TodaysProgressives

JOHN RIGO

Jackboots in Rainbow Hues

I fled communist tyranny to breathe and speak freely, to live without the fear and obligatory debasement of paying lip service to evil. Don't think me dramatic when I say the the Left in general and same-sex marriage bullies in particular have inspired a deeply unsettling sense of deja vu

There are times in life when at last you can fully recognise a deadly, half-hidden danger. Reading an intensely perceptive analysis helps, and there is a relatively recent one by the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko, published in English asThe Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (brief excerpts featured in Quadrant‘s April 2015 edition). Professor Legutko and I grew up in the same epoch and political environment in the communist tyrannies of Eastern Europe. I escaped and came to Australia as a refugee in 1981, while he became involved with Solidarity in Poland. Now he is a leading member of the European Parliament.  

My point of view differs in part from his in that I have more sympathy for today’s voters, who must swim and struggle in the filthy oceans of propaganda the Left elite churns out. But I find his main thesis strikingly true:

“There are increasingly ominous parallels between the communist tyranny we have known and currently developing versions of ‘liberal democracy’ ”.

Totalitarian tendencies in those who increasingly dominate public life in the West – let’s call them the progressive elitists; Legutko hyphenates them, somewhat ambiguously, as “liberal-democrats” – have been pointed out before. It is the way these forces have behaved in Australia during the same-sex marriage and Safe Schools debates that awakened me so sharply. Don’t think me overly dramatic when I say you can smell the totalitarian threat in the air. Yes, right here in Australia.

Decisively, it is the progressive elitists – on the Left and elsewhere – who control the marriage-fakery and gender-confusion pushes, and who, in effect, are exploiting same-sex attracted people for their own purposes. Powerful enablers do far more harm than noisy activists. Of course, not all advocates of false marriage belong to this camp. Some are honestly misguided. There are puppets and there are puppet masters.

Marriage fakery and gender confusion should be seen as parts of the elitist push. There are other parts, too, in other fields. Going by recent experience, we can expect new forms of inhumanity threatening us year by year, with the aim of destroying traditional foundations and herding us towards the prison camp of progressivist utopia. And we are not talking about “fringe elements”, not at all. The tell-tale is their deviousness as they deny obvious interconnections, all the while crying “Red herring!” and “scare campaign!” even as the consequences of legislating for gay marriage are manifest in other countries. Take the Ontario experience, for example, where grade-one children are taught there are six “genders”, as even the program’s defenders concede.

Let me illustrate a couple of the parallels between the elitist social engineers and the commissars of the country and system I thought I had left behind.

The word forgers

Confusing, distorting, reversing and destroying the meanings of words was a major characteristic of communism, as much as the constant threat of state terror. The elitists in Australia also depend on word forgeries. “Homophobe” has become a term for the hysterical condemnation of ordinary people, and it is as manipulative as any communist cant. You may be democratically tolerant and compassionate; as a Christian, for instance, you will try to love all people “as yourself” and accept that all share in the highest possible inherent dignity as children of God. Nothing can more dramatically demonstrate the polar opposite of hating people than the Sermon on the Mount, but today stating as much is of no use. If you still dare to recognize the natural complementarity of man and woman as a fact and a norm, then you are a homophobe and, of course, “a hater“.  This from the the very same people who so loudly and often say they wish only to promote “respect”!

That abuse might well have ben directed at people like my mother, who survived the Nazis and the Communists with her kindness and humanity tested but intact. Her generosity, open mind, unselfishness and self-sacrifice, her deep concern for the true needs of children, would count for nothing. Had she dared to disagree, she would have condemned herself to being vilified with the homophobe label. There are others of similar perspective who come readily to mind: a staunch old friend, an Anzac hero, wonderfully welcoming; Chinese migrant friends with traditions deep and fresh; a generous colleague, living in a joyful African Christian family culture. These are good people with valid objections and reservations about same-sex marriage and Safe Schools-style indoctrination, but they are automatically cast as “enemies” for all their goodness and the charity of their characters. They disagree and that is enough to be declared pariahs by those with the loudest megaphones.

