John Oliver is pretty good at cutting to the chase on complex issues. Only during this particular segment of his popular show Last Week Tonight, his work’s already mostly done, because he decided to tackle Australia‘s preposterous marriage equality vote and that issue is the opposite of fucking complex.
As Oliver says in his ripper of a segment, the whole fucking thing is/was a disastrous waste of money, time, and mental health resources. Because, as he says, we already had a bunch of polls showing that more than two-thirds of Australians supported marriage equality.
And then Malcolm Turnbull went and chucked us all a non-binding postal survey party anyway.
At least we’ve got Oliver to make us laugh through our exhausted tears, and he’s done us all a solid and pulled out the most absurd little artefacts from the entire sordid affair, all courtesy the insanely toxic ‘No’ campaign.
Highlights include the woman who started her speech with “ladies and gentleman – if I may still use that term in these genderfluid times“, and then suggested that we call same-sex marriage “garriage“.
Garriage.
He also feels very strongly about one half of a purportedly marriage-indifferent gay couple, Mark, who proposed to his partner five years ago and was summarily turned down because his boyf Ben doesn’t believe in the whole thing:
“Mark, you can do so much better than him! You deserve someone as committed to you as you are to them!”
Watch the whole thing below (at least until this unofficial footage gets yanked off YouTube, and if you find yourself feeling a keen sense of shame slicing through your mirth, well – I think we all know that we, as a country, deserve it.
https://youtu.be/3Zl7GZAPRoI?t=8m7s
