GAY TRUTH

Gay couple at same-sex marriage march San Francisco 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “Ireland’s tolerant elite now demonise anyone who opposes gay marriage” according to Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked magazine . Bernard Keane, political editor at Crikey, tweets his thousands of followers that Lyle Shelton , managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby and opponent of gay marriage, is “ a nauseating piece of filth ” (see tweet published around 10pm 23/05/15). As for me, I am a “bigot” in big red painted letters on the wall of my medical centre this week, courtesy of a local vandal who does not like my opposition to same-sex marriage. But wait, there’s more, according to a staff columnist  in the Courier Mail who reminds the state of Queensland that I am not only bigoted but intolerant and “comically homophobic”. I beg to differ , as does my good friend Lyle Shelton and so many others who dare to stand up to the juggernaut of pro-gay intolerance, but it just rolls righ

Something terrifying has happened during the past five years: a belief that was held by virtually all human beings for centuries has been rebranded as bigotry , something that may no longer be expressed in polite society. That belief is that marriage is something that occurs between a man and a woman, or between a man and many women: the idea that marriage is a union of opposite sexes. This was once seen as a perfectly normal point of view. Now, in the historical blink of an eye, it has been denormalised, and with such ferocity and speed that anyone still brave enough to express it runs the risk of being ejected from public life. Consider the ABC’s   Q&A   this week , and the furious response to it. The show was unusual from the get-go because it featured not one but two gay-marriage sceptics: Katy Faust, an American Christian, and me, a godless Brit. I made the argument that gay marriage now seemed to play the same role God played 200 years ago: anyone who didn’