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Gay couple review their marriage vows
BY: EAN HIGGINS
From: The Australian
September 20, 2012 12:00AM
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/gay-couple-review-their-marriage-vows/story-fn59niix-1226477676972 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/gay-couple-review-their-marriage-vows/story-fn59niix-1226477676972)
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Senator Louise Pratt with partner Aram Hosie, whom she met as a woman. Source: The Australian
AS a gay woman involved for years with a transgender partner, Labor senator Louise Pratt bared her heart this week as she argued for a marriage equality bill of which she is a signatory, suggesting she wants the right to marry if she so chooses.
Her partner, Aram Hosie, yesterday said he also believed in marriage equality. But he had a funny way of expressing it a couple of years ago when he argued against it as creating an elite of married and socially "acceptable queers" that left all the others as outcasts.
Yesterday, as two gay marriage bills were debated in parliament, Senator Pratt and Mr Hosie said they were two peas in a pod in their support for marriage equality, but their speeches make for an interesting contrast.
Of the arguments in favour of marriage equality and the background behind it, Senator Pratt's was more nuanced than some: she met her partner, Mr Hosie, about eight years ago as a woman, who now identifies as a transgender male. "This is a bill that personally affects me, because marriage discrimination affects same-sex couples and also affects people with intersex and transgender partners," she told the Senate on Monday.
"It would be disingenuous of me not to put on record that in this case the act does discriminate against me," she said. "I am one of those hundreds of thousands of Australian citizens who know that the laws of our nation hold our capacity for love and for commitment to be lesser because of the gender of our partner."