Australian Government Agrees to National Vote on Gay Marriage
Australian Government Agrees to National Vote on Gay Marriage : CANBERRA, Australia—Australia’s government has agreed to a national vote next year on whether to allow gay marriage, although the opposition says it may challenge any such vote and any result wouldn’t be binding on Parliament.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Tuesday that his cabinet had agreed to a vote testing national support for same-sex marriage on February 11, with additional funding for “yes” and “no” campaigns.
But the main Labor opposition bloc said it had not decided on whether to agree to the ballot and could instead back fringe senators who hold the balance of power in the upper house to oppose the national vote, or even have lawmakers decide the matter in Parliament.
“We will ensure that every Australian has a say,” Mr. Turnbull told Parliament. “They will have a debate, it will be respectful, it will be civil and then the nation will respect the decision.”
Since 2001, 21 countries have legalized same-sex marriage. The U.S. did so last year, along with Ireland, a bastion of Catholicism, which became the first country to legalize it by popular vote. Australia is one of the last Western nations to prohibit marriage equality.
An overwhelming majority of Australians—around 70%, according to recent polls—also support same-sex marriage, including the prime minister, who in March became the first Australian leader to attend Sydney’s gay and lesbian Mardi Gras parade.
But the issue has opened deep divisions in Mr. Turnbull’s ruling Liberal-National coalition, which has only a fragile grip on power after cliffhanger elections in July, with some conservative lawmakers staunchly opposed to a change. They include Mr. Turnbull’s predecessor Tony Abbott, a former trainee priest who reluctantly agreed to a popular vote on same-sex marriage before Mr. Turnbull ousted him in a party coup meant to avert an expected election backlash.
The same-sex marriage vote—in which Australians would be asked “should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?”—is opposed by churches and the 50,000-strong Australian Christian Lobby, although their influence is muted in a country where much of the electorate leans to the political center.
In June, ACL Chairman Lyle Shelton likened marriage equality and a “rainbow political agenda” to the rise of Nazism, saying in a blog that it was “causing unthinkable things to happen, just as unthinkable things happened in Germany in the 1930s.”
Source : http://www.wsj.com/articles/australian-government-agrees-to-national-vote-on-same-sex-marriage-1473754273
