The Tasmanian Liberals want to decriminalise altruistic surrogacy for everyone except same-sex couples.
Under their proposed amendments to State Government surrogacy reform, heterosexuals will be able to enter legally-recognised surrogacy arrangements regardless of whether they are married or de facto partners.
Even single people will legally be able to have children through surrogacy.
But if same-sex partners enter such arrangements, not only will the people involved have no legal rights or protection, they could face a $13,000 fine.
In short, the Liberals want to make something a crime only if gay people do it.
Rarely, have I seen a legislative proposal that is so unashamedly bigoted and homophobic.
The people who will suffer most from the Liberals’ prejudice are the children born to same-sex couples – not only those born through surrogacy whose families will have no legal protection, but all those children of same-sex couples whose families will endure greater prejudice for having been lent a criminal stigma.
Inevitably Tasmania will also suffer. Tasmania was the last Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise gay sex. That debate divided Tasmania and drove our reputation and economy to rock bottom. Now the Liberals want to divide and demean us all over again, this time by criminalising gay parenting.
Most bewildering of all is that the Liberals will suffer. The Party’s decision to allow a conscience vote on homosexual decriminalisation in 1997 opened the door to that reform. Subsequent conscience votes allowed a majority of Liberals to vote for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships, including in other areas of parenting law. As a result of this kind of sensible pragmatism, the Party’s support among centrist voters has increased to a point where it could win government.
But the moderates have now lost their nerve or their principle or both, and collapsed in the face of theocrats determined to impose their ideology on the rest of us. At some point since the last election God challenged Will Hodgman for the Liberal leadership and won.
Please write to the State Liberals expressing your opposition to legally-entrenched discrimination against same-sex couples and their children.
For a list of points you can make and email addresses you will need, click here http://tglrg.org/more/483_0_1_0_M/
