Bendigo marriage celebrant Alan Howard has welcomed a potential plebiscite as “the fairest possible way” to approach changes to the marriage act.
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But he said even if a plebiscite supported gay marriage, he would not “marry” same sex couples, though he did not object to their union.
“It’s very discriminatory and unfair to me to force me to do that against my long-held conscientious objection,” he said.
“To try and take away from what I've got by misappropriating marriage would actually amount to the theft of marriage.”
By way of analogy, he said if people showed up to play polo on camels instead of horses they would be asked to “nick off and devise their own game”.
“Marriage has been between a man and a woman for thousands of years and if it is something different from that, you should give it a different name.”
He said though it was not his place to decide, he suggested the term “gay wed” instead of “married” for homosexual unions.
