Challenging religious bigotry
Dear Catholic Bishop Christopher Prowse,
Your lies and untruths do you and your boy-raping paedophile-protecting Catholic Church no justice.
You have no credibility and you make no sense.
You perpetuate vile attitudes.
I dislike you because you are full of hate and intolerance.
Michael Barnett.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52h08RNB6_M]Gregory and I participated in the Adam Hills In Gordon St Tonight Mass Same-sex wedding. It’s been a positive and rewarding experience for us.
Tonight my partner Gregory and I got married. We made a public declaration, affirming our love for each other. We were dressed in our sartorial best, freshly shorn and groomed like two gay blades.
We had a bucks night the week before and we even had a lovely party afterward, with wonderful catering. Oh, and there were bomboniere.
I have to be honest with you. It wasn’t a real wedding, and we didn’t really get married. But yes, there was a wedding, on TV, in which as reality actors, we pretended to get married. You see, currently in Australia two men like Gregory and me are not allowed to get married to each other. That’s gay.
But despite the mean-spirited Howardian legalistic prohibition on us blokes tying the knot, the lovely team at Adam Hills In Gordon St Tonight decided to throw us a big ole gay wedding. And throw us a wedding they did. There were photoshoots, interviews, a special bucks and hens night (coz there were some chicks as well as some blokes wanting to tie the knot), the main event, wedding presents and even a cocktail reception afterward. Oh, and there was live entertainment too, although it seemed more like it had been freshly exhumed. And all at tax-payer expense. Thank you tax paying Australia, and especially Jim Wallace and Bill Muehlenberg, coz I know how much you hip dudes would have wanted to help us celebrate our homosexual union.
If you know me you’d know that I’ve been very activisty in raising awareness of the discrimination that a not insignificant section of Australia’s population faces when it comes to equality in relationship recognition. I’ve protested (peacefully) at the Equal Love rallies. I helped my partner campaign as a then-candidate for the Secular Party of Australia in the 2010 Federal Election (because the party supported marriage equality). I manage the Proud to be a Second Class Australian Facebook group, with a moniker aimed to draw attention to being treated as second class by the Federal Government. I give money to Get Up! to campaign for marriage equality. I’m even a paid member of Australian Marriage Equality.
I don’t think I could possibly make it any clearer that I am trying to achieve a turnaround in the marriage legislation in Australia, to remove the discriminatory words that, for no good reason, prevents me from marrying my partner. That said, we are already living in a legally recognised relationship under Victorian state legislation because we entered a civil union on April 21, 2010. Sadly though this relationship is only valid in Victoria and carries no legal weight anywhere else in the world. It’s also not the same as being married. You might ask why? Well, quite simply, because it’s not a marriage. It’s a civil union, or a registered relationship, or a domestic partnership, or whatever else you want to call it, but it’s not a marriage.
Do I want to get married? Good question. Yes, and no. To be honest I don’t really know. Parts of me want to get married and then go and say to those who don’t believe in equality “See, two poofs can now get married, so stick your bigotry…”. More than that I want to be a positive example of a successful same-sex relationship, to help empower those in their closets, and say “Gregory and I are two men, married to each other. If we can do it, so can you. Be proud of who you are”. Other parts of me simply don’t like the old-fashioned, out-dated notion of marriage that binds two people together, until either one dies or they get a divorce. Camels and goats must be fatted and dripping in gold chokers if you must give a dowry.
I am committed to being in my relationship with Gregory, and irrespective of any piece of paper or legal status, we love each other very much and want to be deeply interconnected in each other’s lives. I know what we mean to each other. We’re special in each other’s eyes and hearts and that’s something legislation can’t change. But it can make us equal in society, and that’s what we both want. Equality. Incidentally, some narrow-minded folk believe that two gay men can’t be equal in society, and therefore shouldn’t get married, because we can’t have children, or that even that we’d be depriving the children of a mother, and therefore bad parents, blah blah blah. With two well-adjusted adult children under his belt Gregory certainly isn’t looking to have any more. And we are equal in society.
Now, around the middle of February this year Gregory sent me an email asking if I wanted to be in the Adam Hills IGST mass gay wedding:
To join our Mass Gay TV Wedding on March 26, email gordonst@abc.net.au – include your contact details and a pic of the happy couple!
