In the Sydney Morning Herald, Michelle Griffin writes it is time to privatise marriage:
Why is marriage legal? Or rather: why does the government have to make it legal? The Marriage Act, says Julia Gillard, has ”a special status”. The Prime Minister is inclined to preserve that status for unions between a man and a woman. For reasons cultural and historical, she says, the act should discriminate against same-sex marriages, which remain unrecorded in the registrars of births, deaths and marriages.
But what if the government did not regulate marriages at all? The call to privatise marriage has had no airplay in Australia’s gay marriage debate, but in the US it’s gaining support from liberals, libertarians and even some conservatives.
Imagine a nation in which marriage had the same legal force as, say, a baptism or a bat mitzvah. The PM could still believe in marriage between a man and a woman, without the hassle of debating it in the media, the House or the national conference.
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