Don’t believe the tripe about a plague of rainbow locusts

SAME-sex marriage won’t unleash an army of transgender, green-leftist, rainbow stormtroopers, writes Paul Syvret. This hysterical rhetoric must stop.

OF all the asinine claptrap spewed forth in what passes as “debate” over marriage equality, arguably the most nonsensical conflation — and there is stiff competition for that crown — is that there is some ideological agenda at play here.

The marriage equality campaign, we are told, has been “hijacked by the hard-left, transgender political activists” — sinister forces who want to institute a form of “rainbow McCarthyism”.

The debate about marriage is apparently not about marriage at all, but is instead a trojan horse for a wider political power play — cue smoke machine and spooky music — and “the empowerment of the hard green-left transgender activists and their anti-conservative, anti-religion, anti-heterosexual agenda”.

This hysterical rhetoric is coming from a vocal fringe that can only ever see any issue through a very narrow prism of “Left” and “Right”, regardless of whether the debate is actually about science (climate change for example), economics, human rights, immigration, or, in this case, human sexuality and extending equal rights to same-sex couples.

The point here is that sexual orientation and gender identity have zero correlation with political philosophy. You can choose to subscribe to a particular political doctrine, but sexuality or gender identity is something you are born with, not a lifestyle option that can be plucked from a shelf at Bunnings and tailored to suit.

Yesterday The Australian newspaper published a full-page advertisement authorised by “Liberals & Nationals for Yes”.

Signatories to the ad included federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham, Attorney-General George Brandis, Health Minister Greg Hunt and Defence Minister Marise Payne, along with the likes of Nick Greiner, Amanda Vanstone, Kate Carnell and Christine Forster — the latter of whom is a Liberal Councillor in Sydney and Tony Abbott’s younger sister who would like the right to marry her partner Virginia.

Simon Birmingham at Coalition Parliamentarians for “Yes” launch event at Canberra’s Parliament House. (Pic: Kym Smith)

It would take a long bow fitted with telescopic sights to claim any of these men and women, who have made their mark on the conservative side of Australia’s political spectrum, could be classed as “hard-left transgender political activists”.

Likewise most people would struggle with the argument in favour of equality — backed by numerous (but certainly not all) church leaders of various denominations — as being somehow “anti-religion”.

In fact when it comes to the issue of religious freedoms you could argue that the question cuts both ways.

As Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio of the Emmanuel Synagogue in Sydney told the ABC earlier this month: “I feel my religious freedom is being curtailed by those groups who are stopping me from doing this because it is something they don’t want to do.

“If they don’t want to do it that’s fine, that’s their prerogative. But I want the opportunity to celebrate and sanctify same-sex relationships with the rites and rituals of marriage.”

Such is the panic among opponents of equality though that they are desperate to talk about the optional postal plebi-survey in terms of everything but marriage, to the point where some of the debate in recent days has descended into a farcical “what if?” dispute about wedding cakes.

Lyle Shelton, the mouthpiece for the Australian Christian Lobby — which is a political ginger group not a peak body representing Christian churches in Australia — has been warning that “there is no greater threat to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech than same-sex marriage”.

There are already long-established anti-discrimination laws in place to deal with homophobic patisseries. (Pic: AFP)

If marriage equality comes to pass, he says — while warning in multiple, daily television interviews that “no” voices are being silenced — then woe betide the Christian baker who refuses to whip up a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Nonsense. There are already long-established anti-discrimination laws in place to deal with homophobic patisseries, or indeed a pub that refused to serve a patron because he was black, or a restaurant that refused service to a woman because she was wearing a hijab.

SSM changes nothing in that department, including the exemption for religious institutions who will retain the right to refuse their services on the grounds that to do so would be a breach of articles of faith.

In fact, if I was organising a gay wedding, the last baker in Brisbane I’d choose would be the one (if it exists) that so hated my sexuality that they didn’t want my money.

Extending equality to members of the community currently denied certain rights does not mean others lose theirs, because equality is not a pie (or a wedding cake for that matter) that is divided up and shared out.

Nor will SSM unleash an army of transgender, green-leftist, rainbow stormtroopers on the land, any more than it will curdle the milk or fade the bloody curtains.