understand that when you duplicate bad laws you give them a new lease of life to cause renewed harm.

Strategically, the bill's exemptions give too much away too early (who starts negotiations with their final position?), they may encourage the demand for further compromises, and it has never been clear how many votes are contingent on them.

Religious exemptions were inserted in the Smith bill to prompt a Coalition free vote, but the postal survey served that purpose instead.

Post-survey, we should have started the legislative process with an entirely new bill, one that wasn't compromised by unnecessary exemptions allowing discrimination in the name of religion.

There are many bills to choose from including bills previously introduced by Labor, Green and Liberal members, or just about any of the bills that achieved marriage equality overseas.

When I left Australian Marriage Equality to campaign more vigorously against a marriage equality plebiscite I cited a young gay man who killed himself during the angry, hateful debate on decriminalisation in Tasmania in the 1990s, and how I needed to do all I could to stop that happening again.

Now, my mind goes to some young gay man in the near future who is humiliated and embarrassed when the celebrant who married his parents, or the flower shop that catered for his sibling's wedding, refuses to deal with him because he is marrying another man.

He and his outraged family will assume such a refusal is illegal until they discover our Parliament explicitly allowed it as recently as 2017.

Perhaps my hypothetical young gay man will overlook the discrimination, or perhaps he will start a campaign to prevent it happening to any one else.

Either way he should not have to endure this injustice just because our Parliament was too weak to do the right thing.

It is no longer enough for Labor, Green and other politicians to say they oppose any further religious exemptions.

They must draw the line by stating publicly the point at which a marriage bill does more harm than good and should be entirely voted down.

I draw the line at anything more than the already-flawed Smith bill.

I believe the overwhelming majority of LGBTI people do too.

Now it's over to politicians to decide where they will draw the line.

We can only hope they draw it on the right side of dignity and equality.