While the Marriage Equality Bill passed its first reading on the night of August 29th, we need to be disciplined and focused on the next stages of the debate. Having leapt the first hurdle, the bill will now go to the Government Administration select committee and receive public submissions. Having decisively lost its opening battle and having failed to prevent the first reading from introducing the bill, Family First will now try to mobilise its fellow fundamentalists to write submissions opposed to reform. Don't forget, they have an institutional base from which to draw- their churches. How do we counter this? We need to adapt to this context and prepare accordingly. Don't forget, Gaynz.com has numerous articles on marriage equality and same-sex parenting, most of them written by yours truly. Take particular note of the reference readings cited at the bottom of these reports and incorporate them into your submissions. Community organisations should hold submission writing workshops, both from their corporate perspective and amongst their individual membership. This also needs to apply to our allies- our friends, our parents, our children, supportive businesses, supportive religious organisations, supportive trade unions, supportive professional associations, supportive community welfare groups and anyone else. What about the Christian Right? Throughout the opening stages of this debate, I've noticed something about Family First. Apart from one stint on TVNZ's Breakfast and spots on Radio Rhema, Bob McCoskrie has kept mostly to the confines of Family First and its "Protect Marriage" front group, without undertaking much debate. How do I know this? Look at the "Protect Marriage" website, for instance. Most of its 'research' is based on propaganda from US Christian Right connections, and its very name suggests that Family First is slavishly basing its argument on US Christian Right tactics and strategies. Moreover, at its June 2012 "Forum on the Family," one of its primary donors was the "World Congress of Families", a conduit for US Christian Right propaganda and network for international Christian Right activism against feminism, LGBT rights and women's reproductive choice. We need to respond to this propaganda. Fortunately, when it comes to the segment of the bill that deals with adoption reform, we will be able to draw on mainstream child and adolescent health, welfare and development professional associations and organisations. In the interim, we can rely on the comprehensive volume of research available from equivalent European and North American professional associations. It is comparatively easy to respond to Family First's chief talking points. When it comes to polygamy, no other developed society has decriminalised polygamy, apart from South Africa due to its large Muslim and indigenous polygamist population as well as same-sex marriage. Canada refused to do so and upheld Section 293 of the Canadian Criminal Code, continuing to prohibit polygamy on the basis of violence against women and child sexual abuse within such relationships. Similarly, when it comes to 'consensual adult' incest, no British Commonwealth jurisdiction has decriminalised it and Argentina is the only society that has introduced same-sex marriage as well as decriminalising 'consensual adult' incest, which it did long beforehand. Furthermore, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights have both ruled against Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski, an incestuous couple of adult siblings. "Consent" is problematic in this context, given Karolewski's learning disabilities and dependent personality disorder, as well as the fact that their oldest children were born with severe physical and intellectual disabilities as a result of their incestuous relationship and genetic consequences. Again, that doesn't apply to same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting, which are careful and deliberative. Moreover, Family First is a populist and sectarian organisation. This provides us with some tactical and strategic benefits. As Family First is populist, it has an animus against professional expertise and research, particularly if it contradicts its cherished prejudices and religious dogma. By contrast, we are free to use any corroborative professional expertise and research and have a stockpile from which to draw- as well as rebuttals to the US Christian Right and its satellites and their feeble attacks on supportive professional associations. Many of these are available online. Family First's sectarianism also provides us with another advantage. It only has the fundamentalist Protestant, conservative Catholic and Greek and Russian Orthodox Christian communities to draw upon, as well as Pacific Island churches. However, New Zealand is now a multicultural and secularised society, which has had certain consequences. In the Canadian marriage equality debate, conservative people of faith found themselves facing opposition from liberal people of faith who supported marriage equality, as has already happened with the formation of Christians for Marriage Equality Aotearoa New Zealand. We need to reach out to other faith communities and get them to support marriage equality, or reassure them that their core doctrines are not endangered by the advent of marriage equality. Why would we 'force' fundamentalist churches or other religious institutions to conduct same-sex weddings when New Zealand's LGBT communities are overwhelmingly secularised and sidestep religious institutions? Why would we disregard their freedom of conscience, belief, doctrinal position and practise when we have not forced the issue of LGBT ordination, for instance? On the other hand, as I've noted, liberal people of faith have been imprisoned within the United States for conducting same-sex weddings- two Unitarian ministers, Lynn Greenleaf and Dawn Seacrest, were arrested for doing so in New Paltz, New York, in 2004. "Religious freedom' is a double-edged sword. Moreover, New Zealand's marriage equality debate also resembles that which has occurred within Western European societies. In those contexts, societies are heavily secularised and fundamentalist political parties and pressure groups are socially isolated, committed to their own brand of ideological purity, resistant to compromise and separatist in orientation toward the surrounding society. They risk being seen as the equivalent of yesteryear's Trotskyite marxists, isolationist lesbian separatists, or Ayn Rand's objectivist libertarians- fringe political organisations, committed to their own narrow sectarian interests and unwilling to work for the common good. What will happen next? Probably inevitably, as with homosexual law reform and civil unions before it, the New Zealand Christian Right will try to import US Christian Right and other 'subcultural luminaries' and try to package them as 'experts.' Again, this is simple to counter- for instance, Professor Judith Stacey at New York University has been of considerable assistance within Canadian marriage equality debates and will be invaluable when it comes to rebuttal and refutation of same-sex parenting opponents here. We have won the opening battle of this debate. Now, with discipline, focus, tactics and strategy, we must strive to win the resultant war. Craig Young - 30th August 2012