Marriage equality: the cold, hard facts

For example, in a recent column, University of Melbourne lecturer, Lauren Rosewarne, says she supports gay rights but not gay marriage because she's no fan of marriage.

"It's as though culturally we'll accept Penny and Sophie's obviously deviant dyad provided that they make it look as close as possible to a vanilla, heterosexual union.

"This of course means no letting of your freak flag fly, no appearances at Mardi Gras, just look as respectably heterosexual as possible and we'll treat you half decently.

"The equal homosexual shouldn't have to act straight-enough to be accepted by bigots. I don't call that progress."

This is a deeply demeaning and stereotyped view of who gay people are or should be.

When we have children or ask for the right to marry it's not because we want to "look" normal or "act" like other people.

It's because our relationships and families are like those of other people.

Studies of same-sex couples and their families confirm this.

A large-scale study by Professor Glen Elder found that same-sex couples from across America registered under the Vermont's civil union scheme were not different to other couples. He concluded,

"[w]hat's most interesting about this analysis…is the banality of the results. Civil union households simply don't differ that much from those of the general population".

A second study of recognised partners in the US, recently released by the University of Minnesota, affirmed this result. It found that the gay people surveyed valued romantic love, faithfulness and commitment no less than their heterosexual peers.

Given these findings it should be no surprise that successive Australian censuses show the number of same-sex couples is increasing most dramatically in suburban and regional Australia.