The Australian Senate yesterday passed a measure to legalize same-sex marriage, perhaps as soon as next week, after lawmakers dismissed a conservative push to allow religious objectors to refuse service to same-sex couples.
Australians had overwhelmingly endorsed legalizing same-sex marriage in a postal survey run by the national statistics agency and the bill easily passed the senate by 43 votes to 12.
Conservative lawmakers had pressed for broad protections for religious objectors, including florists, bakers and musicians, to refuse service to same-sex couples.
However, amendments for lay celebrants to refuse to solemnize same-sex marriages and permitting caterers opposed to the unions to refuse service at wedding receptions were either defeated or abandoned during two days of debate in the senate, where same-sex marriage supporters are in the majority.
“The Australian people voted to lessen discrimination, not to extend it and we, the senate, have respected that vote by rejecting amendments which sought to extend discrimination, or derail marriage equality,” Labor Senator Penny Wong, who voted down all the amendments, told parliament.
The bill moves to the lower house next week, where conservative lawmakers hope for a renewed push to add measures exempting objectors to same-sex marriage from existing laws against discrimination.
“I do not think we have made these changes in a way which advances rights fully,” National Party Senator Matt Canavan said.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal-
National coalition government and the main opposition Labor Party have said they wanted to pass the law through parliament by Thursday next week.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
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