Australia business chief says gay people should come up with a new name for marriage
An influential Australian businessman says gay people should come up with a new name for marriage.
The claim comes from Roger Corbett, the former chair of Australian media giant Fairfax Media, which controls much of the country’s news industry.
He is also the former head of Woolworths, an Australian retail giant not affiliated with UK or US companies of the same name.
In an interview with ABC, Mr Corbett suggested that gay people should come up with a different name for their unions.
He said: “I think it’s between a man and a woman, because only a man and a woman together can create children.
“Marriage is really a union to provide an environment in which children can be conscieved, born and brought up. It is probably the best arrangement.
“It doesn’t mean that gay people who don’t have that inclination shouldn’t have the right to have a union of their own that should have equal status, equal recognition in every way, but be called something different to marriage, because marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Other names have been suggested by opponents of same-sex marriage in the past, including harriage, blarriage and garriage.
After the Supreme Court ruling in the US, conservative activist Pat Fagan said: “So I have a proposal, something along these lines… that we in the pro-family movement start using related terms, but keep marriage for what it always was.
“So we might say, if you’re talking about gay marriage you call it ‘garriage’ instead of marriage.
“If it’s lesbian, you call it ‘larriage.’ If you want a generic homosexual marriage it’s ‘harriage’.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Mr Corbett said: “I think you might find the traditional view is more widely recognised in the community than people might think.”
Mr Corbett also spoke out in defence of tennis legend Margaret Court.
He said: “I think people are scared that they will be vilified. There’s been the Margaret Court incident… I think people are scared of that.”
Court made a splash earlier this year with a string of homophobic comments.
Speaking to the media she likened gay people to Hitler, claimed that homosexuality is an ungodly “lust for the flesh”, that LGBT tendencies in young people were “all the devil”, and that older lesbian tennis stars have ‘converted’ younger players.
In a radio interview, she said: “Tennis is full of lesbians… when I was playing there was only a couple there, but those couple that led, that took young ones into parties and things.”
She recently claimed that Christmas, Easter and Mother’s Day will be cancelled if the country votes in favour of equal marriage.
Speaking to the West Australian newspaper, Mrs Court warned about the dire consequences of a Yes vote.
She said: “They want marriage because they want to destroy it.
“It’s not about marriage. It will affect Christian schools, it will affect freedom of speech.
“There will be no Mother’s Day, there will be no Father’s Day, there will be no Easter, there will be no Christmas.”
