Nowwwww this here is Cory, and here’s about how his life got flipped – turned upside down. And we’d like to take a moment; just sit right there. We’ll tell you how he hates gay marriage and wishes laissez-faire.
Rampant 90s nostalgia aside, Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi is so insistent that the party status quo be maintained in the face of growing political pressure to let people think for themselves, that he has now called for all Liberal frontbenchers who have openly supported same-sex marriage to resign from their post.
“These people have frontbench responsibilities. It is their obligation to reflect the party’s view and not indulge in their own frolics and fantasies. If they don’t like it, take themselves off the frontbench. Go to the backbench and they can say and do whatever they please.
Our party has a policy position.”
“We now have frontbenchers who are actively undermining that policy position and publicly saying they would like something different. That breaks every rule of cabinet solidarity and ministerial responsibility. And I think that sets a very bad precedent.”
Bernardi himself was forced off the Liberal frontbench for infamously stating that enacting same-sex marriage would put Australian society on a slippery slope that would inevitably result in legalised polygamy and bestiality.
“I do not believe there is at the grassroots of the Liberal Party any overwhelming support for a change to such a fundamental bedrock issue.”
Going further, Fierravanti-Wells accidentally expressed the view most Australians hold hopeful for a vote on the issue during this year.
“Whenever it comes up at whatever stage … my sense is the view in the parliament will reflect the review of the majority of the Australian public.”
Bernardi, for his part, went further to clarify his own position.
“It’s not that we don’t like homosexuals.”
“If you look at marriage historically over thousands of years it’s been about the union of a man and a woman, with the intention of providing an environment in which to raise children.”
“If you’re going to say ok well now we can have two men or two women, you’re redefining that institution over thousands of years. You’re virtually endorsing that it’s not important to a child to have either a mother or a father.”
Or, as Senator Fierravanti-Wells put it:
“There’s only two things that are inevitable in life and that’s death and taxes.”
That might be true, but conservative Liberal politicians being doggedly out-of-step with societal change is surely a close third.
