A few months back, see I wrote a piece for the newspaper on same-sex marriage and why the Fight for the Day in White was ten kinds of homo-loco hopeless. Needless to tell, buy information pills the “community” acted severally and angrily and I received an open invitation to function as a urinal in a down-at-heel men’s bathhouse.

Its unequivocal commitment to equality notwithstanding, arthritis the piece caused a fuss. To The Gays, I quickly became Pariah Carey. To The Media, I became, very briefly, talent. To be queer, pungently left and opposed to same-sex marriage politics makes one unusual enough to chase.

One weekday morning, I received a dozen calls to speak on national radio and television. That I declined says less about my cool, cougar eminence and much more about the fact that appearance on television always makes me find eight new ways to ask my girlfriend, “Am I fat?”.

Anyhow. I hadn’t felt as simultaneously maligned and popular than in the Ninth Grade when it got around (quite wrongly) that I freely offered anal.

Now I am a grown-up, it is July and any argument against the argument for same-sex marriage goes unheeded or punished with the slur, “homophobia!”. Frankly, I’m tired of trying to convince squeaky little Marys that an institution now sustained by egoism and cake is not among Our Inalienable Rights. I’m sick of explaining the idea that mimicry can easily be mistaken for equality. I’ve had it up to Ninth Grade Anal telling you that a longing for a vanishing, hetereo-normative gold standard is NOT about equal rights. It is an intimate act of self-loathing.

So. We won’t go on about marriage itself anymore. What we will go on about, though, is the Same-Sex storm as brewed on the cusp of Australia’s tiny Tea Party.

At present in my country, fuckwits are in over-supply. The nation is “debating” (by which we mean “misinterpreting and making a self-serving origami pudding of”) the details of a carbon excise. This action and the Government are led by a centre-left person named Julia Gillard. The Prime Minister’s decision to (a) charge large industrial polluters for their carbon emissions and (b) compensate more than 90% of Australian workers for the predicted price-hikes from this measure has her branded, variously, liar, thief and assassination target.

My personal views on this matter aside for the moment (SURPRISE, I’m all for attainable reform on climate change) I can see no rationale for stump dumb vitriol and cries of “Juliar”. And I can see no correlation between the nation that eats up the fuzzy-felt preening of faux-green filth like MasterChef (“It’s SO important we eat local, seasonal, organic witlof”) and the nation that refuses to sacrifice a cock-damn for the possibility of change. What do I need to do? Cram all of your holes with wads of Handee Ultra to give you time to meet your hypocrisy in private? I mean. The entire country is poncing about with “Green” shopping bags and ineffective lavatory cleaner with pictures of dolphins jumping from the cistern. But, nobody seems to want to bet pennies a week to attain the “sustainability” they so admire when it’s uttered by Matt Preston at an artisanal cheese-making workshop.

Middle-Australia is blinded by selfishness. And Gay Middle-Australia ain’t seeing any better. In recent weeks, I have heard three gay men shriek the name “Juliar” and explain to me, with different gradations of anger and of ignorance, that she is, “homophobic”.

Last night, in fact, I was in a bar with a man who offered me the line that we have now all learned by rote. “What’s an atheist, childless, single woman living in sin doing denying us gay marriage?”. He went on, “She has done nothing for GLBT people. She hates us”

Well. Fuck that. Fuck that Ninth Grade style. I’ve heard this again and again and up to the point that I’m considering a career as a sort of sleeper Civil Celebrant who will build a reputation for graciously blessing The Gays for a decade and then, in 2025 where, say, Ian Thorpe is to be joined to Christopher Pyne in a nationally televised multi-faith event, I’ll be like BAM I’M NOT MARRYING YOU and I’ll get all Judith Butler in their biznit.

Or something. The point is that Labor has done something. Several significant somethings, in fact. I’ve never been a boffin, but here are a few that come to mind sans Google.

* Sexual acts between persons of the same gender were first decriminalised in South Australia by Don Dunstan, Labor Premier in 1972.

*In 1995, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating oversaw changes to the Migration Act that allowed Citizens and Permanent Residents to sponsor their same-sex partners to Australia.

*In 2009 Labor Attorney General Robert McLelland changed 85 laws identified as discriminatory against GLBTIQ people; many of these changes changed my life. I shan’t dive headfirst into an auto-vat of schmaltz but do enjoy this broader sample: your same-sex partner can now take parental leave from work; contingent on circumstances, you may not be required to testify against your same-sex partner in criminal proceedings; you may now take carer’s leave if your same sex partner or a member of their immediate family is suffering illness. If you’re curious to check these new entitlements for yourself or an imaginary Ghey, use this engine.

Currently, McLelland is preparing legislation to afford new protections against sexuality or gender status discrimination. This is awesome news for trans folk and others. The Murdoch press reads this rather nervously as “A step toward gay marriage.” However, the Australian Marriage Equality interviewee for the piece called the Gillard government in matters of discrimination the, “ultimate offender by continuing to prohibit same-sex marriages”.

The fuck? The fuck? You would rather hold on with all your nail-art to this wedge and see Labor’s minority Government consumed by homo-hunting rats?

Oh. Jiminy. I’m boring even myself at this point drowning, as I am, in the blancmange of unassailable proofs that Labor does some good and that the Coalition would like little more than to round us up into opera ghettos and permit our free passage only when costume design is required. But, I suppose we must afford the Coalition their right of reply. Coalition reforms to the GLBTIQ-positive law include:

*Stalling the aforementioned reforms

*Altering the Marriage Act under Howard in 2004 to shake all possible gayness out

*Tony Abbott wearing a Speedo

Is a pattern beginning to emerge? Or, are you too dazzled by the brilliance of your longed-for trousseau to see it? Let me spell it out: The Coalition hates homos.

The other day, I read a wonderful piece by my internet acquaintance Geoff Lemon. After an interval of bravura swearing, he offered this on the “Juliar” matter and the implementation of the carbon tax. “Part of me would love to see these squawking indignant right-to-luxury dickwipes learning how to live in the dust, scraping out dried plants from the earth and hoarding their remnants from the Beforetime.”

Just as Lemon’s basest instinct craves an apocalypse in which he can view the withering of Handee Ultra and the death of the SUV, so does my root chakra twitch for a post-electoral pumping where the sweet vision of His and His luxe-linens are fucked into the void along with all our other hard-won rights.