A few days before, polling was issued showing that support for same-sex marriage in Australia had climbed past the 50 per cent mark, also for the first time.
The coincidence is significant because the future of marriage in Australia may depend on the recognition of same-sex unions.
To see the link clearly, we need to look to those Western countries where marriage is thriving.
Take Denmark, Norway and Sweden, where marriage rates have increased by as much as 30 per cent and divorces are steadily decreasing in number.
Is it a coincidence that, in the late 1980s, Scandinavia became the first region of the world where same-sex partners were allowed to formalise their unions, and that it was from about this time the statistics for heterosexual marriage began to improve?
The Wall Street Journal thinks not. In an October 2006 editorial on same-sex marriage its assessment of the Scandinavian experience was simple: there is no evidence that allowing same-sex couples to marry weakens the institution. If anything, the numbers indicate the opposite.
It would seem that by keeping pace with changing social attitudes to relationships, the institution of marriage can be given new life and relevance.
Married gay couples infuse matrimony with their enthusiasm for the institution, while reform of marriage prompts straight couples to rethink and revalue wedlock as a rite of love, devotion, and, not least, social inclusion.
Compare all this to Australia where same-sex marriage is explicitly banned, overseas gay unions cannot be legally recognised, the ACT's attempt to enact a civil union scheme has been quashed, and mainland state governments look sceptically at the idea of gay couples registering their partnerships.
Less well known is how dimly the Federal Government looks on marriage celebrants who conduct informal ceremonies for same-sex couples or speak publicly about marriage discrimination.
Indeed, in its crusade to traditionalise marriage, the Government has gone so far as to instruct celebrants to only ever refer to marrying couples as husband and wife. Heterosexuals who want to be partners cannot marry.
If overseas trends are anything to go by, turning Australia's marriage statistics around will be impossible while these backward-looking policies are in place.
More and more Australians in mixed-sex relationships will be turned off marriage while it enshrines discrimination against their gay friends and relatives, and while it insists they conform to old-fashioned gender roles.
In Australian ears, the phrase to the exclusion of all others risks becoming a statement of prejudice rather than a commitment to fidelity, while the demand that equal partners become husband and wife will speak of an institution more about sexism than love. Of course, opponents of same-sex marriage will claim that marriage is not a fashion to be updated. But in reality, marriage has changed a great deal over the years.
Within the living memory of many Australians, marriage between Protestants and Catholics was frowned on, women lost many of their rights when they married, and some states took away from Aborigines the right to decide who they married.
If marriage had not shed these stark religious, racial and sexual prejudices, it would have withered away.
Likewise, marriage will follow homophobia down the path of increased irrelevance if it can't embrace change.
At the moment both major parties staunchly oppose same-sex marriage as an article of faith (pun intended).
Indeed, Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has joined Prime Minister John Howard in opposing even those laws which allow same-sex civil union ceremonies, like those put forward by the Stanhope Government.
But despite this intransigence, I'm optimistic change will occur.
What it will take is the recognition by law-makers that marriage is as much a victim of their discrimination as the people excluded from it.