An open letter to Janet Albrechtsen
Hi Janet,
I’m not a regular reader of the Australian. In fact, the only reason I picked up the dreary looking news paper is because it was sitting beside me, abandoned (and very lonely looking) at a cafe under my work. I’ll tack a disclaimer on my email by saying that I’m not actually offended by the stance of the piece.
Your article, ‘No Short Cuts to Gay Marriage’ was at best, a half thought out piece of trash. You show very little to absolutely no understanding of how and why the judicial system creates common laws, and then proceeded to say that gay marriage has no place in parliament. Well then, where does it belong? You ruled out the two ways to get laws changed. If it weren’t for Howard redefining the marriage act while he was in power, Australia itself could have been seeing the legitimacy of disallowing same sex marriage before the high court of Australia (Seven judges for constitutional issues, not three- since you seemed to be particularly dense on how this law-making stuff works).
Pushing the ‘It’s not a huge issue to most people’ not only represents your utter absence of any humanity, but also empathy to understand the gravity of the issue for the people it does affect. Since you had the audacity to bring up women’s rights and apartheid, I’ll point out for your benefit that I’m sure there was at some point similar ratio of people who were either apathetic, or were strongly against these reforms. Does this make fumbling around, waiting until the late 60’s to classify an Aboriginal person as a citizen an okay thing? Absolutely not. Could you imagine someone saying they were against Aborigines being official citizens in this day and age? They would be considered morally inferior and held as a social pariah. Same sex marriage is exactly like those two issues- it’s about all people being treated as human beings.
Also written is that if homosexual couples don’t enjoy the same rights and privileges as heterosexual couples, they should. Uh, have you even done any research? Gay couples have next to none of the marital rights that heterosexual couples enjoy in Australia (You are, after all, writing for “The Australian”, are you not?). You state that they enjoy civil unions- are you sure you’re not writing about New Zealand, or something? Newman went out of his way to remove civil union legislation that Queensland had boldly pushed through- extra parliamentary effort was wasted in order to remove legislation that had already gone through, an active act of discrimination, because Newman said ‘It’s not a big deal’.
I’m also trying to wrap my head around the astounding concept that ‘legitimate reasons’ for being against same sex marriage actually exist. These reasons were mysteriously missing from your article so I’m assuming the only legitimate reason is being too concerned with other people’s marriages and not enough concern with one’s own life. Or conception- in which case all of the sterile people should immediately have their right to marriage revoked.
Go back to high school and complete grade 12 again, you are disgustingly uneducated for a published writer.
Hopefully you’ll take this as advice to crawl back under the rock that you’ve quite clearly been living under, or at the very least think out your articles before you vomit such trash into the news media.
Regards,
Katarena Savage
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