I pondered the idea and then without consulting Gregory I sent in an application to be part of the wedding. I thought that if he was tempting fate with asking me to be part of a TV wedding, I’d accept the challenge and commit him, and me, to being part of it. 🙂
We were accepted by the IGST team and told there were going to be a number of events over the coming weeks culminating in the TV wedding. It was becoming exciting. A bit like a real wedding. Photos, what to wear, bring some food, look good, get hair cut (#2 clippers on each other…), vajazzle, you know, the usual stuff. There was a sense of anticipation. A bit like a real wedding.
We told our family and friends about this. They got excited. Very excited. Colleagues were talking, even those who were usually a little uneasy with the “gay” thing were getting excited for Gregory and me. I was even asked by a colleague, who only last year told me he didn’t believe in gay marriage, whether I was going to invite the guys from work to a bucks night. After a coffee and a chat he even seemed comfortable with the notion that marriage equality might have some merit in treating people on an equal basis. Yes, equality is about being equal.
Gregory told me many of his colleagues were having kittens because he was getting married. They really couldn’t contain their excitement for him. And on Facebook I was getting a variety of well-wishes from people who wanted to know when “it” was and then wished us all sorts of lovely things in anticipation of the big day (or is it the big gay…?). Things were abuzz.
I really started feeling like I was getting married, for real. When we got civil unionated in 2010 people were happy for us, but not to the same level as they had become around the IGST wedding event. It was as if the notion of marriage conveyed a special status, over and above any other sort of life event or relationship recognition. Funny that. Because it does. It’s the ultimate in happy. And it’s the ultimate in silly too. Just look at the amount of money people throw at weddings. It’s big business.
Quite remarkably though, and I think this is about as significant as it gets, Gregory told me that tonight, on his way home, a dear friend of his told him that he had decided that it wasn’t so bad after all if two blokes wanted to get married. He threw his religious belief coins up in the air and they both landed queen-side up. And the world didn’t stop, and the sky didn’t fall in.
People have been talking because of the IGST wedding event. They are talking about how lovely it is to see two guys getting married, and two gals getting married, and they cried and they were happy. These people and conversations are actually changing attitudes and opening minds. Oh, and my Facebook account has melted with all the wonderful messages from people who saw us on the TV and loved that we were getting married. I have never ever had a bigger response to anything on my Facebook page than to our participation in this event. It’s really quite overwhelming, and humbling.
So we got TV married tonight, in a very happily-ever-after way. Two handsome princes rode off into the sunset and shared a bit of love around the place, and hopefully they made a difference.
PS. If you missed the TV coverage of this event, you can catch up on it here.
PPS. If you want to tell the Australian government why you support marriage equality, you can make a submission here. It only takes a few minutes. Be quick as the deadline is April 2, 2012. You can read other people’s public submissions on the site, to get an idea of what they are saying. Speak from the heart. It need only be a few paragraphs. Thanks.
The first part of our experience! A photo shoot and an interview, here’s what went to air on the ABC 14 March 2012
[youtube:http://youtu.be/6VFtfQ3WFe8]
Apparently I’m getting married on TV and at tax-payer expense. 😉
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Photographer, blogger, popular Melbourne gay identity and significant Qmelb contributor, Michael Barnett, is to be featured in a mass gay wedding with his handsome partner. The wedding (and what has been advertised as a stag night / hens night) will be hosted on Australia’s national television network’s by comedian Adam Hills over the next two Wednesday evenings. This will clash with Melbourne’s Queer Film Festival. The wedding will be paid for by Australian taxpayers, a service the ABC has never offered to straight couples. At this stage it is not known whether the ABC or Barnett will be releasing a video of the post wedding celebrations.
Michael Glover
East Melbourne
(The Gordon St Mass Same-Sex TV Wedding Extravaganza is just around the corner! This inaugural event will happen on March 26 and airs Wednesday March 28 at 8:30pm.)
Peter Madden and Warwick Marsh would make excellent homosexual lovers, but which one would go top?
[SOURCE]
I reckon Peter Madden and Warwick Marsh would make great homosexual lovers. Two wonderful role models of Australian masculinity. But which one would be the man and which one would be the woman in that relationship? Coz we all know that every relationship has male and female roles.
I also wonder which one would go top and which one bottom. Perhaps they’d take turns, one going for it first, then flipping and going the other way. I bet they’d both get down and dirty, squealing like stuck pigs, and there might even be some santorum being shared, coz I’m sure they’d be lapping up the post-coital love juices.
