The governments proposed plebiscite on marriage equality is officially doomed. With the Labor Party announcing their intention to vote the plebiscite bill down in the Senate, theres no way it can go ahead, and Australias tortuously long, needlessly bumpy road to marriage equality has taken yet another twist.
LGBT activists and pro-equal marriage campaigners welcomed the news, saying it will force the government to do its job and stave off a divisive, potentially harmful public debate on something that doesnt impact most peoples lives.
But since the plebiscites well-deserved booting, armchair critics have been out in force insisting that these campaigners dont know what theyre doing, that theyve made some crucial, irreversible error, and should swallow the plebiscite in the name of playing real politics.
In a column on Saturday, Fairfax political correspondent Mark Kenny called marriage equality campaigners who opposed the plebiscite naive, compared them unfavourably to the tactics used by US rights reformers in the 1960s, and demonstrated an embarrassing lack of understanding of both.
But I want to focus on this strange idea that marriage equality is now years or decades off because the plebiscites been rejected. Even in the insular, surreal world of Canberra, where closed-door deals between politicians dictate the direction of public policy more than their real-world effects, marriage equality is a lot closer than Kenny and other casual observers seem to think.
