Sodom and Tomorrow

Nobody else volunteered, so let me be the one to bell the cat:  The LGBTQIA people are not normal. So why should the vast bulk of the population be coerced into overturning the long-accepted idea of marriage to placate them?

The word ‘normal‘ derives from the Latin normalis meaning ‘standing at a right angle.’ Its origins can be traced in English usage to 1650 when, according to the Macquarie dictionary, it meant ‘made according to a carpenter’s square’. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines normal as ‘perpendicular to a tangent’. Together, these definitions might be taken to imply that normal people are upright, square-shooters, whereas deviants are liable to fly off at a tangent.

Nobody should have any problem understanding what normal is. If they still teach synonyms at school, any kid could find an alternative that left no doubt about the orientation of the majority of the population:

Average, common, commonplace, conventional, customary, established, everyday, familiar, general, habitual, natural, ordinary, orthodox, predictable, , regular, routine, standard, typical, universal, unsurprising, usual. And in a special sub-category: balanced, healthy, rational, reasonable, sane, stable, well-adjusted, free from mental or emotional disorder.

The word that stands out in that list is of course ‘natural’.  Because LGBTQIA people are not only not normal, they are not natural.  Nobody can argue that (except for the few tragic accidents) we all start out in life as one sex or the other, little boys or little girls – male or female. Natural. Not marvelous or supernatural, but born in conformity with the ordinary course of nature, in accordance with natural impulses. (Subversively, gender is now promoted as a term preferred to sex, to validate the social construct of a sliding scale of sexuality). There can be no disputing that some, born as boys or girls, discover or develop unnatural impulses, abnormal characteristics that set them apart from the majority. Nor can it be denied that throughout history, communities shunned, shamed, pilloried and persecuted those minorities.

But in my lifetime, we have moved from police entrapment, assignations in public parks and lavatories, even murder, to understanding, tolerance and acceptance. This may not yet be complete throughout our society, but it is so in the legal domain, where rights are not only recognised but enshrined in law, as the result of the reform package that passed through Parliament in 2008. That tolerance of the unnatural has gradually extended to those who cohabit with another of the same sex, although for many it has meant swallowing hard. Demonstrative same-sex kissing, so blatantly favoured by ABC producers to illustrate any story on the marriage debate, is cringeworthy for many.

Those who squirm at such scenes try not to imagine the amorous performances of same-sex couples. The great majority turn their faces away from these unnatural sexual practices, in disdain if not disgust. Yet the normalised Australian population is asked to accept these manifestations of a “love” as supposedly equal to that of ordinary, standard, well-adjusted male-female attraction. And that as a result they should be entitled to appropriate the term ‘marriage’, traditionally accepted as denoting normal, natural relationships, with the ideal consequence for society of producing and nurturing children.

So, just who are these interlopers, and how many of them are there? The 2016 Census, found there were 9,148,218 married couples in Australia, 48% of the population over the age of 15. (A further 1,626, 890 who ticked the ‘divorced’ box had previously been married). The number of same-sex couples can be derived by analysis of the census responses; in both the 2011 and the 2016 census the Australian Bureau of Statistics created a new classification ‘Relationship as Reported for Couples’ (RLCP).  The 2016 results are not yet available, but the 2011 same-sex figures, made up from both de facto and declared ‘husband and wife’ show a total of 33,714 couples. This represents only 0.37% of the nine million couples in the country.

Such a proportion immediately raises the question of how such a tiny minority could have produced such a powerful campaign for change.  The twin answers lie in politics, and the emotionalisation of society. Political progressives started with sex education. Fifty years ago, the idea of stealing teaching time to inform children about sex was just an idea. In Britain, its introduction in council schools was hotly debated, and when it launched at our local school in Harrow, we took our children to Lords to see the England v New Zealand test match instead. This year the UK government has made sex education compulsory in all schools. It is now unquestioned throughout Australia.

Homosexual reform has had a much longer gestation. The Macrossan inquiry into sexual offences in Brisbane in 1944 was told by the town’s leading pathologist that homosexuality was a disease and the homosexual was incurable. The Macrossan report  concluded, “When the sexual offender is homosexual, it creates a suspicion that the offender is a pervert, either mental or moral.” In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a sociopathic personality disturbance.

The Stonewall Inn riot in New York in 1969 (when police raided a gay bar) changed everything. It led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front and the origins of the radical gay rights movement. Significantly, the public appropriation of the old English word ‘gay’ was part of the political campaign to normalise homosexual activities in the public mind.

