Conservative religious and family groups celebrated the fifth anniversary of the ban on same-sex marriage with a breakfast for 500 people at Parliament House in Canberra as part of National Marriage Day.
Activists, John Davey and John Kloprogge from rights group Equal Love were forcibly removed from the event after they staged a silent protest holding banners reading ‘inclusion=equality’ during a speech by Senator Ursula Stephens.
The banners were an ironic reference to Senator Stephen’s role as the Parliamentary Secretary for Social Inclusion.
‘The government’s idea of social inclusion does not include the LGBTI community, it includes the religious right,’ said Mr Kloprogge.
Advocates for marriage equality have expressed outrage at the event, labeling it a ‘celebration of prejudice’ and saying it highlights the extent to which the Rudd Government is ‘in bed’ with religious organisations.
‘This gathering in our Federal Parliament represents the biggest anti-gay protest group since the marriage ban was implemented in 2004,’ said Mr Kloprogge.
‘The expulsion from this homophobic breakfast is just another indication of how gay and lesbian people are treated as second class citizens.
‘The real marriage here is between extreme religious views and the complicity of the Rudd Labor Government in acceding to those views.’
On the day following the event, Senator Stephens told a web-based LGBT publication that she had spoken to ‘one of the protestors… and he apologised to me for the disruption.’
However, Mr Kloprogge says while he did speak to the Senator after the event, he did not apologise for his actions.
‘If anyone should be apologising, it is the Senator herself, for insulting the LGBTI community by symbolically endorsing an event staged to celebrate five years of the ban on same-sex marriage.’
The incident concerning Mr Kloprogge and Mr Davey is not the only aspect of the National Marriage Day celebrations to have drawn negative attention.
National Marriage Day is organised by the National Marriage Coalition, an amalgam of groups such as the Australian Family Association, the Australian Christian Lobby and Warwick Marsh’s Fatherhood Foundation.
Warwick Marsh, who was sacked as Men’s Health Ambassador in November last year, after making offensive, anti-gay comments in a report, used the National Marriage Day Breakfast to launch a document called 21 Reasons Why Marriage Matters, published by the National Marriage Coalition and the Fatherhood Foundation.
It was revealed by crikey.com however, that the document is simply a plagiarised version of an American document called Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-one conclusions from the social sciences, published by the Institute for American Values in 2002.
The only material not to have come from the American document is a selection of questionable ‘research’ by Bill Muehlenberg which consists of press clippings and outdated studies from the 1990’s.
Liberal Senator, Bill Heffernan caused a stir at the National Marriage Day Breakfast when he allegedly told Mr Davey and Mr Kloprogge ‘I don’t mind gay people, I just want you to stop f**ing the kids.’
Senator Heffernan was quick to deny the allegations and issued a public apology saying he was misquoted.
‘I actually said “everyone knows that I conduct a continuous war on people who use kids as sex objects and I don’t intend to change nowâ€. I did not refer at any point to gay people only,’ reads the Senator’s statement.
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