Rainbow Wellington Chair Tony Simpson has been gathering his thoughts on same-sex marriage, and he now delves into history then looks to the future in a thought-provoking piece he's penned on the issue. I 've lost track of the number of public and political issues I’ve been involved with over the last five decades. But looking back on it two things emerge very clearly. The first is that the New Zealand we live in now is a very different place to the society it was in the early sixties. We are a considerably more open, tolerant and liberal place than we were when the changes we have gone through began, and not just in regard to gay matters. How many people are aware, I wonder, that until the early sixties it was perfectly legal to discriminate against women in the workplace e.g. insisting that they must resign if they married and paying them at a lesser rate than men for the same job, or that being born ‘outside wedlock’ involved legal disabilities such as no rights of inheritance, or that Maori could be discriminated against in accommodation or refused service in bars simply because they were Maori? And we had only just, at that point, abolished the death penalty (which was still used into the fifties on at least three occasions to hang teenagers when then Attorney General Jack Marshall refused to commute their sentences).