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Originally published in Moonsick Magazine [offline]

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Originally published in Moonsick Magazine [offline]

In the past few months, a lot of reasons to vote against marriage equality have come up in Australia’s most recent debate on the subject.

Across blogs, headlines, comments and interviews, a list of reasons as long as the modern legal struggle for queer recognition have been made, by politicians, commentators, religious leaders and all the regular joes that have had our rights as equals placed in their hands over recent weeks.

Some of these given reasons include:

• because marriage is a traditional institution
• because children need a mother and a father
• because marriage is about procreation
• because religious tradespeople may be ‘forced’ to do work for gay people
• because safe schools is indoctrinating kids with marxist homo brainwashing
• also, because boys might… wear dresses? did i read that right? people are worried about this?
• because freedom of (specific, apparently) speech
• because the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ will become illegal (no, really)
• because tony abbott was allegedly attacked and violence is bad
• because Australia is a religious country and god thinks it’s a bad idea

and new ones every day, courtesy of The Australian’s dartboard of religious persecution and gay agendas.

But despite how loudly and widely these are spoken, and how they manage to percolate down to even the most unassuming and offline of our family members (turning sweet family gatherings into raging infernos of constant fact checking and verbal abuse — well, moreso than they were before at least), they’re missing a very vital point: they have nothing to do with this debate.

No, no matter how you put it, all you’re saying is:

I’m voting no because I don’t want gay people to be able to get married, and that makes me a bigot.

That’s all. You are allowed to vote no, we are apparently at a point in our national political life where you have every right to, but don’t try to talk your way out of what it fundamentally means.

All of these distractions are a way for people to hide their prejudice(because that’s what not wanting a segment of the population to have a right that the rest of the population has, is — bigotry) behind what may on the surface look reasonable, but entirely side step the only argument that actually matters right now.

When you vote no, all you’re saying is that you don’t believe in or support or agree or want gay people being able to marry each other, but that belief constitutes textbook bigotry, so have some fucking courage to own it and say so.