Christian lobbyist Lyle Shelton (“No mandate for change”, The Australian, 18/9) is wrong to say that any Constitutional challenge to marriage legislation would be about “what marriage meant in 1901”. The High Court has never viewed the Constitution, or the nation, as frozen in time. In its decisions on subjects that have changed substantially in meaning since Federation, such as race, political rights, corporations, external affairs, and even juries, the contemporary meaning has rightly always been preferred.

There are many thinking Christians in this country who are able to reconcile their personal view of homosexuality with their membership of a secular democracy, and thus do not insist, as Shelton does, that public law should reflect their private dogma.