Welcome to day three of The Macklemore Debacle. To get you up to speed: US rapper Macklemore is scheduled to perform four songs at the NRL Grand Final on Sunday, including his hit ‘Same Love’. This has upset the No campaign, which says the NRL is making a political statement in favour of the marriage equality.

Macklemore has been scheduled to sing the song for months. The decision was made long before we knew we’d be having this silly postal survey. The song went to number one in Australia in 2013, and this ridiculous controversy has sent it back to the top of the charts today. The whole thing is deeply stupid.

When you take a step back to look at the big picture this is just the latest example of the No side trying to shut down free speech, which is ironic because their entire campaign is based on the notion that a successful Yes vote will be the death of free speech in Australia.

Who Really Wants To Shut Down Free Speech?

Let’s go back six months to when the idea of a postal survey was just a twinkle in a homophobe’s eye. The government’s plebiscite was dead in the Senate and there seemed to be no way forward for marriage equality in the current parliament. But lobbyists from Australian Marriage Equality were still trying to force the issue, and along with a bunch of business leaders like Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, they were campaigning hard for a free vote in parliament.

Then up stepped Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, who said that business leaders should “stick to their knitting” rather than campaigning on social issues.

“It is unacceptable that people would use companies’ and shareholders’ money of publicly listed companies to throw their weight around,” he said. “If Alan Joyce and any other CEO wants to campaign on this or any other issue in their own time and on their own dime, good luck to them. Don’t use an iconic brand and the might of a multibillion dollar business on issues best left to the judgement of individuals and elected decision-makers.”

Why? Alan Joyce is answerable to his shareholders, not Peter Dutton. He and Qantas made the decision that supporting equality is good for business. If shareholders think Joyce is wrong, they can force him to change course. But given the company’s recent profits, that seems unlikely.

Shortly afterwards, the Australian Medical Association came out in support of marriage equality, arguing it’s a health issue and that the nation’s peak medical body would be negligent not to support a policy that has the potential to do immeasurable good for vulnerable Australians.

The announcement was met with anger from a handful of doctors, who accused the AMA of getting too involved in politics and demanded the AMA retract its statement. An almost identical thing happened to the Law Society when it announced support for marriage equality. Nothing says “free speech” like demanding a retraction.

“It’s Not About Marriage”

Fast forward to the postal survey and the No campaign made a very conscious decision not to campaign on the actual merits of marriage equality. They wanted this campaign to be about safe schools, gender identity, religious freedom, and above all else, free speech.

But then the Yes campaign sent out a bunch of text messages urging people to vote Yes. The No campaign, which has been making phone calls, knocking on doors and putting pamphlets in letterboxes, screamed that this was an invasion of privacy. How was a text message any different to those other perfectly legitimate campaign tactics? It’s not. But the No campaign didn’t like the message being sent and wanted to shut it down.

Yesterday we learned that conservative Senator Cory Bernardi is planning to make a million robo-calls urging people to vote no. With a straight face, he actually argued that what he was planning is ok while the Yes campaign’s text messages were wrong. Free speech is fine when it’s speech they agree with.

.@corybernardi says the 'no' campaign's robo-calls are market research and not invasive like text messages. MORE: https://t.co/Ww8dVD3FA1 pic.twitter.com/H3QRqVM9MI

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) September 28, 2017

How Much Should We Mackle, More Or Less?

Then we get to this week, and Macklemore unknowingly took the whole debate to new depths. The NRL, just like the AFL, Cricket Australia, the FFA, Basketball Australia and the ARU, supports marriage equality. All of these organisations decided that opening up their leagues to as broad a fan base as possible was good for business.

Separately to that, the NRL organised for a very popular artist to perform the half time entertainment at its Grand Final. The fact that one of Macklemore’s songs calls for gay people to be treated with respect — it doesn’t even talk about marriage, just the idea that gay people are humans who should be treated with dignity — was too much for the No campaign to bear.

A petition calling for the NRL to keep politics out of sport was started, and Tony Abbott got behind it. ““Footy fans shouldn’t be subjected to a politicised grand final,” screamed the man who has co-opted Australian sporting culture at every turn throughout his career.

"I thought Mr Abbott believed in freedom of speech?”

AG George Brandis says it would be "bizarre" to ban @macklemore's song at the #NRLGF pic.twitter.com/Nchzk4CeTJ

— News Breakfast (@BreakfastNews) September 27, 2017

The No campaign got on board, calling on the NRL to censor itself. Then Dutton (yeah, him again), said he didn’t want politics “shoved down his throat”. Dutton’s idea of free speech is one where two songs are played: “one for gay marriage and one against gay marriage.’’

Sorry, that’s not how free speech works. Free speech doesn’t mean everyone has to give an equal airing to every view. Free speech means letting people say the things they want to say and forcing them to live with the consequences.

The “Intolerant Yes” And The “Innocent No”

The No campaign doesn’t like when people truly exercise free speech because it reveals them for what they are: an ever-shrinking minority of voices screaming louder and louder as their worst fears come closer to fruition.

Throughout this whole debate we’ve been told that it’s the “intolerant, totalitarian Yes” campaign that represents a threat to free speech. The Yes campaign has been forced to take responsibility for the actions of every fool who headbutts Tony Abbott while wearing a “Vote Yes” badge — and the campaign has done just that, time and time again.

When faced with evidence of violence, intimidation and censorship from No supporters, the No campaign has repeatedly portrayed them as fringe-dwellers who have no links to the official campaign. “Just ignore them,” they say while attempting to tie every underhanded act from marriage equality supporters directly to the Yes campaign.

Time and again, the No campaign has attempted to keep ideas that it doesn’t like out of the public square. If we hold the No campaign to the same standard it demands of others, it’s clear that it represents the true threat to free speech.