Man-woman marriage is the heritage of humanity. Defending it, in all its implications, against all forgeries, is a basic and unquestionable human right — unlike the suddenly concocted and bogus “right” to same-sex marriage. Did the Anzacs fight and die for an Australia where we must beg exemptions and indulgence to be heard when we defend true marriage? Functioning, viable societies need freedom of speech. In the framework within which the current debate is conducted, a devious attack on this basic democratic freedom is already implicit.

Meanwhile the painted mask is peeling off the faces of shameless politicians, including the person-of-faith-whenever-convenient variety, who keep reassuring us about religious freedom not being under any sort of threat. If that is genuinely the case, why not release the draft legislation that has been privately circulating in Canberra for months? By their words shall ye know them, by the absence of their words as well. Their bland assurances that there is nothing to worry about, nothing to see here,  (“clergy will not be compelled to officiate” and the like) is so narrow and open to amendment as to be worthy of any communist tyrant. After all, those despots silenced and terrorised believers, but still boasted of religious freedom. Weren’t people graciously allowed to go to church?

More verbal engineering

And what about equality? The word is dragged into the propaganda slogan of marriage equality as fraudulently as any favourite slogan whose language the communist elite twisted and controlled in order to suit its ends?

For those who have lived through communist state-controlled propaganda drives, there is a stomach-turning sense of déjà vu — the spectre of that same monstrous inequality of power.  Most media, universities, even sporting and professional associations regardless of their members’ wishes, the usual celebrity noise-makers — all pressed into service in support of one side only. The former AFL footballer, professional controversialist and sometime vulgarian Sam Newman nailed it this week on, of all TV programmes, The AFL Footy Show. Watch him take the AFL commissars to task in the video clip below. Notice also how host Eddie McGuire honours the legacy of true apparatchiks by marshalling irrelevance and sophistry in defence of authority.

Top managers of big banks and sundry enterprises, with their obscene and gargantuan incomes, are joined by million-dollar-a-year careerist vice-chancellors, plus rich and devious ABC presenters and the like in posing as the new champions of equality. All the while, most of these are working, directly or indirectly, to entrench their own power and privileges over small businesses and ordinary people. I asked my mother not long before she died:

“Apart from fear, what was the worst infamy you had to endure under communism?”

Her answer:

“The degrading feeling of being taken for a fool by propagandists.”

I, too, tasted the bitterness of ideological servility at workplaces in the old Soviet bloc: going through pitiful pretences to avoid victimization, mass meetings and marches where we had to cheer and celebrate the lies we were fed and knew we were being fed. What next for Australian workplaces now that top managers are regularly issuing their enlightened edicts on “correct” opinions? Will employees be required to celebrate the Emperor’s New Marriage Act, as Hans Christian Andersen might have put it? It is no use hoping Labor will protect workers from such degrading servility. That party has finally and comprehensively betrayed those it claims to represent; just look at its support for green energy policies which have killed jobs and grossly inflated the power bills of its working-class constituency. Labor now works on the theory that the best thing for the proletariat is that it be taught obedience.

Unless we want to surrender ourselves and our children to a nightmarish future where speech is controlled, thoughts regulated and those who deviate brought to book, we must keep fighting in our own spheres and circles, be they parental, cultural, educational, political, professional. Let us first support those who already fighting, then start working with a fresh sense of solidarity on new initiatives, new alliances. On new political parties, too, because they are desperately needed. Labor has become an accomplice in the oppression of young and old, telling its voters that ruinous energy costs are good for them and that the correct response to contentious policies is a group cheer and unquestioning acceptance. The Liberals, after stabbing a good man and decent prime minister, have betrayed the “forgotten people”. Leading politicians of both parties now swell the ranks of the arrogant, progressive elitists. Want an example? Watch Attorney-General George Brandis below defend the burqa — that foul, oppressive, impractical, misogynist sack — as (has he no shame?) a sacred “religious garment”.

