As of the 1st of February, the laws that restrict Australians from getting married overseas will be revoked.  These laws, introduced by lil johnny howard in 2004, not only made changes to the definition of marriage, specifically adding lines that would discriminate against homosexual, transgender, and nongendered people, but it also would not allow Certificate For Intent to be issues to GLBT Australians who were overseas.

The CFI is a sheet of paper that certifies that the person does not already have a legally recognised partner and is free to marry.  Since 2004, thanks to the changes added by phil ruddock and lil jonny howard, LGBT people cannot receive these.  Without these, they cannot marry.  Well, could not.  They will be able to once again after February 1st.

So from the 1st of February, Australians will be able to get married overseas, just not in Australia.  Their marriage unfortunately will still not be recognised in Australia either (according to amendments added by johnny howard in 2004).

Anyway, to get to the point of this blog post, I started looking around further at laws, restrictions, and other such things in regards to sexuality equality.  Eventually found myself on this wikipedia page.

It’s quite interesting that the first officially recorded gay marriage was in 27BC, with gay marriage first being outlawed in 342CE … by a christian emperor.

So much for the “tradition” argument against equal marriage by bigots.

That’s also about the same time christianity started (despite there being christians, christianity as we know today really started during the council of Nicea, 325CE when they codified gospel and doctrine), so you can say that the homophobia and bigotry we still see today is all thanks to christianity!