At some point today some dribbling mouthpiece in Canberra will emerge from the basement where the government holds its double secret conclaves behind windows taped up with thick, black sheets of plastic and they'll tell us how many hundreds of millions of dollars we're going to pay a sweating pig circus of morons and bigots to mangulate their hate boners in the marriage equality plebiscite.
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The Prime Minister and the Archbishop
Question time: Malcolm Turnbull declines to confirm or deny giving a commitment to publicly fund the 'No' campaign in a same-sex marriage plebiscite.
Just like we did the last time the Marriage Act was changed to make sure everyone knew that God hates poofters.
Oh, wait. No we didn't. That was just a vote on the floor of Parliament… which raises the question of why we're not having one this time around?
Spoiler alert: because the worst people in this unshaved butt-twuntch of a 'debate' are terrified they might lose. This way, even if they do lose, they win, because an 'indicative plebiscite' carries less legal weight than a fridge magnet poem.
There is no guarantee, of course, that a marriage equality vote would get up in Parliament. The numbers seem to fall in favour, but numbers in politics are not like numbers in real life. They are magical things, contingent and fraught. The only person you can really trust is the one who tells straight up they're voting against you.
As damaging, gross and flat out crazy as a full blown debate on marriage equality could get within the confines of Parliament House, it would be infinitely more refined and intelligent than the deranged shit show that will be unleashed in the wider community by the Prime Minister's determination to do nothing that might offend those shell-backed conservatives he fears will come for him with knives at the first opportunity. Turnbull's thinking seems to run that if he never gives them the opportunity, they'll never come.
But they will, Malcolm. You are already deader than Elvis.
Why not just accept that and govern accordingly?
Marriage equality is going to happen one day in this country because we are still democracy and most people now want it. In democracies these questions are usually decided in whichever chamber represents the will of the majority as measured at the last election.
Perhaps that would mean that a vote on marriage equality would fail. Sometimes these changes are difficult and long fought. But the loss of a Parliamentary vote would do much less harm than the poison certain to be injected into our politics by letting the weirdos and bigots run wild with tens of millions of dollars to amplify their fear and loathing.
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