Rachel Evans gave this speech to a rally for marriage equality in Sydney on May 31. She is a member of Community Action Against Homophobia (CAAH) and the Socialist Alliance.
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We are on the cusp of a victory.
A victory of ordinary people against prejudice and bigotry.
We are on the edge of winning this battle for marriage equality — when the likes of Prime Minister Tony Abbott and conservative journalists Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt coming out positively for our love rights, we know we are close.
Thank you to the courageous people of Ireland, of Greenland, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, Mexico. Thanks for never giving up.
Tribute to all of you who have come out time and time again to protest these eleven years. As a result of your efforts, we are a long way from the National Marriage Forum in June 2004, where LGBTI people were called moral terrorists of the 21st century, unfit to raise children, and psychologically disturbed.
It was at this bigot fest, held in Canberra's Parliament, that PM John Howard and Labor’s Nicola Roxon declared their support for the passage of the marriage ban.
So on Friday August 13, 2004 Australia became the first country in the global north to ban same sex marriage. CAAH organised a rally the next day and we have protested ever since.
In 2004 we were told “No queer wants to get married, it’s a dead end campaign, just concentrate on relationship recognition.”
We refused to give up, and when we won relationship recognition schemes, we were told, “Don't fight for marriage, you will scare the churches and government leaders away from the rainbow community — just concentrate on civil unions.”
Well, we fought for relationship schemes, and for civil unions. But never gave up our fight for marriage equality.
In the course of our grassroots campaign we won the hearts and minds of millions of people, and now have 70% adult support and 80% of young people backing us.
In the course of our campaign we won the repeal of 85 discriminatory federal laws, we won relationship schemes across the states, surrogacy rights, same sex adoption rights, civil unions in the ACT, trans pre-operative recognition, and we won marriage rights for five days in the ACT.
One of the first acts of the Abbott government was to quash the ACT marriage law through a High Court challenge.
Alongside the marriage campaign CAAH also won the freedom of queer Pakistani refugee Ali Humayun from Villawood Detention Centre, we won the freedom of other queer refugees and we helped win an inquiry into the horrific death of trans Aboriginal woman Veronica Baxter.
Tribute must be paid to recently deceased Aboriginal activist Ray Jackson, who shone a light under the dark corner of that case, and countless other black death in custody cases.
CAAh also led the call for justice for Bryn and Jamie, two gay men brutalised by police at Mardi Gras in 2013.
We built the largest queer rights rally in Australian history — in 2011, outside the ALP National Conference. Australian Marriage Equality and New Mardi Gras joined in with us that day — showing that a united campaign is a strong campaign.
We have never won anything without a fight. Australia is built on inequality. This colonial settler country did not allow convict slaves to marry for love. It refused Aboriginal people the right to marry who they loved. It was a battle waged by aboriginal woman Gladys Namagu and her fiance, in 1959, the “Romeo and Juliet” campaign, that changed the racist laws.
The civil rights battles of convicts, of women fighting for the right to vote, for equal pay, the fight of Aboriginal people to to enter town, to enter swimming pools, to vote, paved the way for our fight for equal love rights today.
We are on the cusp of a great victory. But we are not there yet. We call on the ALP and the Coalition to stop playing with our lives. They are point scoring with our rights, our relationships. We want full equality, and we want it now.
CAAH wants both political parties to renounce their homophobic party positions, adopt marriage equality as their platform, and bind their MPs to that position. Labor and Liberal should end the tradition of allowing bigots in their party to vote for discrimination. This is politics behind the “free vote”.
Greenland's parliament voted unanimously for marriage equality. This is what we demand of our MPs. Queer pride saves lives — rainbow rights are a matter of life and death, and our protest movement demands full equality platforms from all political parties in Australia. We will not accept being second class citizens, we want no crumbs, we want the whole cake. And after marriage rights as previous speakers have said — we will continue the fight for rainbow justice, for full rainbow liberation.
A marriage equality bill will be tabled on Monday. We want this bill to pass, now. We don't want to wait till August. We call on all parties and MPs to stop playing with our lives — to end this point scoring and pass the bill.
People's power got us this far, and it is the only thing which will guarantee us our victory.
Justice delayed is justice denied. Stop playing with our lives! Put the bill, pass the bill!
What do we want? Marriage equality, when do we want it? Now!
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