The media hall of shame is now giving out same-sex marriage plebiscite showbags:

On the Monthly blog, Sean Kelly says that non LGBT people should stop making comments on the Yes case’s piss-poor strateg-, sorry, on the Yes case’s strategy. If the Yes vote loses, it won’t be anything to do with strategy, it will be because the nation still has vast reaches of homophobia. Really? How does that square with throwing away 60%+ support? If the Yes vote loses — unlikely, but they could really Hillary this — it will be because the Yes case favoured almost wholly a get-out-the-vote strategy, and had all but zero headline media, advocacy and direct explicit argument. It will be because the leadership encouraged the politically demobilising idea that the issue doesn’t have to be debated, and the argument won. “This is not a two-horse race,” Kelly says. Well, that’s right. If you’ve got a finish line, a track and two horses named Yes and No, and one of them thinks it shouldn’t even have to race … then it’s a one-horse race.

Still in the Monthly stable, Alex McKinnon gives the most oppressive version of the “no debate” mantra in The Saturday Paper, saying some within the ABC suggest the public broadcaster shouldn’t even allow the No case to present itself, and that its arguments are inherently “invalid”. Where’s the court of adjudication that says that a traditional arrangement lasting millennia has no validity in argument? The tradition does not make the argument per se, but it gives obvious standing for an argument to be made. Is Roger Corbett’s bizarro Jim Crow argument about “white men” and “black men” really that much of a threat? I would have thought it was a gift to the Yes case. Where did this idea — that there’s some meta-political court of appeal deciding which opinions can and cannot be presented — come from? From the fact that much of the LGBT and marriage equality leadership are, in other parts of their lives, part of the power structure, and don’t want to be in a politically petitioning position. What’s the next argument that people will say shouldn’t even be allowed to be made? That Anzac Day is a crock of crap? That offshore detention is not justified by the prevention of drownings? Thanks, but don’t trash our free speech just because the No campaign has proved more spry than a complacent Yes leadership thought it might be.

Back to the Kelly gang, and Paul this time, who has in the past few weeks given the country a masterclass in fact-free bloviating, on the issue of “religious freedom” in the wake of a Yes vote. I challenge anyone to find an actual point or argument in Wednesday’s piece, the latest in the series. Kelly, P, is worried that a Yes vote will make, err … he doesn’t say. For obvious reasons. Kelly’s an old Catholic rightist who likes the idea that some religious hum in the background will undergird a conservative order. He thinks marriage equality will be a step in the secularisation of Australia. But he’s not crazy enough to think that it will mean you can marry your ute (pity — I know many straight men who would be persuaded to a Yes vote by that provision), and he doesn’t want to sound crazy. So he has nothing to say. Since the plebiscite is non-binding, how can it, of itself, do anything to change the religious status quo? If Kelly has a concrete example of anything it will necessitate, he should produce it. Tumbleweeds. It’s unquestionably Kelly’s worst, most abnegating culture war performance to date, and given his record, that’s saying something. Coming next week: Paul Kelly warns that a Yes vote will put religious freedom under pressure because oh look, geese.

Well, it’s all very interesting, even if discussion of strategy is now banned. Me, I’m watching it like the World Cup, trying to work out whether the Yes case is Brazil, that team of fat multimillionaires who lumber out onto the field, after no training, and destroy the opposition, or England, when it was down 0-1 to San Marino in a qualifier, and the BBC announcer said, “I have just realised we are losing to a mountaintop.”

Back to the horse race metaphor. On we go, into the, er, straight.