By Joel Meares
Straight people sure have a lot to say about gay rights. Open a news app, flick through a paper, turn on the telly and there they are: Scores and scores of puffed-up heterosexuals, telling us what they think of us. Should we be able to get married? They have some thoughts. Should we be able to have kids? Don't get them started. Should we educate their kids on what makes us different and why their kids shouldn't bully us? Wind them up and watch them go.
Many voices in this loud majority make a lot of sense. Some are powerful LGBTQI allies, making the case for expanded rights, and more power to them. And some are making a vigorous case against expanding those rights – and more power to them, too: I can follow the loop de loop logic that makes my bedroom and nursery a concern of the Johnsons down the road, the family being the building-block of society and all. Argue using logic and facts from a place of care and concern and I am happy to listen, and then to respond.
I marvel at the advocates who take this fighting spirit and apply it to the same-sex marriage issue.Credit: Harrison Saragossi
Then there are the others: The angry "straightsplainers" with vitriol and little else. They know our hidden agendas, apparently. They know what's best for society, apparently. And they know they have a platform from which they can "tell it like it is".
I have one wish for 2017: to hear a lot less from far fewer of them.
My frustration with these "straightsplainers" has been building for a long time, but it has grown more acute in the last year with the same-sex marriage and Safe Schools debates luring them like sirens to our televisions and newspapers, "hot takes" in hand. There, they have tried to reverse-engineer the dynamics of these debates, often reframing LGBTQI advocates' push for equal rights as a greed-driven attack on society, and – with precious little evidence – painting those advocates as intolerant of dissenting views (those dissenting views being that we are not equal people).
So it is that in place of reasoned debate we get ridiculous cartoons in which the LGBTQI community marches on Australia like rainbow-fancying Nazis. Without any examples of it actually happening, we're told that we are practising "totalitarian tolerance" – if someone disagrees with us, we treat them, according to one prominent writer, as "a bigot, a homophobe, a non-human who deserves nothing but the cruellest excommunication". (Want to know cruel excommunication? Try being queer in a playground.)
Over and over, these straight people have told us what our motivation is: it is not, as I had always thought, to protect vulnerable kids, marry the people we love and take an equal place in society, but to "radically change" it.
Thanks for the heads up on my motivations.
The tipping point for me was a piece in The Australian last week that went beyond the usual "straightsplaining" white noise. In it, rabbi Shimon Cowen pontificated on the "real problem with same-sex marriage". He wrote of the sources of homosexuality with great certainty – "bodily temperament and disposition, psychological trauma …ideological cultures which advocate for it" – and then offered a handy definition: "Homosexuality is not like skin colour, with which the soul can have no issue. It is a behaviour, with which the soul can and does legitimately struggle, however difficult and deserving of compassion it may be."
By the end, I was not quite sure exactly what the problem with same-sex marriage was. But I'd learnt something I didn't know. According to this "straightsplainer", I wasn't born this way, but had been psychologically traumatised this way, aided and abetted by a too-coddling society.
To say fact-free pieces shouldn't be published isn't a call to curb free speech. Or even an instance of "totalitarian tolerance". It's a call for judgment, a call to look at the value of an argument and assess whether it deserves a soapbox.
Similar judgment could be used in other areas where even more extreme, intolerant "straightsplainers" and bigots are given a different kind of air. Last week, following the death of George Michael, we were treated to the usual reports of what the Westboro Baptist Church – the Florida religious group that protests the "fag lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth" – thought about the situation. I won't repeat any of it, but suffice to say it was very much in line with what they had said following the Orlando nightclub massacre last year, which the press also widely reported on.
What's the point of publishing these attention-seeking squeals of awfulness? What purpose does it serve beyond driving outrage clicks? This is not reasoned dissent; it's the pernicious view of a bigoted group whose goal is to hurt another group of people and spread a message hate.
We should ignore them, not echo them.
I know my wish for 2017 won't come true. Certain writers will continue to explain the issues that affect my life for me. Outrageous attention-seeking will be rewarded with undeserved attention. But I will make a 2017 resolution to ignore it. And to engage with other more valuable, but less heard voices. Australia is full of them. Advocates for LGBTQI rights groups. Young reporters rigorously covering LGBTQI issues for new media companies. Thoughtful parents, friends and allies. Even many considered, thoughtful opponents.
These are the voices we should be lifting up and putting on a soapbox, not the peddlers of hate, falsehoods and ignorance. Our debate – on both sides – will be healthier for it.
Joel Meares is a Fairfax Media columnist.