Well, that’s just my fantasy, a bit like their fantasy, that all homosexual relationships are disgusting and dangerous and that it’s ok to vilify homosexuals.
Oh, and if they don’t like that gays want to marry a same-sex partner, I’m of the opinion that their choice of life partner is pretty sucky too and that they could have done a lot better.
My 2009 response to Rabbi James Kennard’s column on why there is such a high failure rate in marriages in the Jewish community.
The following letter was published in full (see letter “Hidden Anguish in Marriage”) in the Australian Jewish News on Nov 6, 2009, in response to Rabbi James Kennard’s Matters of Principal column “Building the blocks of marriage” (AJN; Oct 30 2009 p23).
A copy of the column appears below my letter.
In talking about why so many marriages in the Jewish community are failing, Rabbi James Kennard neglects to mention two of the most important attributes a person must bring to a marriage: honesty and integrity. Without either, any marriage is doomed before it has even begun, no matter how hard the couple perseveres.
Roughly five to 10 per cent of any population is not attracted to the opposite sex, but rather the same sex. In the Jewish community this is often conveniently swept under the carpet and ignored, if it is ever even acknowledged. Many of these same-sex attracted people get married under pressure, possibly have children, find themselves in loveless relationships and the next thing is their marriages have fallen apart and they’ve got broken homes. Sadly I’ve met all too many of these people.
What is lacking in these marriages is honesty and integrity, and the reason why is because of intolerant attitudes in the community that make it a taboo to be in a relationship with a person of the same sex. The net result is false, hollow heterosexual relationships. The Orthodox community won’t even tolerate the idea of recognising same-sex Jewish relationships, let alone considering same-sex marriages (despite the position of the federal government). In this atmosphere of intolerance, same-sex attracted people will always be second-class and the marriages they find themselves in will inevitably be unhappy.
Perseverance is not the answer to sustaining a marriage if the foundation it’s build on is one of lies. What we need to teach our children is honesty, integrity and that it’s ok to have relationships with the people they want to love, not the people they are expected to love. We might then find that the percentage of happy marriages actually increases.
Michael Barnett.
Aleph Melbourne.
Australian Jewish News
Oct 30 2009
Page 23Matters of Principal
James KennardBuilding the blocks of marriage
In an age of instant gratification, we are failing to teach our children the skills of perseverance, especially when it comes to sustaining a marriage.
GOOD news! Australia’s divorce rate last year was its lowest since 1992 and the number of marriages is on the rise. But before we become too complacent and begin to believe that we live in the land of matrimonial harmony, we must note that even this record low constituted no less than 47,000 divorces, compared to only 118,000 nuptials. Four in 10 marriages are still estimated to end in divorce.
So although the short-term trend is encouraging, the longer-term changes over decades show a significant decline in the number of marriages both commencing and enduring.
Every divorce is a personal tragedy. Often no-one is to blame, although many have to suffer. But as parents and educators, we must ask if we are preparing our children well for what will be the most important and consequential task of their adult lives – creating a loving and lasting marriage, for their own sake and that of their own children.
In some crucial respects, we are not succeeding. We are failing to teach our children to compromise or to persevere.
In striving to give our children self-esteem – a vital and difficult challenge in the world of competitive and sometimes cruel teenagers – we too often confuse self-worth with self-importance.
We put our children on a pedestal and tell each of them they are the most important person in their world. Bar and bat mitzvah parties turn into coronations of princes and princesses, with no indication that the youngster has any more to achieve in order to reach perfection.
Yet marriage requires precisely the opposite approach. Suddenly each partner in a couple has to realise that they are, at best, the second most important person in the world. They have to learn to share, to compromise and to yield. When in our children’s childhood and youth do we teach them these skills?
If a marriage hits a bumpy moment, as it often does, are future partners prepared? To the delight of advertisers and manufacturers, we live in a culture of “ending is better than mending”.
As soon as the iPod or iPhone looks tarnished, it’s time to get a new one (and that’s if we haven’t already upgraded simply because a new, slightly improved, model has been released). If a child has problems at school, the solution is to try a new one.
Clothes that suited us well 12 months ago are now “so last year”.
The same applies to challenges. In an era of instant gratification, if a problem cannot be solved quickly, it cannot be solved at all.
But marriage requires a mindset that is diametrically opposed to this cult of the new. We have to find opportunities to teach our children that often it is the old things that are worth preserving and that persevering with a problem may, in time, bring a solution.
