David Pocock Says He Won't Marry Until Gay Marriage Is Legal In Australia

Rugby star David Pocock (pictured Left) says he won't marry until Australia legalizes gay marriage.

Pocock, the 23-year-old Western Force and Wallabies openside flanker, told The Sun-Herald Extra that he and his fiancee Emma Palandri won't wed until their gay friends can.

“More than 60 per cent of Australians are in favor of same-sex marriage, so it just doesn't make sense to stop it from happening,” Pocock said. “For a lot of Christians, it's a big issue and I know there's a lot of people who don't share the same opinion as me. It comes down to equal love. I don't think it's the government's role to tell people that their love is right or wrong.”

In a previous interview, Pocock said he gets “pretty annoyed with the Christian lobbies around the world who say gay marriage destroys the family and that kind of rubbish.”

“I guess it is fear of the unknown – if you talk to someone who doesn't like gay people you can almost guarantee that they don't know too many.”

“Emma and I decided not to get legally married until our gay friends could do the same,” Pocock added.

Gay Activist Arthur Evans Dies At 68

Arthur Evans, one of the nation's earliest and best-known gay activists, has died of a heart attack at the age of 68. During the Stonewall era, Evans was a member of the Gay Liberation Front, a group he later left to co-found the Gay Activists Alliance.

Based in New York, the alliance became a model for gay rights organizations nationwide, pushing in New York for legislation to ban discrimination against gay men and lesbians in employment, housing and other areas. Mr. Evans wrote its statement of purpose and much of its constitution, which began, “We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings.” To attract attention the alliance staged what its members called “zaps,” confrontations with people or institutions that they believed discriminated against gay people. Among other incidents, they confronted Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, went to television studios to protest shows perceived as anti-gay, demanded gay marriage rights at the city’s marriage license bureau, and demonstrated at the taxi commission against a regulation, since abolished, requiring gay people to get a psychiatrist’s approval before they could be allowed to drive a taxi.