Restore lesbian ban: Christian lobby
IVF laws banning lesbians were struck down as a result of judicial activism and need to be restored, Christian lobbyists have told a Senate sex discrimination inquiry.
The inquiry, continuing this month, heard Victoria’s IVF restrictions were ruled inconsistent with the federal Sex Discrimination Act, but this was never the intention of the elected representatives who drafted it.
Current arrangements allowing IVF access to single women and lesbians are not in the best interest of children. Evidence supports the fact that children do best when raised by both a mother and a father, Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace told the inquiry.
Wallace recommended the Sex Discrimination Act be amended to allow states and territories to restrict access to IVF to married women and women in heterosexual de facto relationships.
More recently, for us, there have been even sadder implications of this looseness in the drafting of the legislation, with developments in surrogacy and now with one state and one territory allowing the adoption of children by homosexual couples.
The McBain decision that overturned the Victorian IVF laws could soon be used to overturn any state legislation that prohibited the availability of alternate parenting services to men, Wallace warned.
The ACL also wanted existing religious exemptions in the Sex Discrimination Act to remain, despite submissions from a Catholic women’s group seeking the exemptions’ removal.
The inquiry also heard the Sex Discrimination Act excluded same-sex partners from the protections offered to opposite-sex partners who perform a carer’s role.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s sex and age discrimination director Cassandra Goldie told the inquiry unwed mothers and gay teachers had no protection from employment discrimination in the private school system.
She said the Commission ac-knowledged the merits of a general limitations clause which would allow organisations to seek exemptions if they could show they were pursuing a legitimate aim in human rights terms that was the least restrictive measure.
We are keen to support an inquiry into the equality act. That would be a major reform. It is an example of the path that the UK has gone down, and we welcome that, but we propose a three-year time frame.
The inquiry is due to report by 12 November.
Hey Christians: Get your Rosaries off my Ovaries!!!!
As a devout Christian with 7 rainbow babies and 3 current pregnancies I prefer to follow Jesus teaching that “God sends his rain on the righteous and the unrighteous and makes his sun to shine on the evil and the good”.
If I wanted to discriminate I would find it easy to determine in this debate who was the evil and who was the good. I have found that Lesbian families raise happy healthy well adjusted children children.
Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby has no business interfering in what lesbians can lawfully do with their own wombs nor demanding that public policy be rewritten to enforce his narrow-minded agenda.
Jim Wallace, stop being an ideological bully, keep your stuffy private religious demands to yourself and your followers, and leave lesbian mums alone.