Every now and then, round my place, a heavy tension settles in the air, as my wife and I go about our days.
These periods of anxiety always coincide with the ugly rearing of same-sex marriage in the public discourse. Whenever the possibility of legally sanctioned gay marriage is mooted, we become distinctly uneasy about our future.
This is because like all decent, hard-working Christian patriots, our marriage contract contains a "homosexual get-out clause". It was made explicit even in our vows: "I promise to love and honour thee till death do us part, unless gays ever get married, then all bets are off." And let me tell you, those vows are sacred.
So you can imagine our relief when we found out that Attorney-General Robert McClelland, in removing same-sex discrimination from 100 laws, had opted not to allow same-sex couples to get married and made clear that "the Government believes that marriage is between a man and a woman".
Of course marriage is between a man and a woman. Have you ever seen a woman have a buck’s party? Have you ever seen a father give away his daughter, who is a man? Of course not, because it’s illegal. And why is it illegal? Because marriage is between a man and a woman.
Make no mistake, if the law were changed, it wouldn’t just be men marrying men and women marrying women – we would open the floodgates and allow mothers to marry sons, sisters to marry brothers, toddlers to marry sharks, and priests to marry woodheaters. Experts agree that it is impossible to draft a law allowing consenting adults to marry each other, without also allowing children and animals and kitchen utensils to do so as well. I doubt you’ll be thanking Mr Rodney Croome of the Australian Coalition for Equality the day you see a healthy young man marry his own hair, all because the gays got a little over-sensitive.
The argument against gay marriage is rather elegant and quite impeccable: marriage is a historically based institution which forms one of the foundations of our modern society. The basic unit of society is the family, and families are created by a marriage between a man and a woman. To alter this institution would necessitate a drastic shift in the way our society is organised and the way we think about our social relationships, which could pose a grave risk to social stability, the welfare of our offspring, and the continued procreation of our species. Marriage, as we know it today, is the wellspring of all the cohesion and harmony that allows us to evolve and progress as a people.
Or, to put it a little more succinctly: Gays? Eww.
It was even more of a relief to see that McClelland quickly slapped down the ACT Government, when it tried to introduce civil unions for same-sex couples. As McClelland says, we cannot have anything in this country that mimics marriage, any more than we can have a territory government mimicking autonomy.
ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope may claim that legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships does not diminish his marriage "one iota", but I think he will find on reflection that it would diminish by several iotas, possibly more. Experience shows that in places where homosexual civil unions are permitted, over 90 per cent of decent upstanding heterosexual marriages have dissolved within a fortnight, frequently in violent circumstances. In some cases, straight people have reported arriving home the day the civil union legislation was passed, and finding they literally did not recognise their spouse.
So Mr Stanhope, for your sake and that of your marriage, just be thankful your Government isn’t a real one.
The instant collapse of normal, non-perverted God-fearing marriages everywhere would be only the beginning of the catastrophe that the homo-activists are trying to rain upon our heads. Redefining marriage would mean changing the language, which has been steadfast and unchanging for millions of years. If we alter one word’s meaning, what’s to stop us altering others? If marriage can mean a union between two people of any sex, then dog can mean cat, stop can mean go, trampoline can mean anaesthesiologist, until eventually our language breaks down completely and we are reduced to a rabble of burbling buffoons. Just look at Spain – they legalised gay marriage there and I can’t understand a word those people are saying.
So have a good hard think, same-sex marriage backers, about the world you’re trying to usher in. A world full of primitive deviates communicating through grunts and whistles with the bucketful of live ducks that they married the day before, and dying prematurely of exhaustion from the constant pride parades.
A grim vision, I think you’ll agree.
So let us defend the culture that has served us so well and kept us so happy and free all these years. And let us remember what Hollywood has taught us: homosexuals have their place at weddings, and that place is comic relief. Can we afford to lose that?