Nick Ryan: On the Safe Schools program, Senator Cory Bernardi just doesn’t get it

CORY Bernardi is kidding himself if he thinks children don’t need educating about same-sex issues.

Cory Bernardi Homophopia poster at the back of 30 Flinders St Adelaide building. Picture Campbell Brodie

THERE are lots of things that would make the world a happier place.

Champagne flowing from kitchen taps.

Perpetual Port Adelaide premierships.

Upgrades on every flight, bonuses in every pay packet and free sauce on every pie.

And Cory Bernardi letting go his obsession with sex. Because Cory just doesn’t get it.

I should probably rephrase that.

In one sense of the word, I’ve got no right wondering if Cory gets it or not, his amorous activities are private and require no interference from me. If only he’d extend the same courtesy to others.

But, in the other sense of the word, it’s patently obvious that Bernardi‘s brain starts to sputter when he contemplates the sexual world beyond what he considers acceptable.

This is a bloke who fears same-sex marriage because he believes it to be the first step on a slippery slope that takes us to polyamory and further still, to a world where we’ll be asking jewellers to find a way to make wedding rings fit on cloven hoofs.

Any man who can draw a line from two consenting adults confirming their love for each other right through to honeymoon suites in horse stables is lacking a little basic humanity.

Senator Cory Bernardi at a family fun day at The Lodge, in Canberra, earlier this month. Picture: Mick Tsikas/AP

So, too, is the man who thinks a program seeking to support vulnerable kids will inevitably turn our schools into nothing more than production lines for gays.

Bernardi has called for the defunding of the Safe Schools program, an initiative born of teachers asking for resources to help deal with the victimisation of students with an emerging sexuality that may not fit the majority mould, claiming it was being used to “indoctrinate children into a Marxist agenda of cultural relativism”.

Looking past the kind of language that doesn’t usually get used outside the ‘kids playing grown-ups’ world of student politics, that statement just perpetuates the fallacy that sexual orientation is something that can be taught.

Surely the “nature vs. nurture” debate has been put to bed by now and we can accept that our sexuality is something hardwired at birth and not some aftermarket modification.

The extensive Madonna memorabilia collection my brother-in-law had amassed by the time he was 13 isn’t what made him gay. It was just the outward indication of what he’d always been.

In an ideal world, the Safe Schools program could educate itself out of existence.

My seven-year-old knows just about as many gay adults as straight ones and she doesn’t distinguish between them.

I suspect her generation will handle the hurdles on the way to adulthood better than mine did but, even if the victimisation becomes more rare, there must still be support in place to deal with it when it occurs.

In a weird way, I share one bit of common ground with Senator Bernardi on this issue. I, too, am a little uncomfortable with kids as young as 11 having to discuss matters of sexuality.

If I had my way, my daughter would drive herself to her first ever sex-education class having stopped off to vote in an election on the way. But I know that’s unrealistic.

If an 11-year-old is confused, threatened or depressed by emerging issues of same-sex attraction – let alone what must be the even more overwhelmingly daunting feeling you’d been born the wrong gender – then my prudishness is a triviality not worth a second thought.

If 11-year-olds can already criticise a classmate for “being gay” then they’re more than worldly enough to learn that it’s wrong.

To put just one kid at risk to try and make some political point is simply appalling.

That it comes with the support of a political lobby that likes to call itself Christian but won’t act as such is even worse.

Perhaps it would be easier for these people to swallow if the Safe Schools program broadened its focus from the sexuality issues that make them so nervous and simply tried to preach the virtues of tolerance and compassion in all things.

They could call it “Don’t be an arsehole 101.” I can think of a few people in need of a refresher course.