Piers Akerman: Hatred has given love a massive headbutt

THE Yes-No debate on changing the meaning of the word marriage to include currently legal homosexual unions was always going to be about headbutting but civility was meant to have kept it metaphorical.

Piers Akerman.

THE Yes-No debate on changing the meaning of the word marriage to include currently legal homosexual unions was always going to be about headbutting but civility was meant to have kept the blows metaphorical.

However, well before former prime minister Tony Abbott was given a Liverpool kiss in Hobart last week by an anarchist wearing a Yes sticker this argument had descended into one of hate.

That the hate has come overwhelmingly from those on the Yes side of the debate — with a few rare exceptions such as the assault on former PM Kevin Rudd’s godson Sean Foster who was beaten when he attempted to stop a protester removing rainbow Yes posters near a Brisbane bus stop — would surprise no-one who has been following this issue.

It wasn’t meant to be this way, we were assured by the homosexual lobby which aggressively fought against any public vote on the matter whether through a referendum or a plebiscite and with support from Labor and the Greens, effectively stalled the parliamentary process that would probably have seen legislation on homosexual marriage passed earlier this year.

The argument against letting the public have their say was that any discussion would release a torrent of hate speech.

Yes it has, from supporters of the Yes side and again this is unsurprising.

Bullying has become an art form on the Left and, like most aggressive activist tactics used by so-called progressive movements in Australia, it has been plagiarised from the actions used to some success to intimidate in the US where the feminists and then every other self-proclaimed minority cried discrimination to coerce their opponents into capitulation.

This why the department that used to be called Industrial Relations or IR, quickly became Human Relations or HR in the ’80s and started expanding into the bloated bureaucracies we now see in most major organisations and indeed government.

After watching US feminists successfully ensure that no male stood a fair chance when allegations of sexism were raised against him, the homosexuals were quick to follow with the result that the language gained a new word — homophobe — to denigrate anyone who didn’t publicly and enthusiastically support the homosexual agenda.

Such corporate bullying has been rampant in Australian business circles and now it is running like wildfire through the sporting world, although fortunately sports fans are not as willing to be patsies for political correctness as the wimps who sit in the nation’s boardrooms.

The heads of bodies such as the AFL, which last week took a giant leap into the absurd when it placed a big Yes on its logo only to replace it a day later when it discovered that its support base had a multitude of legitimately different views that didn’t include the self-aggrandising virtue signalling of those who claim to hold the flame for their game, show no respect for the public.

This top-down approach is Stalinist in the extreme but it exists in businesses across Australia — just look at Qantas and the monocultural claims its CEO, Alan Joyce, makes on behalf of its thousands of employees.

Can anyone of them challenge their boss, or the bosses of those law firms, or major corporations, which have nailed their rainbow colours to their corporate bodies — not bloody likely. The sibilant heterophobic hisses of hatred from those who have entrenched their Yes positions would make a snake’s nest seem like a sanctuary.

The call for homosexual marriage has been dressed up as a civil right but it doesn’t exist under any of the UN’s rights conventions.

It’s a claim on a word. A semantic claim-jump but the original holders of that claim have, if you will, an historical right to a definition which goes back millennia. Amusingly, at least one polemicist from the Yes side has claimed that the Roman Emperor Nero’s marriage to a boy named Sporus in AD67 indicates historical support for homosexual marriage. That Nero also had the lad castrated and that some historians say the emperor married the boy because he bore some resemblance to his first wife Poppaea (whom he kicked to death when she was pregnant) seems to have been written out of that narrative.

To point out these inconsistencies is to risk the wrath of the politically correct thought police who control the Human Rights Commission’s agenda, and the agendas of other instrumentalities like the Tasmanian anti-discrimination body and entities which practise punishment through process.

The simplistic Yes argument for love is well and good but it doesn’t come near to addressing the grave concerns about the very real right of freedom of speech.

The draft legislation mentions protections for religious bodies but what about the ordinary individual who feels strongly opposed to arbitrary redefinition of an age-old institution?

They aren’t all bigots, they aren’t angry headbutters, they are just average people who share former PM Paul Keating’s view that two blokes and a cocker spaniel don’t constitute a family.

Had Australians been given the opportunity to decide this issue through a binding referendum we may have had a more civil debate but the hostile actions of the Yes lobby make that implausible.

The inoffensive Coopers Brewery conducted a civil discussion between parliamentary Liberal supporters from either side of the debate, Tim Wilson for the Yes side, and Andrew Hastie for No, and was faced with a boycott before humiliatingly capitulating and kowtowing to the Yes mob.

A referendum would have required a double majority to pass — a national majority of voters and a majority of voters in a majority of states (at least four out of the six states).

Before the nastiness, it may have passed. That opportunity has now gone, killed, ironically by the aggressive Yes promoters.

Sadly, it is now difficult to see how the current process will lead to anything but an increasingly divided nation.