Richard Di Natale sums up "nonsense" of gay marriage debate in one glorious smack down.

One “nonsense” argument. One brilliant response.

If you’re one of the vast majority of Australians who support same sex marriage, parts of last night’s Q&A probably made you want to hurl your remote at the TV in rage.

It was part two of the show’s same sex marriage debate, and panelists included Greens leader Richard Di Natale, Labor’s Sam Dastyari and Liberal Kelly O’Dwyer.

They were joined by international guests Katy Faust, a self-described bigot and American anti-same-sex marriage advocate raised by lesbian mothers, and Spiked Online editor Brendan O’Neill, from the UK.

Yes, things got heated. Yes, insults were hurled. And yes, some of the arguments against same sex marriage felt like we’d gone back in time to the 1950s.

The stand-out performer was Di Natale, who summed up the “nonsense” of the same-sex marriage debate in one eloquent argument, as well as explaining why it was unrelated to the issue of same sex parenting.

Check out Di Natale’s perfect speech here:

“We support as a society the right of same sex couples to be parents, and we do it because look, there’s lots of pseudo-science and gobbledy-gook out there about the effects on kids – almost every study demonstrates that the most important factor is whether a child is raised in a loving household,” he said.

“It’s not biology that influences whether you’ve got a happy, healthy, well-balanced child, it’s whether they grew up in a loving household – and if there’s any issue that kids growing up in an environment with same sex parents have to face, its the discrimination towards their parents, and it’s that issue we should be tacking, not this nonsense argument about whether people of the same sex should be able to raise a child. We’ve had that debate. That’s gone. We’re now having a debate about marriage, and whether people should be able to marry.”

“The issue with marriage is this for me: marriage is an expression of love and commitment between two people. Why do we say that one couple should be entitled to express that love and commitment publicly and yet another couple can’t do that? The only justification is that you think that the love between those people is somehow lesser, it’s worth less, it’s not as important and it’s different. And that’s what prejudice is.”

Thank you, Richard Di Natale, for putting so eloquently what most of us have been thinking for so long.

Now it’s time for the government to listen.

Do you think it’s time same sex marriage was legalised in Australia?

Want more? Try these:

18 arguments against gay marriage – and why they’re bollocks.

‘Tony Abbott, you don’t know how to love your sister.’