Earlier this week, the Bible Society posted a web video featuring Liberal Party MPs Tim Wilson and Andrew Hastie having a conversation about their opposing views on marriage equality. Both share their viewpoints, and are then asked to put forward the other's views to prove they'd been listening.
Titled 'Keeping it Light', the idea was to show that a civil conversation on the issue of marriage equality is possible.
The response, however, proved otherwise. The video prompted a backlash from marriage equality advocates. Coopers' apparent sponsorship of the video prompted many to call for the company to be boycotted. The company — after a series of earlier statements that tried to distance themselves from any stance on the issue — eventually issued an apology and made a statement publicly endorsing same-sex marriage.
Marriage equality advocates argue that civil conversations on the issue are impossible, just as civil conversations on racial or gender issues would be impossible if one party refused to acknowledge that black people or women had equal rights and dignity.
The issue is an intensely personal one for LGBTI people who have had to overcome homophobia and marginalisation for their entire lives. Their responses to opponents of marriage equality are easily understandable in this context. With high suicide rates among LGBTI people, the question about whether and how conversations like this can be conducted is anything but a 'light' issue.
When advocates first began widely adopting the term 'marriage equality' to define the debate it was placed in the same category as racial and gender equality. Since then, the onus has been on advocates of traditional marriage to find a way to engage in the debate that doesn't impinge on the dignity of same-sex attracted people.
The fact that most people who oppose marriage equality do so on religious grounds makes this particularly difficult. Biblical, or theological, arguments are easily dismissed in a society that usually defines 'secular' as 'religiously neutral'.
Forced to conduct the debate entirely on secular terms, the arguments of traditional marriage advocates usually fall flat. People like Hastie make a valiant effort, but they fail to evoke the same intellectual and emotional resonance of civil rights arguments.
"People who hold biblical or theological views on marriage aren't going to be convinced by arguments that don't respect those views."
Our world has changed, and there's little evidence that children raised by same-sex couples are any less well off than those raised by a mother