Triumph of Aussie goodwill, despite all the leftist predictions

LOOK at the gays celebrating yesterday’s massive public vote for same- sex marriage. Look at the hugs, the tears, the flags and the streamers.

Forget whether you are for gay marriage or against, for good reasons or bad. The unambiguously great thing about this result – a 61.6 per cent yes vote – is that more than seven million Australians have put their arms around gays and lesbians to show we’re one family.

This was a vote of love – an overwhelming public affirmation that no vote by just 150 federal MPs stitching up some deal in Parliament could ever have delivered.

How far we have come and so fast. It is only 20 years ago that homosexual sex was still banned in Tasmania. But gays could party yesterday because Australians proved yet again they are everything that Labor, the Greens and many journalists claimed they were not.

That’s why one moment in the celebrations jarred. It was when Labor leader Bill Shorten climbed on to a stage in Melbourne to bellow to a crowd of gay- marriage supporters: “What a fabulous day … You are 100 per cent loved.”

But wait. This day and this evidence of being “100 per cent loved” is exactly what Shorten and the Left tried so furiously to stop.

Labor and the Greens voted against a formal plebiscite, and gay activists and independent MP Andrew Wilkie then launched appeals to the High Court to stop this survey, too. Australians could not be trusted with a say, we were told.

Shorten said a public vote would be “a taxpayer- funded platform for homophobia” that could drive gays to suicide, and frontbencher Andrew Leigh predicted it would be a “shambles”.

Gay activist Rodney Croome agreed the campaign would be so nasty it could kill gays, and Greens senator Sarah Hanson- Young predicted it would just “unleash bigots”.

And a whole tribe of Leftist journalists predicted everything from a flop to a hate- fest by homophobes.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. How often the Left underestimates Australians, trashing them as monsters in need of a leash.

For a start, the plebiscite turnout was amazingly high — 79.5 per cent.

In contrast, just 60 per cent voted in the Irish referendum that legalised gay marriage in 2015. The turnout in Britain last year for the Brexit vote was 72 per cent. The turnout in last year’s US presidential election was just 61 per cent.

Australians clearly wanted the say that so many on the Left were so determined to deny them, and they said yes. This was the vote of the people that ends the argument over gay marriage now. No one can protest that this result was in some way unrepresentative, or just tricked up by politicians.

Parliament will now wave through a bill to legislate gay marriage — putting the lie to another scare- prediction from the Left that politicians would defy the public will.

The yes vote would have been even higher, I suspect, if there hadn’t been so much bullying by yes supporters, with Christians picketed, preachers sued, no- campaign ads censored and the Australian Christian Lobby bombarded with threats. Those attacks suggest that freedom of religion and of speech will now be under threat unless our politicians pass laws to protect them.

But above all note this: the widespread homophobia we were warned would erupt did not. The predicted suicides have also not occurred – or none that we’ve heard of.

Yes, there was isolated nastiness and bigotry by homophobes, but the debate was largely respectful, at least from the no campaign.

If the feelings of some gays were bruised during the weeks of voting – and they were – then this massive yes vote should end any pain.

The insults of a few may hurt, but the love of millions of Australians must now surely heal.

Thank something more important to Australia than gay marriage, which is the way we resolve such debates. Not by threats, censorship and the votes of a powerful elite, but by reason, debate and the vote of a good people.