Letter to My Son

Dear Vincent,
I saw your Facebook posting of the complaint that a plebiscite would be a waste of money, and it concerns me that people of a generous nature are being misled by arguments which sound very reasonable, but when analysed, reveal a very cynical series of misrepresentations.

So I am taking some time to persuade you to look at the wider picture. I think the following “letter to the editor” sums it up.

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Dear Editor,
In the proposed vote on changing the established meaning of marriage it is essential to have confidence in the results, unlike the Irish method, in which only 37.5 per cent of the total electorate voted Yes, but the proposition was won by 62.1 per cent of the 60.5 per cent who turned out to vote.

However, a compulsory plebiscite without the fairness of equal funding for both sides to present their cases in an officially mailed-out information paper would be a travesty. Otherwise, one side, with undue influence in the media and a marked tendency to shout down and denigrate any opposition, will ensure a skewed result. In fact equal funding should be accompanied by a ban on private funding of pre-poll advertising since, as in the recent Irish referendum, well-heeled activists could pour millions into one side’s coffers while the other side has to manage with letters to the editor. (A US foundation funded the Irish Yes case with about $25 million, thirty times the amount available to the No case.)

If Parliament blocks the plebiscite, one alternative is a conscience vote of MPs, but this is almost an oxymoron in the party system we have, and with the low public opinion of MPs’ motives.

The present government only got back in because one of their undertakings was to give us, the great unwashed, the right to have our opinion recorded in a plebiscite. The homosexual lobby were saying how confident they were of winning, but now they are afraid to test this democratically. Or rather, they are afraid to allow both sides of the argument to be fairly put. Hence the desperate attempts to prevent funding of the No case by claiming it will denigrate them. They even employ blackmail by saying that they might suicide if they are “hurt”. LGBTIs are already twice as likely to have a high level of psychological distress as heterosexuals and a higher risk of suicide. These may be endogenous effects, but it is convenient to burden the rest of us with responsibility for their condition. Strange that they have made all the running so far in the hate campaign against their opponents, including trashing an MP’s office and threatening a hotel chain for booking a meeting by Christian groups wanting to present the No case, thereby forcing its cancellation. Yet, hypocritically, they demand tolerance from others.

They are aided and abetted by the human rights industry, as shown by a Tasmanian case where a “transgender” Green claimed to be offended by the Catholic bishops’ teachings on marriage, a clear attempt to silence Christians (and like-minded people) on the marriage issue. The court accepted this absurd case, and it was dropped only when the Greens realised it might be electorally damaging before the July election. Meanwhile those courts take no interest in the Australian Christian Lobby leader Lyle Shelton being called a bigot, a creep and “a nauseating piece of filth”. Another group, Family Voice, had its submission to a parliamentary committee on communications censored. The part removed was pointing out that the “Safe Schools” scheme promoted a website to children that gave links to pornographic sites. Those concerned with plebiscite costs should consider the millions wasted on these courts, which are so short of work to keep them occupied that they actually tout for business. Even pipsqueak entities like the ACT have them!

Facebook, Google, Telstra and other big firms are on the same bandwagon. Facebook kept removing posts from the Family Voice page that they didn’t like, one referring to the 110–26 defeat of a “marriage” vote in the Austrian parliament, another quoting the US Chief Justice stating that the activist judges’ ruling on that topic “has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent”. The Centre for Public Christianity posted an article calling for respectful debate from both sides. Facebook deleted it and then restored it only when the former Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson intervened.

The clever use of terms such as “equality” and “human rights” is intended to play on people’s good nature and at the same time obscure the underlying social realities. This matter has been going on for years in a long-term campaign to gain acceptance as normal by some people with gender dysphoria, but others in that group are not interested in “marriage”, they are only intent on destroying social stability. They are the self-styled “progressives” who, until they jumped on the marriage bandwagon, regarded marriage as an oppressive institution of religion. This is just another tool in their kit for introducing extremist politics. Most of them have always despised marriage for representing bourgeois social structures that they did not want to fit in with, so one strand of this campaign is to destroy the meaning of marriage and bring on a values-free social experiment, which is also in full swing in the brainwashing of primary school children, which is tantamount to grooming for a precocious interest in sex.

You can see that nothing has changed over the past thirty years or so from this letter, published in the Bulletin on January 17, 1989, which I came across recently (except that it would have been censored today):

Check the Motives

Dennis Altman (Interview, Bulletin, December 20) presents the case for extended homosexual rights. He does it well but the case is nevertheless weak.

I have no hesitation in asserting that the great majority of Australians regard homosexuality as a perversion but one which does not particularly bother us as long as it is practised in private between consenting adults.

What does trouble us is the homosexual culture—by which I mean the insistent public display of homosexuality, its public description as an “optional lifestyle”, the implicit and sometimes explicit proselytising of youth, the appropriation of the language of human rights in its justification, its portrayal of itself as a legitimate persecuted minority and its incessant exhibitionism. Homosexuals need to be reminded that the decriminalisation of their perversion in no way was meant to imply that we approve of it. Rather, it was meant to imply that genuinely private matters should be private and that official snooping in private lives contains dangers to all of us which outweigh any likely benefit.

