More Australians support equal marriage rights, than Australians who do not.

Dear Andrew Leigh MP, 

You’ve received enough measured and peaceful letters quietly urging you to adequately represent a section of our community whom after decades of trials and tribulations deserve your ear.

I refuse to add to this dust-gathering paper tower on your desk as anything less than a very troubled individual. 

This is not a peaceful, measured letter. This is not the part where I say please and thank you for so humbly allowing me to peel back the cotton wool from your ear momentarily and let a quick five hundred words of deep concern and common decency trickle in. This is the part where I say that anything less than an unfaltering and wholehearted support of gay marriage rights on your behalf renders your opinions out-dated and immoral. 

I know politicians seldom have time for those silly, finicky little things that the common man refers to as a fact, so, instead of getting on my soap-box and spewing out the all too familiar diatribe on all of the other politicians that have had the base moral fortitude to stand up for equal marriage rights, and rattling on about the Howard government’s homophobic construction of the legal definition of ‘marriage’, and instead of getting sidetracked into an essay on why I think Bob Geldoff is a schmuck as so many of my letters to distinguished members of our community end up becoming, I have one fact to share with you. It is the most relevant of all facts regarding this issue and more pertinently a fact that when systematically left ignored will rattle the fundamentals of this democracy to its very foundations: more Australians support equal marriage rights, than Australians who do not. 

As our collective head of hair thins and greys by the second as too many major-party members stand inactive as if their fears of equality are their seats’ last bastions of societal order, it’s your constituents’ obligation to take a step back and ask ourselves why. Why is suck a lack of passion for equality tolerable? Why are our elected officials ignoring their constituents’ call for change? Why are we once again settling for second-best?

Mr Leigh, why am I being forced to write to you on behalf of my contemporaries when you already know what we’re asking you for?

You are either part of the solution or part of the problem. I don’t want my twilight hours stained with the ever-cloying knowledge that while my fellow students’ calls for equality were ignored, I stood alongside the head-shaking machine and waited out the storm. 

While the statistics which reflect Queers’ plight and right to fend off persecution and bigotry stack high against the fortress of irrationality and fear governing successive governments’ Queer policy, as my local member I want to know which side of the wall you stand on, and I want to know why before I dare approach that ballot box next time.

Sincerely (frustrated),

Joshua Dabelstein.