In Australia, the push for marriage equality has reached a tipping point. We're seeing opponents change their minds like never before, and yesterday, a bill was introduced into our Parliament to legalize marriage equality. I'm going to have a fuller timeline of what has been happening up on the weekend, when I won't be as busy.
Inevitably, the religious right is having a massive shitfit. I want to point you to some of the more offensive and dangerous shit that they're spewing.
Yesterday, I read an article against marriage equality in The Age, an Australian newspaper. It was by a man named Kevin Donnelly, who is identified as "a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University". One of his plans to fight marriage equality is as follows:
Thirdly, the school curriculum should no longer adopt a morally relativistic approach to what constitutes marriage and students should not be indoctrinated with cultural-left views about gender and sexuality.1. This is arrogant. I love his blunt demand about what he wants and the total lack of a justification. He wants his way, end of story.
2. This is hypocritical. What would he have students taught about gender and sexuality? His "cultural-right" bullshit views about it? His stupid Catholic views about it? Wouldn't that be indoctrination?
3. This is counter-factual. We need Stephen Colbert to give him a lesson: Reality has a well known liberal bias. If he was actually interested in science and biology, he would accept that the "cultural-left" views that he derides are facts. Homosexuality and non-conforming gender identities are completely natural and not the result of anything going wrong, just as with any other variation in nature.
4. This is dangerous. If students are not taught these facts, more anti-LGBT bullying will occur than if they are, and more suicides will occur, hence the title of this diary. It's a follow-up to my recent diary "The Death Sentence Of The Christian Right".
This is why we don't like going to popular votes if we can help it. Offensive and dangerous shit like this gets multiplied by 1000. The Christian right can never restrain itself from its desire to advance an attack on LGBT youth. It just shows how stupid their feigned concerns about "the institution of marriage" are. Their anti-equality arguments are not about marriage. They're about hate.