Sam Vimes
What am I about to read, you may ask? Good question. I’m editing and reverse engineering this as I go, so I’m not 100% sure; it started out as an attempt to understand the ins and outs of the same sex marriage furore, but it’s morphed into something else. As soon as one digs even slightly deeper than the sophistry of the Yes campaign and the pronouncements from government, it really gets quite depressing.
Where to begin? Over the past 12 months the world seems to have lost the plot, and Australia the country seems to have slipped away from me, out of my realm of understanding. Forgetting about Brexit, Hillary Clinton and Islamic terrorism (if that’s even possible) for the moment, we have a government that’s limped from month to month through 2017 with ever worse opinion polls, and a Prime Minister in Malcolm Turnbull of whom the fairest thing that could be asked is “what exactly is the point of keeping him around?”. When he ousted Tony Abbott two years ago, in what at the time felt like a considered move to many given Abbott’s popularity ratings were so poor, Turnbull claimed he wanted to bring about a calm government, fiscal responsibility and that he would listen to the people of Australia.
Well, if he’s listening at all, it’s with the ears of someone else; I’m sure only Angela Merkel or Theresa May would beat him to the title of ‘Most Tone-Deaf Leader – 2017’.
But it’s in the weeks since the announcement of the Same Sex Marriage survey that I have come to understand the Prime Minister’s true calling. With a list of real issues – spiralling national debt, a deficit that refuses to budge, a strange LNP Renewable Energy Target policy that seems to be about being not quite as onerous as Labour’s, a divided and disjointed coalition tarnished by a citizenship and eligibility scandal, the LNP losing out in State elections in both Queensland and Western Australia – Turnbull has claimed the moral and spiritual victory of passing legislation to legalise same sex marriage, a Bill rushed through both houses, just in time for Christmas. This was his crowning achievement of the past 12 months – during which time the economy has tanked, farmers and fishermen and small business has suffered, and South Australia has built a giant boondoggle of a battery to cope with blackouts – a giant, Christmas turd of a SSM Bill, covered in the glitter of appeasement to the ideologues of the left.
It was the way the SSM survey panned out however, the lies and obfuscations and promises to those that voted Yes or No, that the SSM survey would only be about “love-is-love” and would never seek to undermine religious freedoms or the rights of those that don’t agree with SSM to speak freely about the subject. Those on the No side of the campaign have had their concerns treated with utter contempt by Turnbull and the government, which seemed desperate to appear even more “progressive” than Labour.
Prior to the survey results being released of course, the country also had to deal with the unhinged rainbow coalition spreading their message of love with bullhorns, protests, online bullying and vile attacks on any concerned citizen who dared suggest that possibly the vote wasn’t about “love-is-love” after all, and maybe had far darker consequences such as paving the road for radical gender theory to be further mainstreamed, not just in our schools but in our laws. That was never going to happen, it was claimed, but unsurprisingly the rainbow coalition has, in the weeks since the law was passed, come out in strong support of additional LGBTQI-etc protections and programs in our schools. Naturally, this has elicited the usual moist-eyed support from the lefty media, obsessed somehow with the notion that if this country doesn’t act quickly in ratifying further legislation, and implementing desperately needed programmes in our schools, the LGBT community and those with gender fluidity issues are literally going to die in their tens of thousands, or be dragged kicking and screaming to internment camps by Lyle Shelton and the Coalition for Marriage.
Of course, supporters of the SSM legislation no doubt consider that its only about nice suburban gay people being able to marry, and for those that don’t spend any time outside of their cosy liberal suburban bubble, its understandable that they would question why anyone would be opposed to it. After all, gay people are human, and we should be compassionate, right? On that level I am unequivocally in agreement; that is, if the SSM bill was about love-is-love. Sadly, this is not the case, and for that a brief explanation is needed.
In 2005, Canada’s parliament passed the country’s version of the SSM bill. It passed unanimously, and was universally celebrated, as at that time Canada was only the third country to do so, after those wacky Dutch and Belgians. Where is Canada ten years on? Latest statistics from Canadian census data suggest that a shade over 23,000 same sex couples were married as of 2016 out of approximately 6.3 million married couples (0.3%), and about 1.7% of adults in Canada regarded themselves as homosexual. Those aren’t massive numbers, and clearly the gay community has embraced SSM as around one third of gay couples in Canada are married, so you might ask yourself “what’s the problem?”
Well, the problem is that as the Left in Canada has continued to build up the case that the LGBT community has been persecuted almost to the same extent as Jews in Nazi Germany – Justin Trudeau cried at a recent “Sorry” ceremony for heaven’s sake – and as the LGBT acronym has expanded to include all sorts of categories around gender identity, so Canadians via their government have sought ever greater exoneration for their “sins” by allowing ever greater encroachment of the LGBT agenda into every aspect of society over the past decade. Schools, universities, government institutions – none have been safe from leftist agitprop, to the point where the “normies” of society – the remaining 97% of the population, the heterosexual community, liberals and conservatives both – are now considered the marginal group, and radical gender theory has assumed the position of the orthodoxy.
In June 2017, however, the situation truly reached its nadir when the Canadian Senate passed Bill C-16, Trudeau’s amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act, which added “gender identity or expression” to the grounds of discrimination under the Act. To quote the Ontario Human Rights Code – “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity … will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social area covered by the Code” – think most workplaces, schools, universities, hospitals and so on.
There is so much to unpack with this particular piece of legislation, and I urge all readers to research this in greater detail, as well as the possibly even more insidious Motion M103 which seeks to outlaw “Islamophobia” – [yes, this is a thing]. It’s enough to suggest however that compelled speech is a direct violation of free speech, and to enshrine a so-called human right onto a group of people who choose to identify as different genders on any given day, and that to not refer to them by whatever gender pronouns they’re identifying with at that moment is somehow in violation of their basic human rights, is surely limiting my rights to ignore them completely?
So, now that we’re at this point in Australia, why does our government seem so myopic? Why do we feel the need to place the ideological needs of a minority group, particularly one that is so far from oppressed in our Western societies as to be laughable, at the forefront of our legislation and policy decisions, to the detriment of ordinary heterosexual families, religious freedoms, freedom of speech and traditional values? What is it about our society in 2017 that is so intolerable to the LGBT community and its media and political cadres, that it must be torn down?
In trying to figure this out for myself, I realised the answer to this is complicated, slightly unbelievable, but deeply rooted in Marxist ideology. I hope you’ll join me for Part 2; thanks for reading.