Gender Fluidity Oils a Slippery Slope

This same-sex marriage business is a slippery slope. Before we know it, sparsely dressed grown men will be flaunting themselves suggestively down Main Street and, although it is impossible to believe, uniformed police and defence force personnel will not be shepherding them into cells for the night, with a “what’s going on here me-lad,” but will join in the frolicking.

Children will be taught confronting techniques for disguising themselves as the opposite sex. Boys will be in dresses and girls in, well, boys’ clobber. Or maybe girls and boys will share the same clobber and, in fact, the same gender-neutral ablution facilities.

In fact, however unlikely it seems, boys and girls might be taught their gender is simply a state of mind and little to do with their bodily parts. Whether a boy today or a girl tomorrow will become a matter of how you really, really feel. Is fluidity for you? That could well become a morning assembly question to focus kids’ fertile and inquisitive minds on the appropriateness of their genitalia. Maths and English Literature be damned.

Pretty soon using an inappropriate gender-specific appellation will earn you a stern reprimand from the various hate-speech authorities. Brave Christian clergies (the few remaining) might be hauled before these same authorities for daring to cite Biblical passages supporting conventional marriage.

Jack might join the navy and become Jill at taxpayers’ expense. And I suppose Jill might become Jack. Who is Arthur and who is Martha will take on a whole new complexion. Having a mummy and mummy or daddy and daddy will become de rigueur, and woe betide anyone who dares suggest children might do better with that old-fashioned construction of a mummy and daddy.

You might spot the flaw in the slippery-slope argument: all of the feared consequences have all already happened — are happening — without same-sex marriage (SSM). Will SSM give it a kick along? Sure, whole new areas of territory for the Left to conquer will open up.

For example, gay people pay taxes. Thus, it will only be a matter of time before a campaign to remove taxation privileges for churches refusing to solemnise SSMs is undertaken and succeeds. Why should churches receive tax benefits from all taxpayers while “discriminating” against some in providing their services? The logic of the argument will prove to be compelling. Activists will not let up. They are single-minded and have nothing else to do.

Fortunately, I don’t work for Qantas or other oppressive group-think organisations, so I am free to say that I intend voting ‘No’ in any plebiscite simply because SSM is a definitional absurdity. Two men or two women shacking up together is fine by me – not my business – but it cannot be made into marriage. Nor is it an issue capable of being resolved by debate.

Arguments in support of SSM are beside the point. None amounts to a hill of beans. Take the argument from some conservatives that supporting SSM is quintessentially conservative because marriage itself is a conservative institution. What a non-sequitur!

Marriage is between a man and a woman. Inviting in other combinations of gender is not a conservative position. It is one intent on undermining the intrinsic structure of a time-honoured institution. It represents the very opposite of a conservative position.

But, of course, activists supporting SSM don’t care about making the case in any rigorous way. They simply want to see ratified their sexual preferences, which seem to preoccupy them to an extraordinary extent. There is no higher ratification than to be accorded the status of being married. The effect that this has on the institution of marriage is, for them, a remote side issue, if it is an issue at all.

Get used to it. Whether this year or in the next year or two, Australian law will make an ass of itself by redefining marriage. But, make no mistake, with or without SSM, the established moral order of society will continue to be picked apart. Stopping SSM will not stop that. Children will be especially targeted.

The agenda is to remake society: Teaching boys that they may in fact be girls (and vice versa) to sow confusion and moral ambiguity into young minds; feminising the defence forces to weaken our resolve; disparaging our historical past (e.g., Shorten’s invented “infected blankets and poisoned waterholes”) in order to manipulate the future; and shutting down free speech to constrain and mould debates. Vandalising and pulling down statues (read heroical figures) is but the latest manifestation of this insidious insurrection. Where it will end is hard to know.

For some reason, there are large swathes of people, particularly among the elites, who despise who and what we are and have been. They want to tear down our society. They favour anyone (e.g., Islamists) and anything (e.g., SSM) which serves that purpose. If they get their way those who defend what they oppose will probably end up being strung up on lampposts. But I doubt they have thought that far ahead.

Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that each generation faces the same unwanted developments. Something different is happening. Take a lesson from this commentary on life by Sheriff Bell in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:

Had this questionnaire [in the nineteen thirties] about what was the problem with teachin in the schools…the biggest problem they could name was things like talkin’ in class and runnin’ in the hallways, chewin’ gum. Forty years later… here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide…when I say anything about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m getting old…my feeling about that is that anyone that can’t tell the difference between rapin’ and murderin’ people and chewin gum has a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got.