Then came colour – first, the purple of Gay Pride, then the annexation of the rainbow, the symbol of God’s promise to Noah. The ultimate insult to public norms and Christian morality was the appropriation of the date of Carnevale – the traditional festivities before Lent in Catholic countries – for Sydney’s Mardi Gras procession. How many of the families that take their children to watch this rainbow extravaganza realise that the glitz and feathers celebrate buggery? The message pumped out to the community is one of equality, and the need for acceptance of homosexuality as a normal outlet for the affections.

The first big battle in the war was decriminalisation. Laws such as ‘committing carnal knowledge against the order of nature’ had to go, to make anal sex equivalent to vaginal sex. Decriminalisation equalled normalisation. Although sexual acts in private between adult males in England and Wales were decriminalised in 1967, it took until 1997 for all Australian states to follow suit. A new political obstacle to the holy grail of same-sex marriage had to be overcome when increasing numbers of divorcees (like Christine Forster) took their children into lesbian relationships, or created same-sex families by adoption or IVF (like Penny Wong).  It became necessary to claim that fathers weren’t essential. (Over the centuries that male homosexuality was condemned, paradoxically lesbianism was never criminalised. It was even celebrated in the erotic illustrations of clit-lick by the 19^th century French artist Edouard-Henri Avril. So it is significant that females have been at the forefront of the equal-love campaign.)

Yet the real issue of lesbian families has been avoided in the Yes campaign. Research has consistently shown that children in single-parent families were at greater risk for emotional and behavioural problems, and for poor academic achievements. Even President Obama said “Children who grow up without a father are more likely to drop out of school and wind up in prison.” More importantly, the often-quoted U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) conceded that “children and adolescents with lesbian mothers are likely to experience stigmatisation based on their mothers’ sexual orientation, which in turn can influence their psychological well-being in a negative manner.” Even so, the NLLFS has frequently been criticised for its small self-selected samples, and its special pleading. The Regenerus study from the University of Texas found copious evidence that children raised by gay parents contend with unique difficulties. With a sample of 5000 young adults aged 18-39 years, this study was the most comprehensive ever undertaken.

So it’s hardly surprising that capital-L Love has been made the central theme of the campaign for same-sex marriage. It’s a ‘straw man’, designed to seduce the same warm and generous spirit that places thousands of flowers at every lateest terrorism site. What is more surprising is that senior politicians and government ministers continue to assert, in the face of all evidence, that the postal survey is simply a yes/no matter on same-sex marriage. That lawmakers who contend daily with the issues raised by the consequences of legislation they are drafting and passing into law can refuse to consider what might follow a Yes vote, is alarming.

The campaign for same-sex marriage is not about equality, it is about envy and destruction, the creation of androgynous families. In every real sense, equality already exists; homosexuals are free to love, like anyone else. Extremist activists reveal in their own words, that the objective is to “transform the very fabric of society.” So the threat is not only, or mainly to the Christian churches; it is to society as a whole.

The clever fraud of ‘marriage equality’ and the organisation of the mob may be local, but the lead, and the political strategy come from America. The author of Queer in America, Michelangelo Signorile  wrote that the fight for same-six marriage was to “debunk a myth and alter an archaic institution…the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake…is to transform the notion of ‘family’ entirely.”

Should legislation redefine marriage, as the campaigners hope, there will be no end to the demands on society to pursue those ends. Schools will be the major target, and the intolerance, bigotry and refusal to allow free dissenting voices will increase.  Anti-discrimination laws will be applied, paradoxically, to discriminate against critics. Already today, those who try to say that marriage should be, and always has been, about man, woman and children, are shouted down.

We are told that as long as kids have a clean home, love, decent school grades and good scores on sociologists’ ‘self esteem’ tests, terms like ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are interchangeable. The nonchalance about the child’s attachment to cultural figures is proof of the aim to re-make society. And government and opposition parliamentarians alike succumb weakly.

Paul Johnson concluded that it was decriminalisation which led homosexuals to organise as a powerful lobby to place them on the same moral level as normal sexuality. He wrote:

“Thus we began by attempting to right what was felt to be an ancient injustice and we ended with a monster in our midst, powerful and clamouring, flexing its muscles, threatening, vengeful and vindictive towards anyone who challenges its outrageous claims, and bent on making fundamental – and to most of us horrifying – changes to civilized patterns of sexual behaviour.”

Beware Australia – this is a totalitarian movement on the march. But as to the so called ‘tides of history’ argument, there is no such thing as inevitability – not to long as there is free choice and free speech. The consequences for those precious rights could be dire indeed, should the Yes vote prevail.