ACT Liberal Senator Gary Humphries has told constituents who support same-sex marriage that he opposes a change to the law because marriage is a religious issue.
In the letter to local residents, Senator Humphries said that same-sex couples cannot marry because “The Church … (has) a measure of ownership” over the meaning of marriage.
Humphries is now the only federal MP in the territory who opposes same-sex marriage, after the other representatives (Gai Brodtmann, Kate Lundy and Andrew Leigh) confirmed their support for the reform last year. A News Ltd poll last year found that 73% of territorians support same-sex marriage.
In the letter, Senator Humphries argued that marriage was “created” by the Church and could not be changed:
“Marriage … was originally a religious sacrament conferred by the church. Over many centuries, certain legal rights became attached to marriages which were not available outside this institution. In recent centuries lawmakers began to realise that it was unfair to exclude people not in a religiously-sanctioned relationship from the entitlements which the law attached to marriage, and accordingly a form of civil marriage was developed to confer many of those rights.”
“Marriage isn’t a term the government invented, and to change that definition is false logic – it’s something we neither have nor want the authority to change”.
Last year Senator Humphries attended an event at Parliament House hosted by the Australian Christian Lobby (pictured above).
To read the letter in full, click here.
To sign the petition calling on Senator Humphries to support marriage equality, click here. (For each new signature, Gary gets an email)