We are bullied and confused by multiple machines of propaganda and distraction. Their noise keeps us from understanding the message rising from the “democracy of the dead”, as Chesterton’s resounding phrase puts it, from the tradition of life-giving marriage — the tradition that fathers and mothers should not and never can be interchanged.

But let me return to my theme, as inspired by Ryszard Legutko’s wonderfully perceptive work The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, and address the increasingly ominous parallels between communist tyranny and elitist trickery. I will focus first on schoolchildren.

I began primary school in Budapest in the year following the 1956 anti-communist uprising, a counterrevolution in communist terms. It was a revolution of truth, with many students and others becoming heroes in the fight against the marxist lies of the day. After the movement was crushed and its heroes killed, imprisoned or driven into exile, parents had to warn their children never to utter the word “revolution“ at school, as we could never know whose parents were regime-friendly informers. If only I could lend readers my eyes of memory to see the panic, even in 10-year-olds, when someone blurted out something ill-advised about the uprising. The fear of consequences was palpable. Today, I think of the Orwellian Safe Schools program and its inevitable future variations and extensions. Must 10-year-olds live under the same stress to use the “correct” and approved term, as once fear obliged me to do?

The fake marriage and Safe Schools propagandists often use suicide prevention as a rationale, even as they ignore far better and more general anti-suicide and anti-bullying programs. And they ignore this: in Eastern Europe communist indoctrination led to masses of schoolchildren losing their bedrock cultural and religious heritage. Multitudes of lives sank into an ethical quagmire, with despair, alcoholism, family breakup and, yes, suicide the result. To save my future children and grandchildren from that same danger was one of the main reasons for escaping to the freedom of the Australia I loved and still do.

Yet now in my Australia, what kinds of distress, including suicide, could eventually flow from the religious confusion and loss of cultural bearings produced by gender-blurring programs and boosted by same-sex marriage? Are those potential suicides and ruined lives somehow less worthy of considering? Naïve question. The whole point of the progressive elitist agenda is to undermine traditional cultural-religious foundations. Why would they start acknowledging the real costs now?

The suicide of logic and compassion

Consider another push occurring right now and the Rainbow Brigade’s emphasis on stopping suicides as a rational for gay marriage becomes even more transparent. Often the very same ideological voices are pushing “voluntary euthanasia”, lately packaged in the stomach-turning trickery of “assisted dying”. Like the commissars, they will have their way with words and meanings! Undoubtedly over time the euthanasia push will see a despicable pressure on the old and sick to agree to end their lives early. Voluntary? Drugging her coffee and getting helpful family members to hold her down for the lethal injection because she was fighting back – that was the way it was done for a poor and confused Dutch woman with dementia, as reported earlier this year. So-called progressives who say they want to decrease the pressure towards suicide among young homosexuals by promoting fake marriages and misleadingly branding Safe Schools an anti-bullying program are often the very same people who do not object to increasing the pressure for the old and disabled to end their inconvenient existence.

Once more I think of my mother, who last year died a natural death last year completely helpless in a nursing home. I remember the last flicker of her warm smile two days before the end. There was infinitely more love and infinitely more dignity in that smile than the progressives, with their conditional  utopias, could ever comprehend.

Universities of servility

Straight after retiring from universities in Australia, after 28 years and three institutions, memories of a climate of servility are uppermost in my mind. Places full of enhanced “21^st century organic outcomes”, in vice-chancellorspeak.

Earlier, in the 1970s, I spent five years at a Hungarian university where I studied engineering. The fear of communist state terror had by then sunk deep into everyone’s mind. I am thinking of one particular physics lecture with several hundred students in attendance, during which the professor stopped suddenly and asked everyone to remain seated.

A door opened.

