Australia: To marriage ‘equality’ militants: Take our olive branch and shove it
For defenders of traditional marriage, the plebiscite was a significant concession and a risk they didn’t need to take. But if the other side doesn’t want to come half way, then so be it. Take our olive branch and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
Lyle Shelton from the Australian Christian Lobby. “I never thought I would be meeting secretly in this country in my lifetime,” says Lyle Shelton, managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby. “It’s not the Australia I grew up in or the Australia I want for my children.”
Shelton says his receptionist at ACL’s Canberra offices is regularly distressed by abusive phone calls. Uninvited visitors have intimidated staff. ACL now has to lock its doors.
It is true that the marriage debate has unleashed hatred from intolerant authoritarians. But the victims are not loved-up LGBTIQ folk.
They are gentle Christians and other defenders of traditional marriage who have been vilified for daring to hold a contrary view. Those courageous enough to raise a head above the parapet are brutally made examples of.
It’s the social form of warning off perfected by ISIS when they publicly behead people or lower them in cages into swimming pools or stage any number of elaborate tortures as a lesson to others who might dare even think of being disobedient.
Social death awaits those who defy the fashionable position on marriage.
For example, Christians in northwest Sydney who set up a group called “Children’s Future” were named and shamed in a vicious article in the Sydney Morning Herald last week because they letterboxed pamphlets which linked the same-sex marriage campaign to “Safe Schools”. Since Roz Ward, the architect of the radical sex education program, has explicitly made the same link, it’s hardly a giant leap.
But because some members of Children’s Future also are members of the Liberal party, and are Catholic, they were easy prey for factional rivals who sicced willing media onto them with gratuitous mentions of Opus Dei and George Pell.
One shop owner, named just because his brother is involved, was in despair last week, forced into hiding after phone calls and strange visits to his shop. He is terrified his business will suffer as a result of the smear campaign.
Let that be a warning.
Last month, when the ACL and other Christian groups tried to hold a meeting at the Mercure Hotel at Sydney Airport to prepare for the plebiscite, their booking was cancelled after threats of violence to hotel staff.
They regrouped last week but had to meet in secret.
The same illiberal tactics were employed at The Occidental Hotel in May when protesters shut down a talk in defence of traditional marriage by Joe de Bruyn and Cory Bernardi, whose Adelaide office had previously been trashed by gay activists.
When Toowoomba GP David van Gend wrote a book, “Stealing from a Child”, making the case against same-sex marriage, the printing company refused to print it two days before its launch last week.
Then there is the soft coercion, through corporate “diversity” programs. Employees soon get the message that their careers will suffer if they don’t go with the flow. Take Mark Allaby, a senior executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers, who was forced to resign from the board of ACL after a word from PWC’s “diversity” officer.
Let that be a warning.
This Tuesday, Qantas employees will receive diversity training at Mascot when a spokesman from Marriage Equality addresses them. Will Qantas invite Shelton along to balance the discussion? No chance.
In the end, intimidation of opponents, and Labor’s despicable portrayal of the plebiscite as a trigger for gay suicide, has had the desired effect. Public support and the will of politicians to support the public vote is waning.
The militant arm of Marriage Equality and Labor will be rewarded when, as seems likely, the plebiscite is killed off in the Senate this month. Then Malcolm Turnbull has an existential crisis on his hands.
Inevitably he will be faced with another bid for politicians to legislate same-sex marriage, without the plebiscite he promised at the election, and which is central to the Coalition agreement with the Nationals.
If the public will is subverted, the political bloodletting will be immediate and ugly.
Instead of the country uniting around a publicly-sanctioned marriage revolution in February, a politician-led change will never be seen as legitimate. It will be a Pyrrhic victory which sets the stage for ever more nasty culture wars.
