In response to a challenge mounted by the Commonwealth questioning the validity of the ACT’s Marriage Equality (Same-Sex) legislation, the High Court yesterday decided to reserve its judgment on the matter until next Thursday meaning that Australia’s first ever same-sex marriages will take place this Saturday.
According to The ABC, ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell confirmed that because the High Court did not seek an injunction to the laws, the first of forty-seven meticulously planned ceremonies will take place this weekend, saying, “I’m sure couples will welcome the fact that the law will come into operation and that they can marry under the law, albeit, with the prospect that there is some risk to those ceremonies because of the uncertainty surrounding the High Court case until we receive the court’s judgement.”
Commonwealth Solicitor-General Justin Gleeson yesterday argued in the High Court that the Federal Parliament still has the right to define marriage in Australia as “a common genus that is not divisible into multiple species” in accordance with the 1961 (Nineteen Sixty-One) Marriage Act and the Marriage Amendment Act of 2004, both of which constitute marriage as the union of peen and geen, or “the essential requirements of marriage”.
In the opposite corner, Australian Marriage Equality’s lawyer Anna Brown argued that “the ACT marriage laws should be held to be valid because it governed only same-sex relationships and that wasn’t in conflict with the Federal Marriage Act“, which deals only with the legal status of opposite-sex couples and does not prohibit or exclude laws conferring the status of marriage on others.
You can read a breakdown of both arguments in fantastic detail by Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sydney, here.
Photo: Torsten Blackwood via Getty
via The ABC