Australians regret that such respect for privacy has been abused and has resulted in the arrogant assertion of legitimacy by the homosexual culture. But it is really only the homosexuals themselves, together with their parasitic “support groups”, who assert this legitimacy, and the majority of us is appalled at the consequences. Altman’s case really depends on keeping us intimidated with the usual epithets: bigot, fascist, reactionary or you name it. There is really a much stronger case for blocking all further homosexual rights and rolling back some of those already conceded.

William Wentworth
Towanba, NSW

Two interesting points are raised here, “legitimacy” and “consequences”. Today, the legitimacy is put in terms of “marriage” and the consequences are studiously ignored.

Take the use of the term “equality”. Basically they are saying that unnatural sex is equal to natural, in other words we are expected, and soon will be forced, to pretend there is no qualitative difference. When the child laughed at the naked emperor’s delusion of wearing fine clothes, the rest of the population dared to laugh too. Today that child would be dragged before a court for hurting the emperor’s feelings. But as C.S. Lewis, author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, wrote, “certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all”. In his words, there is a natural law or reality we ignore at our peril. In Christian theology all people are equal in a spiritual sense, but it is their actions which determine whether they are condemned. The church does not condemn homosexuals, only acts of perversion.

Do the homosexuals think that by calling themselves “married” they will change reality? With all other de-factos they already have equal legal rights; they are not discriminated against. Marriage, as a social contract, is not in fact a “human right”, as there are rules about who is eligible, some being too young, some too closely related, some barred for being undivorced, and some for not being male and female. To change these rules, which recognise social and biological reality, would make marriage meaningless. (There is however a recognised UN right for children to have a mother and father, which they ignore.) We are told that Australia should keep up with other “progressive” countries, but they are a very small minority of nations whom the rest of the world probably regards as decadent, and in some cases the “triumph” of the homosexual cause is of very dubious legitimacy, as in the Irish set-up, or the usurping of law-making functions by some activist judges of the US Supreme Court.

Many people who have lived long enough to see cause and effect operating have concluded that social disintegration, such as increased violence, drug-taking, bullying, pornography, contempt for authority, increased imprisonment of women and so on, are related to the decay of agreed values, trust and family stability, and the failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions. They are people of discrimination, a word the dictionary defines as “the ability to make sound judgments”. In the Orwellian re-working of the language, no one is allowed to exercise this ability. It is ironic and telling that we have anti-discrimination courts.

The “marriage” campaign must be considered in the context of such wider social consequences, and the nasty attitudes it exposes. The social manipulators seem unable to discriminate in other matters of importance to the survival of our society either. They say nothing about imported cultures with openly hostile attitudes to women’s freedom, homosexuals and indeed to all infidels. To speak up would be to discriminate “against” them, to be a “Hansonite”. So to be ideologically consistent they must turn a blind eye to all cultural and biological differences, and abdicate the human responsibility of making moral judgments. This of course makes their position absurdly inconsistent in the real world, particularly when we do not assess them on their own terms (claiming to show tolerance), but observe their fanatic belief system in full operation against people they don’t like. The ones they particularly hate are those who point out their inconsistencies and their self-satisfied virtue-signalling.

How out of touch they are is shown by an article in our local Fairfax press. Two state MPs told a reporter, “We believe a relationship should be between a man and a woman. We’ve always stood our ground on this.” How would a rational person describe that statement: reasonable? conventional? honest? The Fairfax journalist described it as “utterly appalling”. If that response appears bizarre you are starting to get a picture of the mindset of the self-appointed arbiters of correct thinking. They are, in short, delusional—but also dangerous, because like jihadists they are driven to suppress and vilify other people’s thoughts. Free speech is anathema to them.

Just two more examples of their misleading propaganda: One group argued that “laws protecting any part of the population from discrimination should not be contingent on a public vote” (Canberra Times, October 4). So they have already decided that “homomarriage” is a right under anti-discrimination laws. Isn’t it the public’s right to decide that? What about the “rights” of siblings to marry? They also say “John Howard” (actually the federal parliament) changed the wording of the Marriage Act, so it doesn’t set a precedent for them to do so as well. There was in fact no “change” but a spelling out of the meaning of marriage, which for at least 2000 years didn’t need defining, but now needed to be spelled out due to attacks on it by the thought manipulators.

Regards,

Peter Edwards

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I hope you will make your decisions based on this wider picture, because we live in a world where universities have been seized by a fad variously described as deconstructionism, relativism or postmodernism, in which everything is what you want it to mean, and there are no standards. This fad is rampant in history, philosophy, linguistics and other areas, and produces graduates who are illiterate and culturally ignorant. As the Romans used to say, “Whom the gods destroy they first send mad.”

Best wishes,
Dad