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May 31st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda NSW has joined Tasmania and the ACT in calling for the legalisation of gay marriage.
Greens MP Cate Faehrmann’s private members’ motion passed 22 votes to 16 in the Legislative Council, with both major parties allowing a conscience vote. Marriage is a federal responsibility, governed by the 1961 Commonwealth Marriage Act.
Unlike the federal Liberal Party, the NSW Liberals allowed a conscience vote on the issue. The Premier, Barry O’Farrell, dismissed suggestions the motion would put pressure on the federal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, to allow a conscience vote when several gay marriage bills come before federal Parliament.
Mr O’Farrell declined to confirm whether he backed the motion, saying if a similar motion was debated in the lower house he would make his views clear then.
But the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young and the Australian Marriage Equality convener Alex Greenwich said the motion had put pressure on Mr Abbott to allow a conscience vote.
Shortly before the vote, Ms Faehrmann likened a ban on gay marriage to 1950s laws prohibiting Aboriginal men from marrying white women.
During the debate, the Labor MP Helen Westwood described being in a lesbian relationship.
”There’s just no evidence that my children or my grandchildren have been disadvantaged by being raised in a same-sex relationship,” she told the chamber.
But Labor’s leader in the upper house, Luke Foley, said that as a practising Catholic he believed civil unions were more appropriate for gay couples than marriage.
”I do believe that homosexual relationships are different to a married relationship,” he said, adding a ”procreative relationship open to the possibility of children” was an ”essential feature of marriage”.
The Liberal MP Matthew Mason-Cox argued same-sex marriage could lead to polygamy.
”Indeed, if one was to take the notion of equality of marriage to its logical conclusion, then there would be no reason to stand in the way of polygamist marriages, or other variants,” he said.
”This is the so-called slippery slope in this debate which has manifested itself overseas in some jurisdictions where same-sex marriage has been allowed.”
Fellow Liberal Catherine Cusack, however, said denying gay people the right to marriage caused ”enormous harm and hurt” and was a 19th century approach to relationships.
”The rights that we have all been able to take for granted … ought to be extended to all couples,” she said.
The upper house passed an amendment from the Nationals’ Trevor Khan for religious groups to be exempted from having to perform gay marriage ceremonies.
But the Legislative Council rejected amendments from the Christian Democrats MP Fred Nile and Labor’s Greg Donnelly, which noted the European Court of Human Rights did not consider homosexual marriage to be an inherent right.
The Australian Christian Lobby’s NSW director, David Hutt, said it was disappointing the NSW Parliament had allowed itself to be ”co-opted into an activist campaign” to change the federal Marriage Act.
AAP
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