Four academics from the institution’s party committee filed in. Without any meaningful introduction, their spokesman started making a speech in support of some Soviet propaganda drive. Very monotonous it was. To such a captive audience those marxist phrases verged on the narcoleptic. Ironically, it was the wooden delivery that excited and maintained interest, as that seemed to suggest the speakers were simply going through the required motions. They didn’t believe. We didn’t believe. But the words had been spoken as required and that was enough. Soon, a vote in support for the Soviets was demanded. All students without exception, including me, promptly raised our hands. The committee filed out. The physics lecture resumed. Clockwork.

And now, with that memory freshly revived, a recent experience in Australia. One day there is a minor media outcry – entirely justified — about slimy, government-sponsored “gender ideology” materials aimed at schoolchildren and produced at the university where, coincidentally, I happened to be working at the time. And what is the official university response? Immediate recourse to  high-minded indignation that critics would dare to call a spade a spade. In due course the university declares it has now officially endorsed “marriage equality”. And now? Let us await the next propaganda crusade … and then the next … and the one after that. Those Hungarian academics, by their conspicuously wooden performance, were moving away from enthusiastic servility. Australian universities have been steadily moving towards complete servility to the progressivist powers.

Sometimes I still turn my mind’s eye back to that Hungarian lecture, trying to recall what I saw straight after, outside the building. The luminous colours of autumn leaves following rain, or the small, hopeful flowers of spring – I cannot now remember the details, just the impression. I knew then that I longed to live in a country where I could feel the fresh air of freedom inside a university building as well as outside.

Today, as I write, I imagine confronting senior Australian academics and administrators with memories of that longing, and of what has become of it. I would say:

“Unlike you, some of us have not come here for stellar salaries or career coups. We came for the fresh winds of free debate, where fear has no place. When I became a refugee, I bet my whole life on that proposition. Can you understand that? If you can grasp what it means to be able to speak without fear, why are you now educating the youth of Australia for lives of doctrinal servility?”

What would they say to that, I wonder? But again, what a naïve thought! Of course they would have plenty to say – through their departments of marketing and propaganda (whatever the official name). They never allow themselves to be short of excuses and obfuscatory explanations for the inexcusable and self-evident.

Right side of history?

One of the most hateful aspects of living under marxism was being constantly bombarded by the message that history was on its side – “the forces of progress”, as the apparatchiks liked to say – and the concomitant conclusion that resistance was useless. To make our subjection total, we had to be demoralised, stripped of any and all hope.

Now I hear the same hateful message: anyone daring to oppose gay marriage is on the wrong side of history. Sure, if we bow before the piled-up power and privilege of the elitists, they win. Then we can expect in other fields new inhumanities, fresh deceptions, more servility. And always, because this is the way of the preening Left, new penalties and sanctions on its critics. Inside every leftist wardrobe of assertions and responses, as history has demonstrated time and again, there is a pair of much-loved jackboots.

That is the crux of the matter. We have allowed ourselves to be put to sleep, instead of fighting back. Let us now join the fight and in all the spheres available to us. And let us build new alliances.

The progressive elitists are fond of putting on shows to demonstrate their loudly professed virtue, especially where “racism” can be dragged into it. Yet they keep sneering at the cultural values of people from outside the West, which means most recent migrants to Australia. That superior, sneering attitude of the elitists is as bad as racism, probably worse; it certainly comes with the same stench of arrogance. Of those alliances we need to build and which I mentioned above, well we should build networks of solidarity with migrants against devious assaults on all of us. We are their natural friends and allies — us social conservatives, if you will — not the progressivist hypocrites who, in one breath, can cite their “respect” for multiculturalism and, in the next, demand the adoption of policies and attitudes to make a Confucian or a Muslim blanch.

As Professor Legutko puts it:

“We have seen the progress of the “progressive forces on the right side of history” fail, their tyranny crash, against all odds. There can be a different kind of progress in decent directions that do not make us trample upon the democracy of the dead.”

Yet despite it all I cling to a hope that Australians will defy the elitists, will keep on fighting and do so without hate, but with spirit and courage.

