Very long post - please forgive.

If you care about where this country is headed then you should take the time to read all of Thursday's Hansard speeches from the laughably-truncated Marriage Bill 2004 'debate', but you should in particular read Senator Brian Greig's and Senator Andrew Bartlett's. First, though, you should read the PM's speech to the National Marriage Forum in Parliament's Great Hall the previous week, to see where his standard 'dog-whistling/wedging' stump tactics have now led both the Liberal Party and the country: to the hitherto unthinkable juncture whereby religious fundamentalism is explicitly driving secular legislative change. Browse the pale, grim, joyless, loveless faces in those podium photos; skim their grim, strident, humorless, loveless speeches; sense the aggressively populist, simplistic, barren, loveless feel to it all...

Remember, too, that the PM opened the enormous Hillsong Corporation in Sydney a few years ago (which at least has a sense of joy to it - when there are no dour pollies hanging about, that is). But remember, too, that Peter Costello - that 'small-l' Liberal future hope - ramped up the same God-wants-you-to-vote-Liberal vibe there not so long ago. And recognise if you haven't already that there's a very evangelical momentum building in politics in this country; if you think it has much to do with God and Faith and Values and Social Inclusion, then in my view you're dangerously deluded.

Now if all this - the growing popularity of Hillsong-style worship, 'policy' forums such as the National Marriage one - were going on a thousand miles away from our Parliament and our Parliamentarians, then big deal. Good luck to them; it's a free country, religious faith is a profoundly private matter, and even the very conservative brands can be warming, compassionate and beautifully Human. But there's a huge difference, in my view, between 20, 000 evangelical Christians coming together to sing along to the Jesus Rocks! (oh, and Je$u$ $ave$!, too) schtick in western Sydney each weekend, and a similar, if smaller, cross-section of worshippers being addressed by the PM in the very heart of our legislative centre, in the lead-up to a related law-making debate inside the chambers. Just how intimidating and physically-confronting does 'lobbying' of our Reps have to become before it ceases to be 'lobbying' and becomes electoral extortion?

Ignore John Howard's shallow weasel words in that speech; the separation of Church (specifically, what he calls 'Judeo-Christian' values - although Muslim groups supported the NMF, too) and State in this country is now under intense pressure.

Is it?

Well, let's leave the Great Hall's populist 'Religion Saves The Morally Weak' vibe, the soft neo-fascism of Moral Darwinism and the Besieged Defenders of Normalcy delusions - but not forgetting as you read these ugly speeches that they came from the same podium as our PM's - and step inside those secular law-making chambers to see what happened next. None of us, of course, were obliged to attend the neo-Revivalist values-hallellujah meeting in the Great Hall, nor subscribe to their elitist views of marriage, nor believe in such gods as would hate gay Human Beings as 'unnatural', nor live our lives as such zealots would have us live them. Unless, of course, such views somehow become enshrined or reflected or enmeshed in Federal Legislation. At which point it alas DOES begin to affect 'all of us', and so the private religious views of the (minority? majority?) of hateful bigots among those who attended the National Marriage Forum DO become everyone's business, including mine, which is why I am doing such a long and aggressive post here.

Confine your views on marriage to your churches and your own lives, persons of faith, and it's none of my business. Shape our secular laws according to them, and you are explicitly inviting me into that aspect of your private lives. I accept that invitation, and dismiss all those of you who would banish gay Australians outside the 'circle of life' as religious fakes.

Jesus Christ taught the world only one thing that matters: To love. To love. To love your fellow Man with every ounce of your Human Being. And the (secular) Marriage Amendment Bill 2004 that was passed last week is a piece of legislation based, at its ugly heart, on the precise opposite. Shame on you all, and shame especially on your god.

Here's how the Senate Marriage Guardian-in-Chief Senator Ian McDonald re-introduced (2nd Senate reading) the piece of heartless junk that rose like an ugly legislative weapon from the pseudo-religious heat of the National Marriage Forum - complete with the by-now-standard, artificially-hyped sense of looming 'moral crisis'. My bold:

It gives me much pleasure [Pleasure? What a miserable, miserable...; JR] to introduce this Bill. This Bill is necessary because there is significant community concern about the possible erosion of the institution of marriage. The Parliament has the opportunity to act quickly to allay these concerns. [How many divorcees in Parliament, Senator?! How many married MPs are having or have had flings?]

The Government has consistently reiterated the fundamental importance of the place of marriage in our society. It is a central and fundamental institution. It is vital to the stability of our society and provides the best environment for the raising of children. The Government has decided to take steps to reinforce the basis of this fundamental institution. Currently, the Marriage Act 1961 contains no definition of marriage. It does contain a statement of the legal understanding of marriage in the words that some marriage celebrants must say in solemnising a marriage that: `Marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.' The Government believes that this is the understanding of marriage held by the vast majority of Australians and they should form the formal definition of marriage in the Marriage Act.

This Bill will achieve that result.

John Howard's Liberal Party of Australia: bravely defending the sanctity of marriage-for-life and 'family values' in our Parliament since...well, since it became electorally useful, apparently.

Senator Joe Ludwig for the ALP-in-support was simultaneously craven in his weakness and self-congratulating of his own moral steadfastedness, in the way that only the ALP can be in such circumstances. He opens with fulsome capitulation to the conservative wedgers...:

Labor supports the Marriage Amendment Bill and will be voting for it today. Labor has said from the beginning of this debate that we will not support same-sex marriage. In a doorstop interview on 31 May this year, the Leader of the Opposition, Mark Latham, said: '...we have always said that we believe the Marriage Act is an institution for a man and a woman, and we've never proposed in the Labor Party to change that. So we will be supporting what really is the formalisation of it