Our children are not helped by the messages about relationships they receive from the media. The most popular movie genre, the romantic comedy, follows the same formula as the fairytale that was its cultural antecedent: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again – and they live happily ever after.
Dramas, on the other hand, usually start with a couple in a relationship and chronicle its dissolution. So the real (and best) story, of a couple working on their marriage and making it last, is rarely told.
One message that young people learn from their peers – that may or may not be endorsed by their parents – is the devaluing of sexual intimacy. In the past, society understood that sex was reserved for marriage and, even though this convention was often ignored, the expectation itself showed how physical relations can serve as a unique bond between couples permanently committed to each other for the long term.
Now such a view seems quaint or even so antediluvian as to be laughable. But if sex is used today to say “I like you” or even to say “hello”, what is left to say “I love you”?
The decline of marriage matters. It is not only human beings – parents and children – who suffer when a family is shattered, but society as a whole. Nature (whether the designer is God or Richard Dawkins) has arranged for the children of human beings to live with their parents for longer than the young of any other species, so that they can learn values and skills with which to prosper and build the next generation. The family is the building block of society itself.
A stable family does not guarantee stable children and many single or separated parents raise happy and confident young people. But to help our own children with the challenge of building their home and hence creating their own world, we must show them that the greatest happiness may take much time to achieve, but can last forever.
Rabbi James Kennard is principal of Mount Scopus Memorial College, Melbourne. His column appears monthly.
It’s time for equality. Sign the petition and share.
Gays can now get married in New York, but still not Australia. Seven years down and we’re still buried under the the most hateful piece of legislation ever passed in this country.
Seven years after the Howard Liberal government introduced the delightfully discriminating Marriage Amendment Act (2004), we’re still rallying for marriage equality.
Tracy Bartram was guest of honour:
Federal Member of Parliament (The Greens) for Melbourne, Adam Bandt is a strong advocate for Marriage Equality. He had a few words to say about Marriage Equality (including how the Liberal Party has been noticeably absent at these rallies – Shame Liberal Party Shame):
There were even drag queens and a hot dancing boy (because sequins and lip-sync are necessary to help legislate away the hate):
I seem to be a recurring feature at these rallies, and so does my partner Gregory. We’re not married, but we are in a registered relationship in the state of Victoria. We’ve been in a relationship since November 2008. Why can’t we get married Julia?
Oh yeah, and in case you didn’t know, same-sex couples can now get married in New York (but not Australia!):
Back in March I took some pics, and last Saturday, August 13 2011, I took some more. Enjoy the excitement of the day – photos on Google Photos and Facebook.
The members of the Rabbinic Council of Progressive Rabbis of Australia, Asia and New Zealand declare their support for marriage equality under Australian law.
Nearly four years after the 2007 statement from the Union of Progressive Judaism where they overturned their ban on same-sex commitment ceremonies, the UPJ have now endorsed full marriage equality under Australian law, as per the following media release from Australian Marriage Equality.
Media Statement
Wednesday May 25th 2011RABBIS GIVE STRONG SUPPORT TO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
Australia’s Progressive Rabbis have endorsed marriage equality.
Australian Marriage Equality National Convener, Alex Greenwich, and former AMA head, Prof. Kerryn Phelps, have welcomed the statement saying it highlights support for allowing same-sex marriages among people of faith.
“We welcome the Rabbis’ strong statement in support of marriage equality because it highlights that people of faith can and do support full legal equality for all Australians”, Mr Greenwich said.
“To often this issue is wrongly portrayed as ‘God v gays’ when it is really about the equality and dignity of all people.”
“The statement is important, not only because it is made by religious leaders, but because it is based on religious values such as the recognition of human dignity and because it recalls the deep discrimination Jewish people have endured.”
The statement was also welcomed by former AMA head, Prof Kerryn Phelps, who was married in a Jewish ceremony in the US to her wife Jackie Stricker-Phelps.
“I am very pleased leaders of my faith have now formally declared support for my marriage and call on the Australian Government to do the same”, Professor Phelps said.
“Rabbis have been performing same-sex marriage ceremonies for some years now, and it’s important these marriages have the same legal recognition as other marriages.”
“The recognition and respect that my faith provides our relationship gives us great strength .”
The full statement from the Union of Progressive Judaism is attached.
For more information contact Alex Greenwich on 0421 316 335.