TheAgeOfEquality

First Things

The death of Eros

Mark Regnerus

Something strange is going on in America’s bedrooms. In a recent issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, researchers reported that on average, Americans have sex about nine fewer times a year than they did in the late 1990s. The trend is most pronounced among the young. Controlling for age and time period, people born in the 1930s had the most sex, whereas those born in the 1990s are reporting the least. Fifty years on from the advent of the sexual revolution, we are witnessing the demise of eros.

Despite all the talk of the “hookup culture,” the vast majority of sex happens within long-term, well-defined relationships. Yet Americans are having more trouble forming these relationships than ever before. Want to understand the decline of sex? Look to the decline in marriage. As recently as 2000, a majority—55 percent—of Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four were married, compared with only 34 percent who had never been married (see Figure 1). Since then, the two groups have swapped places. By 2014, 52 percent of Americans in that age group had never been married, while only 41 percent were married. Young Americans are now more apt to experience and express passion for some activity, cause, or topic than for another person.

Figure 1.

A decline in commitment isn’t the only reason for the sexual recession. Today one in eight adult Americans is taking antidepressant medication, one of the common side effects of which is reduced libido. Social media use also seems to play a part. The ping of an incoming text message or new Facebook post delivers a bit of a dopamine hit—a smaller one than sex delivers, to be sure, but without all the difficulties of managing a relationship. In a study of married eighteen- to thirty-nine-year-old Americans, social media use predicted poorer marriage quality, lower marital happiness, and increased marital trouble—not exactly a recipe for an active love life.

If these were the only causes, the solution would be straightforward: a little more commitment, a little less screen time, a few more dates over dinner, more time with a therapist, and voilà. But if we follow the data, we will find that the problem goes much deeper, down to one of the foundational tenets of enlightened opinion: the idea that men and women must be equal in every domain. Social science cannot tell us if this is true, but it can tell us what happens if we act as though it is. Today, the results are in. Equality between the sexes is leading to the demise of sex.

To understand why this is, we need to turn to Gary Becker, an economist who won a Nobel Prize for his study of the economic principles behind human interactions. He documented how the benefits of marriage receded as women’s earning power rose relative to that of men. The years between 1973 and 1983 were decisive. In that decade, young women’s wages climbed steadily while men’s actually fell, never to recover. Women had less reason to marry, and they had less attractive mates should they nonetheless decide to. Though women had often entered marriages for financial reasons, many nonfinancial benefits followed, including the formation of a stable, intimate relationship with a spouse and the sense of purpose that comes with raising a family. These are things that no job—however lucrative—can deliver.

The introduction of the Pill has not changed what men and women value most, but it has transformed how they relate. The marriage market before the Pill was populated by roughly equal numbers of men and women, whose bargaining positions were comparable and predictable. Men valued attractiveness more than women, and women valued economic prospects more than men. Knowing that men wanted sex, but realizing that sex was risky without a corresponding commitment, women often demanded a ring—a clear sign of his sacrifice and commitment.

Not anymore. Artificial contraception has made it so that people seldom mention marriage in the negotiations over sex. Ideals of chastity that shored up these practical necessities have been replaced with paeans to free love and autonomy. As one twenty-nine-year-old woman demonstrated when my research team asked her whether men should have to “work” for sex: “Yes. Sometimes. Not always. I mean, I don’t think it should necessarily be given out by women, but I do think it’s okay if a woman does just give it out. Just not all the time.” The mating market no longer leads to marriage, which is still “expensive”—costly in terms of fidelity, time, and finances—while sex has become comparatively “cheap.”

For every one hundred women under forty who want to marry, there are only eighty-two men who want the same. Though the difference may sound small, it allows men to be more selective, fickle, and cautious. If it seems to you that young men are getting pickier about their prospective spouses, you’re right. It’s a result of the new power imbalance in the marriage market. In an era of accessible sex, the median age at marriage rises. It now stands at an all-time high of twenty-seven for women and twenty-nine for men, and is continuing to inch upward. In this environment, women increasingly have to choose between marrying Mr. Not Quite Right or no one at all.

