Gay High Court judge Michael Kirby has backed same-sex marriage in Australia, urging "equal justice under law for all".
Revealing he had considered and rejected the idea of marriage with his own partner of 38 years, Johan van Vloten, Justice Kirby yesterday questioned the Howard Government's laws that define marriage as specifically between a man and a woman.
As the ACT pushes ahead with plans to reintroduce laws offering "civil partnership" ceremonies for same-sex couples, Justice Kirby said the legal discrimination that flowed from the ban was "hurtful" and represented "dog whistle" politics.
"It is a source of puzzlement to Johan and me, as we go about our tranquil lives, that there are many fellow citizens - some of them well educated and very important - who seem to be threatened and upset by such relationships and who feel the need to discriminate against them by laws enacted or unenacted by our nation's parliaments," he said.
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Justice
Michael Kirby with
AME members Peter Furness and Theo Phillip Photo: Michael Kirby |
"It is (about) whether a secular civilian status of marriage under law should be denied to other citizens whose sexual orientation or identity makes it impossible and wrong for them to go through marriage with an opposite-sex partner just to keep up appearances or to make their families and society happy.
"I am sure that Family Court judges and practitioners have seen too many marriages of that kind to wish to inflict more of them on the innocent victims who get caught in the trap of such deception, including self-deception."
The Howard Government quashed the ACT attempt to allow civil unions earlier this year, securing a midnight ruling from the Governor-General to render the laws invalid.
The outspoken judge, who recently used his eulogy at lawyer John Marsden's funeral to criticise the "anti-lavender brigade" in the media, decided to go public over his homosexuality 10 years ago. Justice Kirby outed himself in Who's Who in 1999 by naming Mr van Vloten, a newsagent, as his long-term partner.
In 2002, the High Court judge was the subject of false allegations raised in parliament by Liberal senator Bill Heffernan that he had been using his taxpayer-funded car to go "trawling for rough trade".
In a speech to a family law conference in Perth yesterday, Justice Kirby also raised the issue of legal discrimination against same-sex couples that flow from the marriage ban.
"Of course, we can understand that such laws sometimes help keep people like us out of pension, superannuation and other rights that we would enjoy if we were married - or even if we were an opposite-sex de facto couple," he said.
"That, after all, saves money, although it seems and feels discriminatory to those affected. Such attitudes and 'dog whistles' over this issue constitute a puzzle, and a hurtful one."
Liberal MPs, including Warren Entsch, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Lindsay and Greg Hunt, have won the agreement of Prime Minister John Howard to cost various options for reform in this area, including extending the couples rate of the Medicare safety net to gays and lesbians.
Justice Kirby said just because he and his partner had rejected the concept of marriage did not mean it was not important.
"We have outlasted many marriages that we attended," he said. "We agreed at the time we first considered the issue, back in the 1990s, that, after all that we had been through together, marriage was not an important priority in our lives."
A spokesman for Attorney-General Philip Ruddock declined to comment on the speech.