Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the marriage equality campaign’s renewed momentum is the panic it has imbued within the ranks of the family values bigots.

Not placated by the many assurances that this reform is simply about “love” and nothing more, the right is desperately casting around for more victims they can invoke to hold back the marriage equality deluge.

This week, the unlikely category of cattle exporters has been added to the list of cake shop owners, God-fearing heterosexuals and the obligatory children whose rights will supposedly be trashed by marriage equality.

Barnaby Joyce’s attempt to invoke a vision of homophobic Asian countries not willing to tolerate beef reared in a country where LGBTI people can marry not only smacks of racist deflection. It also seems to confirm the theory that the political establishment was sent here to amuse us, and through a terrible mix up somehow ended up governing instead.

Cory Bernardi’s preoccupation with bestiality and how granting rights for LGBTI people might encourage it has provided much entertainment over the years – until it proved too crazy even for the Liberal party to tolerate.

His new Ned Flanders-style euphemism for marriage equality, “frolics and fantasies”, nevertheless indicates that comic talent springs eternal. Not as natural a comedian, Eric Abetz has done what he can to keep the loony quotient up in Canberra over the last week.

Amusement aside, it is an indictment of the Australian political system that people of this calibre determine the laws that the rest of us have to live under.

It is bad enough that both sides of politics have imposed, upheld and defended homophobic discrimination for more than 10 years. But the fact that card-carrying bigots who belong on the fringes of society also exercise considerable influence in this arena is downright disturbing.

It is also why the political establishment world-wide is so threatened by what is happening in Greece. The idea that people who actually are attuned to and motivated by the concerns, attitudes and difficulties faced by ordinary people should also be in charge of decision making is anathema to those looking to defend the status quo.

They want to entrench discrimination, impose austerity and push through pro-business budgets without reference to how they affect ordinary people, because that’s what their friends in the business world want.

They want to see a population divided, concerned about family values rather than their class interests and willing to accept deteriorating living standards.

So ideas that are divorced from the concerns of ordinary people, and that back the status quo, are a requirement of the political establishment, not an aberration or a problem of them simply being “out of touch”.

The marriage equality campaign is rightly recognised by the political right not just as a harmless nod to love, but a potential blow against the values that the right wing seeks to impose.

And it can set a worrying precedent that politicians should respond to public pressure, rather than ignore it. Far from seeking to allay such concerns, the marriage equality campaign should be looking for ways to use the current momentum to shift political debate to the left and weaken the right as much as is possible.