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.

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