Bob Katter’s anti-gay rubbish an utter disgrace

BOB Katter has earned his reputation in Australian politics as the crackpot with a cardboard sign warning of the gaypocalypse, and last night he went too far, writes Seb Starcevic.

MUCH like the postal ballot itself, this week’s debate over the SSM bill in the House of Representatives has consisted of a bunch of mostly straight people talking at length about issues affecting the gay community, with varying degrees of coherence.

Around 100 MPs have addressed the chamber over several days of back-to-back speeches, with the proceedings often lasting long into the night.

Some were more memorable than others, like Liberal MP Tim Wilson’s painfully adorable proposal to his long-time partner, or Labor MP Linda Burney’s tearful tribute to her son, who took his own life earlier this year.

And then, last night, there was Bob Katter.

Apparently undeterred by the response to his previous tirade in which he referenced an imaginary epidemic of croc attacks, the Queensland MP launched into a bizarre rant about HIV, population decline, and seemingly anything else that happened to float into the tortured hellscape of his mind at that very moment.

“You want to talk about equality?” he raged, before referring to the “72 children” who “were injected with AIDS” as a result of gay men donating blood during the AIDS crisis.

“They wanted equality in the giving of blood,” he said. “They said, ‘We as homosexuals have a right to give blood’, so they did… There were 724 AIDS cases in this country, and no-one ever brought up the fact all of those AIDS cases were either intravenous drug users or men participating in homosexual behaviour.”

Ignoring for a moment the questionable figures in that statement, it’s as if Katter thinks AIDS was something its carriers recklessly chose to inflict on others rather than an indiscriminate virus that disproportionately affected gay men — many of whom, it should be noted, were reluctant to seek testing or treatment due to the kind of homophobic stigma perpetuated by Katter and his ilk.

Adding that people are “genetically programmed” to be heterosexual, he seemingly implied homosexuals are predisposed to anti-social behaviour, saying: “There’s no doubt there is a DNA thing there, and some people can handle it but a lot of people can’t.

“We all know about the Versace case,” he continued, alluding to the 1997 murder of Gianni Versace by gay serial killer Andrew Cunanan. “And there is a very, very ugly side to this, where the curtain comes down and we’re not allowed to talk about it.”

That’s right, everyone, beware the killer gays.

He ended his spiel bemoaning the “vanishing race” of Australians before the Deputy Speaker mercifully cut him off by adjourning the session. But as the record shows, this isn’t the first time Katter has taken aim at the LGBTQI+ community.

“I would walk to Bourke backwards if the poof population of north Queensland is any more than 0.001 per cent,” he famously once declared, adding: “Mind you, if the percentage is what they say it is in the rest of Australia, then I think I’ll take to walking everywhere backwards.”

And in his 1996 speech about why he refused to support legalising homosexuality in Tasmania, he said: “It (Sydney) has its gay Mardi Gras and skites about all the people that came out from San Francisco, the city of a million people and 20,000 AIDS cases, presumably to bring their pestilence and plague with them.”

"I just want this to stop!" Some sense from Bob Katter. #auspol pic.twitter.com/NqG1ZMozwy

— Roje Adaimy (@rojeadaimy) December 6, 2017

He also compared the criminalisation of homosexuality to jaywalking or public drunkenness in his defence of anti-gay legislation, saying: “Numerous laws exist in society not to impose some sort of punitive penalties… but to set standards, just as a dotted line in the middle of a road sets a standard, a form of behaviour.”

In the same speech, he warned against “clothing in legitimacy, acceptability and respectability behaviour on which, throughout most of history, almost every country in the world has had laws which have put some sort of sanction”.

More recently, he accused the LGBTQI+ community of “taking” the word “gay”, which he said used to be “the most beautiful word in the English language”, and referred to Macklemore performing Same Love at the NRL grand final as “seeping sewage”.

All of this is to say that Katter has well and truly earned his reputation in Australian politics as the crackpot standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign warning about the impending gaypocalypse.

Despite his claims that he’s not “anti-homosexual”, after last night’s disgraceful magnum opus of homophobia, he should be censured and forced to apologise, Akubra hat in hand.