CLAIRE HARVEY: the search for equality has become about adding more letters to an acronym

THE groan was audible. The shout was deafening. “Can you stop saying ‘same sex marriage’, please?” the man yelled from the far side of the room.

I was on a stage at a charity conference, chairing a panel of mental health experts.

The panel’s discussion had come to the question of whether we’d be voting on whether or not to reform marriage law.

I’d referred to it as “the same-sex marriage plebiscite”, asking the panellists about Labor’s warning a passionate debate about the plebiscite might endanger the mental health of gay Australians.

My heckler in the audience didn’t like that. First he groaned, then he bellowed: “Can we just call it ‘marriage equality’?” in a tone suggesting he was sick of correcting the ignorance of morons like me.

Wow. So this is where we’ve arrived in 2016. The phrase “same-sex marriage” is now apparently homophobic.

I’m the least likely person to decry political correctness. In my experience, people who whinge about something being PC usually just want to be mean to someone who can’t defend themselves. I actually think it’s a good thing polite society has created a taboo around once-common words like “spastic” or “darky”, and I’m astonished anyone could have a problem with that.

But, in this case, I’m calling bullshit. Somehow, along the long and glorious path to equal rights for gay and lesbian people, we have ended up in a situation where semantics are taking precedence over the real substance; where the genuine search for equality and understanding has become simply about adding more letters to an acronym.

The present widely accepted form of words to describe someone who’s not heterosexual is a series of letters that’s been growing since it superseded the catch-all “gay” in the mid-noughties. It’s now, depending on whom you’re talking to, reached eight characters: LGBTQIA+. That’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex and asexual (or maybe ally), plus anyone else who would like to be included on the list. Really? Do we really consider that progress?

Are we really so desperate to be considered right-on, so unable to choose between the billions of words available to us, that we’re going to use all the words we can think of, but only their first initials?

And in describing marriage for such people, are we really not going to use the phrase “same-sex”, even though this is the form of words that, if in the unlikely event we do have a plebiscite, the question will include? George Brandis, the Attorney-General, says if the question is posed, it will be something like: “Should the law be changed to allow samesex couples to marry?”

By the way, I think Labor’s struck on a piece of genius in their looming likely decision to vote down the plebiscite legislation in parliament.

Most Australians have very little understanding of the mechanics of this, and I think it has been largely overlooked by most commentators, but in the midst of all Labor’s stated concerns about the whipping-up of hatreds, I think the party has belatedly struck on the realisation that they can make this an election issue.

If Labor votes down this plebiscite, the Government will attempt to portray the Opposition as the killers-off of marriage equality. That’s not how the voters will regard it. They’ll simply see that Malcolm Turnbull has been unable to make it happen.

That sets up Labor to go to the next election in 2019, with a platform headlined by: vote for us and we’ll legalise samesex marriage on day one of the new parliament. Why would Labor do anything else? It’s not their job to make Malcolm Turnbull look progressive.