Even if this were true, we're not living in a feudal society. We have governments and public services to protect individuals these days – and when we know women in Australia in 2017 are most at risk of violence from male partners and family members, it's a ridiculous argument. But the notion that marriage is some noble male institution created for the benefit of women and children is more than ridiculously revisionist. It's downright offensive. That said, Abbott is not entirely wrong. Though it boils down to how you interpret the word "protection". The institution of marriage did evolve as a way for men to "protect" the women and children they considered to be their property, by essentially granting men ownership rights. By formalising a relationship under the marriage contract, a man was legally protecting his property from other men who might come sniffing around it. Women and children (those born under wedlock, not outside) came under a man's "protection" in the same way as just about any other item of his property would be protected by him. Like horses. Or land. Or slaves.

The idea that a man "protects" his family and property is just part of the ownership deal. It's in his interests to do so. But how and whether he chooses to protect them is, of course, up to him. They're at his mercy. He may choose to be kind. But he may also choose to be controlling. This is where the notion of "paternalism" comes from. It's using "protection" as a disingenuous excuse for exploiting people for your own benefit, under the pretense that it's for theirs. Under the traditional, paternalistic conception of marriage and the family unit with the master/husband/father at its head, a man has been legally allowed to beat and rape his subordinate wife until frighteningly recently. NSW was the first state to criminalise marital rape in Australia. In 1981.

Domestic violence was only recognised as a criminal offence in the 1970s – and it's only in recent years after massive campaigning efforts on the part of feminist advocates that the issue is actually starting to be treated with proper seriousness. Though women are still dying at the hands of their partners at alarming rates, and the government is only putting a fraction of the cash being thrown at terrorism towards domestic violence despite the number of deaths being far higher. For the reasons above and more, some members of the LGBT community have felt ambivalent about the fight for equal marriage rights, given many who are also feminists (particularly of the radical persuasion) have long preferred to see the institution dismantled. But marriage has also changed as women have been granted rights and our culture shifts towards equality between the sexes. The less it becomes about reproduction and male ownership of women and children, the more it becomes about a personal choice between a couple to love and commit to each other, the better. When people try to argue against extending marriage equality to same-sex couples because of tradition, because of children, because of some outdated notion of men "protecting" their wives, they are really arguing in favour of that model of marriage in which women were treated as men's possessions, their sole purpose to provide their husbands with a "legitimate" brood. Despite the progress made in recent decades, heterosexual marriage remains at least potentially problematic for women. Women are still broadly expected to surrender their names and put their jobs and their financial independence at risk to raise children while their husbands continue their careers. Many men continue to view their wives as their possessions, or at least as their subordinates, even if women are no longer treated as such by the law.

This is a cultural issue that will take not just time but significant effort to change – and in my view, the existence of marriages between people of the same sex is an essential stepping stone towards overturning archaic attitudes about gender roles for which traditional marriage (and the patriarchal societies under which it arose) is largely to blame. I personally look forward to a future in which marriage is nothing more, or less, than a symbol of a couple's love and commitment. And we won't get there without making the gender of the couple making that commitment to each other irrelevant.