When anti-discrimination turns to shouting down

Andrew Barr's impassioned defence of the so-called Safe Schools program in the Legislative Assembly on Wednesday did not go into the concerns many parents have with their kids being inducted into contested gender theory. No one, especially people of faith, want to see children bullied at school for any reason. Full stop.

But missing from the Chief Minister's defence was a rationale as to why an anti-bullying program urges schools to change their policies so boys identifying as girls should be allowed in the girls toilets and to share school camp accommodation. It is not clear why school teachers should cease using gender specific terms such as "boys and girls" when referring to children. No one has explained why four year olds should be encouraged to read the Safe Schools resource book Gender Fairy which tells them no one can tell you what gender you are. Safe Schools heavily promotes the Minus 18 organisation and its website which gives instruction in chest binding to girls and penis tucking for boys.

How is this instruction relevant to anti-bullying? Leading feminists rightly contest gender theory – the idea that gender is a social construct with nothing to do with a person's biological make-up. Johns Hopkins hospital in the United States ceased gender reassignment surgery in the 1970s because it was found to not make trans people happier.

A 2011 study in the world's most trans-friendly nation, Sweden, found the suicide mortality (not ideation) was 20 times higher in the trans population than the non-trans population. While people may argue about causality for this unspeakably sad statistic, it is hardly likely that "progressive" Sweden's stigmatisation of transgendered people is the cause.

Telling kids that "penis and vagina sex is not the only sex and certainly not the ultimate" has little to do with anti-bullying and more with usurping parents' rights to provide moral formation for their children. Safe Schools, through its promotion of Minus 18, downplays the seriousness of sexually transmitted diseases, undermining decades of safe-sex messages.

"So I done f.....d up. Literally. One Grindr hook-up gone wrong and that's how I got myself some gonorrhoea," Minus 18 says. It's easy to poke fun at "Neanderthal conservatives" because that doesn't require thinking or engaging with their argument.

Federal parliamentarian George Christensen was right to reveal the websites, such as the Toolbox, which the Safe-Schools-promoted Minus 18 website directs children as young as 11 to click. If I sat down with a child in front of a computer and directed her or him to click through the images of artificial penises and exploited women in fetish positions I would probably be in trouble with the police.

Under the cover of the confected outrage at Christensen, Minus 18 quietly de-linked the Toolbox minutes after his speech to Parliament.

It's easy for Mr Barr to criticise ACL for calling for a level playing field for free speech in the up-coming marriage plebiscite. If he was following the debate, he would know that our motivation in calling for a suspension of anti-discrimination laws is not so we can unleash a tirade of hate against our fellow Australians.

Surely he must know that a Roman Catholic Archbishop has been before the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission for more than six months. Archbishop Julian Porteous' crime was not hate speech, it was simply telling the truth about marriage and its importance to children.

If Mr Barr thinks this is a good use of the law, he should say so. If marriage is redefined in law, it will be interesting to see whether or not programs like "Safe Schools" morph from voluntary to compulsory, including for private schools. It will be interesting to see if anti-discrimination laws continue to be used to silence anyone who dares say out loud that marriage is the exclusive union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others voluntarily entered into for life.

Sadly I fear that rainbow politics is ushering in a new era of intolerance backed by the big stick of the law.

Lyle Shelton is the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby.