March On Canberra

I assume that the majority of you are people who don’t believe that to love someone you must possess the opposite genetalia. I assume that the majority of you are people who have a firm seated belief that love is genderless, that love knows no labels, no borders, no boundaries. You’re the kind of person who knows that equality is justice and justice is humanity’s last and only great pillar, its final foundation in a world where religious creed and fanatic ignorance provide a hurdle that we must overcome if we intend to live forever as a species and as a civilisation.

This government, whom so fervently claim to be the true representatives of a nation that adores equality and lives for the mantra of a fair go for all, must realise that now is the moment that the future can be gained, now is the moment that humanity can be justified, that now is the moment that intolerance must be left behind and ignorance and arrogance must be thrown off and trampled, for love does truly conquer all, and if, if there ever comes a time that all else fails and things seem their darkest, love will prevail. You cannot defeat love by quoting a few empty words from a hate filled book of immorality and inhuman bigotry.
Upon the birth of every human being, they are awarded a certain set of rights, unalienable and concrete. Among these is the right to never have your rights supressed by others, for your life is your own to do with as you see fit, and for any one person or any organisation to seek to take them from you represents the most abhorrent of all the failures of this species. Your right to love whom you love is embedded in the hearts and souls of each and every person on this planet, and this government, this farce, this inhuman hypocrisy of holy hate, has not even the slightest semblance of a right to take it from you.

People may say to you, at different points in your life, that the sky is the limit. Bullshit. You have inside of you the conglomerate ability of 50,000 years of modern humanity. You have inside of you the joint and combined wisdom of four billion years of evolution. You are made of atoms that came from stars that have been around since the dawn of time. You are made of stardust and your limit is the cosmos, and for anyone to tell you anything but that, just because you are different, represents a gross and unfounded miscarriage of justice.

These few words aretaken from a speech by Robert F. Kennedy on April 5th 1968; let them try to persuade you, because I believe that they still hold true even forty years on.

"For when you teach a man to hate, and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man, because of his colour, or his beliefs, or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you, threaten your freedom, or your job, or your home, or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens, but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation, but with conquest; to be subjugated, and to be mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens. Alien men, with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us, in common dwelling, but not, in a common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire, to retreat from each other, only a common impulse, to meet disagreement with force.

Our lives on this planet are too short. The work to be done is too great, to let this spirit flourish any longer in this land of ours. Of course we cannot banish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us, are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance, to live out their lives, in purpose, and in happiness, winning what satisfaction, and fulfilment that they can.
Surely, this bond of common fate, surely, this bond of common goals, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at the least, to look around at those, of us, of our fellow man, and surely we can begin to work a little harder, to bind up the wounds among us, and to become in our hearts brothers, and countrymen, once again."

Join us, to fight for equality, and to fight for love, and humanity.