What was supposed to be a historic advance for same-sex marriage in Australia turned into a humiliating defeat.
The lower house of the Australian parliament voted overwhelmingly against a gay marriage bill by a vote of 98 to 42 on Sept. 19. On Sept. 20, a similar bill was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 41 to 26.
This means that there will be no change to the definition of traditional marriage in Australia.
“When the governing Australian Labor Party abandoned its longstanding defense of natural marriage, it was supposed to all be over except for the celebration on the part of homosexual activists,” says Larry Jacobs, managing director of the World Congress for Families.
Thanks to the hard work of Australian groups like the National Marriage Coalition, the Australian Family Association, Endeavour Forum, the Dads-4-Kids Foundation and the intense lobbying of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians in behalf of maintaining the historic definition of marriage, Jacobs says, 40 percent of Labor MPs in the House joined members of the National and Liberal Parties to defeat this step toward the deconstruction of traditional marriage.
Earlier this year thousands of pro-family leaders gathered to affirm traditional marriage in The Madrid Declaration of World Congress of Families VI. The Declaration provides in part:
“We affirm the natural family to be the union of a man and a woman through marriage for the purposes of sharing love and joy, propagating children, providing their moral education, building a vital home economy, offering security in times of trouble, and binding the generations.
“We affirm that the natural family is a fixed aspect of the created order, one ingrained in human nature. The natural family cannot change into some new shape; nor can it be re-defined by eager social engineers.
“We affirm that the natural family is the ideal, optimal, true family system. While we acknowledge varied living situations, all other ‘family forms’ are incomplete or are mere fabrications of the state.”
Jacobs notes that in the United States, 31 states have now adopted the definition of marriage as “the union of a man and a woman,” all by popular vote. The latest was North Carolina, in May, by a vote of 61 percent to 39 percent. Says Jacobs, “Every time the people have had a chance to vote directly on the issue, the only definition of natural marriage that protects children has carried decisively.”
