This Too Shall Pass: Why Yesterday’s Setback For Marriage Equality Isn’t Reason To Give Up Hope

Last night, after a marathon five-hour joint party-room meeting, the federal Coalition voted to deny its members a conscience vote on marriage equality in Parliament by a factor of about two-to-one. The decision virtually guarantees that an upcoming cross-party bill aiming to legalise equal marriage will fail, and that marriage equality will not be achieved in the life of the current Parliament.

Despite a historic shift in support for the issue in the wider community over the last few years, and after innumerable protests, petitions, campaigns, viral videos, speeches, op-eds, debates and marches, we’re seemingly no closer to this simple but maddeningly elusive goal. Yesterday’s decision joins the failed votes in 2012, the short-lived same-sex marriages in the ACT that were annulled by the High Court in 2013, and the abortive bill introduced by Senator David Leyonhjelm in 2014 as yet another example of the thwarted hopes, setbacks, delays, compromises and general nonsense proponents of equal marriage in Australia have had to put up with so far.

Every effort and tactic has been stymied by the singular, unavoidable hurdle that is federal Parliament and the retrograde views of the bare majority of its members — so much so that groups like Australian Marriage Equality are reversing their previous opposition to a national plebiscite on the issue and challenging Prime Minister Tony Abbott to hold one, as he says he’d like to. Given his stubbornness so far, and the fact that a plebiscite doesn’t legally compel a government to do anything, it’s entirely possible that Abbott would meet a result he didn’t like with a shrug and some vague language about focusing on jobs and growth.

The debate’s been so hideously drawn out it’s understandable that plenty of people are feeling deflated and exhausted after yesterday — even GetUp seemed uncharacteristically downcast last night, and the latest sign from the Gosford Anglican Church today sums up the mood of the room pretty well.

“FOR GOD’S SAKE JUST DO IT.” Gosford Anglican Church’s message to Abbott today. #marriageequality #auspol pic.twitter.com/9iJoogaZ7N

— SameSame.com.au (@samesame) August 12, 2015

If you’re quietly wondering whether the “marriage equality is inevitable” argument is too optimistic, or even whether we’re going backwards, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the progress Australia has made on LGBTI rights in the last few decades, and the people who made that happen.

I can’t give anything like a comprehensive rundown of all the victories they have won over the years — there are too many for the limited space and time I have here, and there are plenty of people who could speak to them much better than I could. But it is fair to say that for Australia’s LGBTI justice movement, this battle is just the latest in a decades-long, mostly unknown war for basic legal rights, democratic freedoms, social acceptance and human dignity, and relatively few of us really understand the enormity of how much they’ve won in that time  — Tony Abbott least of all.

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Looking At History

Many people don’t know much about Sydney’s first Mardi Gras, for instance — back in 1978 when LGBTI people didn’t have much to celebrate. That first march was, first and foremost, a protest; a demand for the repeal of laws that criminalised homosexuality, an end to endemic police and state brutality, and a statement that homosexual people existed. Those who gathered to march wore elaborate make-up and costumes partly as an act of defiance and culture, but also to avoid being identified — many were terrified of being recognised by family or colleagues if their faces wound up on the news.

As it turned out, their fears were pretty justified; 53 of them were arrested, many of them violently, and their full names, street addresses and occupations were published in the Sydney Morning Herald. The consequences in their personal and professional lives were immense, and heartbreaking — many of them were subsequently fired or kicked out of their houses once their employers and landlords realised they were gay. As that pattern of police brutality and ritual humiliation was repeated in subsequent protests, growing awareness and sympathy soon led to laws limiting the arbitrary power of police officers in public spaces, as well as NSW eventually decriminalising homosexuality in 1984.

The thought of one of Australia’s largest newspapers forcibly outing several dozen people, potentially ruining or even endangering their lives, is unimaginable now. So too is the idea that a wave of hate-crime murders in a major city would go ignored by police out of sheer indifference. But that was the reality in Sydney as recently as the early 1990s — in parks and forests across the city used by gay men as “beats,” or places to meet discreetly for sex, gangs of men and women would routinely ambush, beat and sometimes kill people they found there for sport. “Fag-bashing” was so common the gangs that did it had names — the Bondi Boys, the Tamarama Three, the Park Side Killers. Men were picked up by the feet and wrists and thrown bodily over cliffs at Manly and Bondi; many of their bodies were never recovered.

Even worse, most of these murders were not even routinely investigated, largely out of an institutional indifference to the fate of “poofters”. A 2013 Herald investigation found that police frequently ignored evidence that violence had taken place, and instead listed roughly 80 likely murders as suicides or deaths by misadventure — 30 of which remain unsolved. Many families of the dead preferred it that way, rather than live with the shame that their loved one had been gay. The sister of one likely-murdered man remembers a police officer asking her: “Did you know your brother was a poofter? Do you still love him?”

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Where We Are Now

That we have come from hideous realities like those to our current circumstances in such a vanishingly short time is testament to the dogged strength of the LGBTI movement, and cause for anyone who might be flagging after yesterday to have hope. Society’s casual hatred and ignorance of “poofters” didn’t magically morph into cautious and growing acceptance of LGBTI people sometime in the mid-2000s — that change was fought for, and the people who did the fighting paid for every inch of won ground with pain and sacrifice most of us cannot contemplate.

Equal marriage won’t be the end of the push for complete legal equality by any stretch, and plenty of those old battles are still being fought. LGBTI people are still the target of hatred, suspicion, ridicule and violence, and society’s conception of gender-diverse and intersex people is still woefully uninformed. Allegations of police brutality at the 2013 Mardi Gras show that even in LGBTI-friendly parts of the country like Oxford Street, the old hatreds are still lurking in dark corners.

But the fact that we’re even talking about marriage equality like it’s a foregone conclusion less than 40 years after that first Mardi Gras march is proof of something astonishing. When even your Nana is crossly wondering “why don’t they just let the gays get married, whose business is it anyway,” the old cliche comes true: we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Compared to what’s come before, Tony Abbott isn’t a roadblock — he’s a speedbump, and if the new rumblings about his leadership can be believed, he might be about to get run over.

Put it this way: who would you bet on to win this latest fight? A social movement that has upended the attitudes and laws of a nation? That has faced down state-sanctioned violence, entrenched ignorance, hysterical hatred, and the outlawing of its own existence?

Or this guy?

I know where I’d put my money.

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Feature image via Guillaume Paumier on a Flickr Creative Commons licence.