Historic legislation allowing same-sex couples jointly adopt in Victoria has passed through the Victorian upper house after a lengthy debate. The bill passed with 31 MPs voting in favour, and only eight voting against.
Under the legislation, faith-based adoption services will still be able to maintain religious exemptions to offering adoptions to gay and lesbian couples.
The bill also originally tabled included a clause that ensured adoption agencies couldn’t discriminate against same sex couples. Labor MPs voted to pass the unchanged, but Liberals and National MPs voted to remove the clause thereby protecting the rights of adoption agencies with connections to religious organisations.
The question of how to balance the rights of the LGBT community to equality with respecting the rights of religious freedom is a tricky one to negotiate.
Many on the religious right – even on the US Supreme Court – maintain that after marriage equality passed, the next step inevitably will be evangelicals and Catholics being taken to court if they refused to allow a gay couple to get married under their roof.
Personally, I respect the sincerely held beliefs of churches not to conduct same sex marriage ceremonies, but that’s partly because I’m a Godless atheist who would never want to get married in a church or seek the blessing of an organised religion that didn’t want me as a member.
In the United States, this debate is playing out in real time in the Church of Latter Day Saints, after Mormon leaders decreed that any LGBT Mormons who get married are to be disciplined and ex-communicated from the church. Although the Supreme Court may have declared marriage equality legal across all 50 states, this decision means ordinary LGBT Mormon couples face the absurd situation of being cut off from their families, friends and their faith for the crime of getting married to their lawful spouses.
It isn’t just Mormons. Scientologists have also had public spats with their own disciples over their attitude towards homosexuality. And of course even in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, there are still many evangelical Christians and Muslim mosques where homosexuality is regarded as not just unnatural, but a sin against God, ranging from ex-gay camps and conversion therapies that try to make you pray the gay away, to even more barbaric punishments.
While I can accept people’s private right to practice their religious beliefs and for religious institutions to refuse to marry couples under their roofs, but I draw the line when people use religious beliefs to sanction blatant bigotry or homophobia in the course of your everyday life or in the course of during a job or providing a service.
If you’re Kim Davis, the county clerk at the marriage registry office, a cake baker, a pub owner, hairdresser, a doctor, a taxi driver or a school principal, then you shouldn’t be able to refuse service to a gay couple, any more than you should be allowed to refuse to service someone because of their race, nor should you be able to fire someone for being gay. These exemptions aren’t protecting religious freedoms, they are giving discrimination a free pass.
In my life as a journalist, I’ve had to interview people and represent – as objectively as possible – the views of people who I found personally abhorrent or who viewed me as such for being gay. In other words, sometimes I had to do my job, even when I was offended. There is no right in a democracy not to be offended but there is a right not to be blatantly discriminated against (or at last there should be).
As Drew Sheldrick, the new editor of SBS’s newly LGBT website once memorably put it, if a gay nurse has to wipe the arse of every old bigot in hospital, then you can bake a fucking cake. And that goes for adoption agencies too.
CLOSET is on again this month at private members’ club Hugs & Kisses, for the second last bash of 2015. On Friday November 20, CLOSET will once again open its doors from 10pm, and invites back DJ JNETT, Melbourne’s first lady of disco, to grace the decks once again. The last time she played she spun everything from techno to talking heads and turned the whole dancefloor into a sweating, heaving mess that kept going for hours. Joining her will be Salvador Darling, fresh from his Horse Pavilion, YO! MAFIA and Luke Agius. Door entry is available from 10pm till very late. Entry is $15 on the door. Hugs & Kisses is a members’ club, so you’ll need to register for entry if you haven’t already. You can also win the chance to get in free simply by RSVPing to the event on Facebook.
There is some big news coming up on the gay scene as we prepare next month to announce Midsumma’s program for the annual LGBTIQ festival in January and February. And without giving too much away, CLOSET also has some big things planned in 2016 that we are almost ready to unveil.
