While it seems that non-Russians have been sent home, Russian citizens will no doubt face charges and potentially jail time for wanting to celebrate ‘Slavic Pride’.

Russia introduced equal age of consent laws in 1997. So given the Moscow mayor’s response to this march it got me thinking how homophobia can still occur even when legal equality is achieved.

We Aussies have it pretty good compared to our Russian cousins, don’t we? The risk of Australians being bashed because of their sexuality or gender identity is surely lower than the regular occurrences of fag bashing in Russia.

Surely these are signs that gay and lesbian rights have been achieved in Australia.

But then I remembered we still can’t get married, there are still no federal anti-discrimination laws, we can’t adopt our partner’s children, and in Queensland you can still be charged for sodomy if you have anal sex when you’re 16. So maybe our rights haven’t been achieved.

As if to emphasise the point that some pockets in society think full equality should be delayed for same-sex couples I came across Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby on breakfast TV equating marriage equality for same-sex couples with the right to marry your cat.

Former SAS Brigadier Wallace went on to label the fight for ‘gay marriage’ as an “aggressive” and “selfish” campaign to prove the “lifestyle of 1.2% of the population is normative”. He goes on to explain that he disagrees with LGBT people “invading” every institution in society and that marriage is where he thinks society needs to “draw the line”. Thankfully, the host pulled Brigadier Wallace up when he started to imply same-sex couples would abuse children.

Reading through the online discussion later that night on the sunrise website, I noticed that opponents to same-sex marriage outweighed the number of people who supported same-sex marriage.

Looking at the latest update to submissions received by the Human Rights Consultation under “Sexuality discrimination/gender equality” I noticed that there were only a handful of submissions.

Given the consultation is reported to have received over 10,000 submissions, it will be intriguing to understand how many people within our community will have spoken out to protect their rights.

I think it’s safe to say that Australia is a more tolerant place than Russia. We are unlikely to have a mayor of a major capital ban a gay rights parade in the foreseeable future.

But if people don’t engage loudly in the various debates occurring around the country to continue to stand up for LGBT issues, I wonder if we wont be drowned out by the voices of our opponents?

Tell the Australian Human Rights Consultation why you want equality and human rights protections for LGBT people by making a written submission – go to www.humanrightsconsultation.com.au.

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