Refusing to leave well enough alone.

That the house do now adjourn... Not one of the finest nights for the Qld Parliament.

– LNP MLA, David Gibson.

Image: Strongly held beliefs are fine, imposing them on others is not.

In the dying days of Queensland’s Bligh government, in a last desperate lurch for votes, a bill was passed that allowed for same sex civil unions. Regardless of the motives behind the legislation, the result was to give same sex couples a similar status to marriage without interfering with the rights of churches, as has happened in Denmark.

The conservative LNP though, were outraged and swore to repeal it. After backing away from this decision, it was brought forward again by members of the party, substantially amending it:

MARRIAGE equality is a controversial issue, prompting a range of studies into same-sex unions and sparking heated debates between politicians in parliament, work colleagues, clergies, parishioners, families and friends.

Member for Gympie David Gibson spoke up during a parliamentary sitting on Thursday in response to a "politically charged" debate on same-sex relationships that "distressed" spectators in the gallery. He reminded his counterparts it was their responsibility to represent all Queenslanders, regardless of their religious faith and sexual orientation and the matter needed to be handled with respect. …

Under the Newman government's compromise the scheme will be renamed from civil partnerships to a relationships register and aspects of same-sex unions that mimic marriage, such as state-sanctioned ceremonies, will be removed.

This week's release of census data has shown that around 1350 same sex Australian couples have travelled overseas to marry, while 65,000 Australian homosexuals are in unrecognised de facto relationships.

It is difficult to understand why the issue of civil unions should be such a major issue to a government, which is struggling to fix the economic mess left by labor, including a potential state indebtedness of $100 billion. It is not as if the whole Queensland population was demanding action on this, in fact it is most likely an irrelevance to most. Everybody knows they exist; do many care? Probably not!

Statist parties such as Labor, the LNP, and Greens are becoming increasingly imperious in their attitude towards the public at large. They demand to exert pressure on us in what we read, watch, play, eat, drink, all other forms of ingestion, how much, what we can do on our own property, where we can go, just to name a few.

In a free society it is fine to dislike something, the trouble is that statists tend to believe that if they don’t like it, it should be prevented.