For the typical American woman, the route to the altar is becoming littered with failed relationships and wasted years. Take Nina, a twenty-five-year-old woman my team interviewed in Denver. Petite, attractive, and faring well professionally in her position with an insurance company, Nina was nevertheless struggling when it came to relationships. She had a history of putting men she valued as confidantes in the “friend zone.” With these men, a sexual relationship seemed too risky. If it went awry, she’d lose not only a potential mate but also a valued friend. On the other hand, if she didn’t know the man well, she was willing to have casual sex while hoping for something more.

After several years, this approach had taken its toll: an abortion, depression, and a string of failed relationships. Nina now believed that a marriage ought to begin as a friendship, and for the first time in years, she had someone in particular—David—in mind. Though she had been raised by liberal parents to be open-minded about sex and wary of traditional household roles, she had come to see things differently. She was blunt: “I’m dead serious. . . . I would marry him, I would raise his kids, raise a family.”

In her 2013 book Hard to Get, Leslie Bell, a sociologist and psychotherapist, tries to understand the lives of women like Nina. She laments that the skills they developed “in getting ahead educationally and professionally have not translated well into getting what they want and need in sex and relationships.” When it comes to relationships, their “unprecedented sexual, educational, and professional freedoms” have led to “contradictory and paradoxical consequences.”

Nonsense, I say. The only contradictory and paradoxical thing here is the unrealistic expectation of so many that the financial independence of women would have wholly positive effects on the dance of the sexes. Women and men still want each other, but the old necessities that once brought them together have disappeared. Many are going it alone, apparently. Since 1992, there has been a 100 percent growth in the share of men and nearly 275 percent increase in the share of women who masturbate at least weekly.

Even those who marry are having trouble in the bedroom. According to the study, the frequency with which married couples had sex fell 19 percent between 2000 and 2014. An even steeper decline is evident in the just-released 2016 data. It’s not just married couples, either; cohabiting Americans are also reporting a drop in sexual activity. In their 1994 landmark sex study, University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann and his colleagues reported that 1.3 percent of married men and 2.6 percent of married women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine had not had sex within the past year. Twenty years later, 4.9 percent of married men and 6.5 percent of married women in the same age range report that it has been more than a year since they have had sex with their spouses. How do we account for this?

Here, too, equality is the enemy of eros. Differences between men’s work and women’s work—between breadwinner and homemaker, father and mother—are increasingly viewed as arbitrary and oppressive. And yet this loss of everyday oppositions between men and women has made Americans less, not more, attractive to each other. It was not supposed to be this way. Some sociologists have guessed—or perhaps hoped—that men who are willing to take on traditionally female household tasks might enjoy more active sexual lives with their wives—quid in the kitchen for quo in the bedroom. The authors of a recent analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households conjectured that women would use the promise of sex to convince men to do more domestic tasks. Despite the transactional way of framing the problem, the researchers harbored a fond hope: that more equal relationships would also be more erotic ones. So, do men who do a greater share of the housework enjoy more sex? No. In fact, they’re penalized in the bedroom. Husbands who do little or no housework had sex with their wives nearly two more times per month than did husbands who do all of it. Meanwhile, doing a greater share of traditionally male work around the house—mowing the lawn, fixing things—correlates with more sex. Men and women are not attracted to sameness, but to difference. We long for what is missing in ourselves. Needing each other makes us want each other.

Recognizing this doesn’t mend everything between men and women, however. The cheap sex that was made possible by the Pill, further discounted by pornography, and made more efficient by Tinder has proven to be a bad bargain for women, leaving them (and, in turn, men) lonelier and less connected than they once were. I see it in the statistics and I hear it in their stories.

“Equality,” Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz writes in her 2011 book, Why Love Hurts, “demands a redefinition of eroticism and romantic desire that has yet to be accomplished.” Indeed. Egalitarianism promised the flourishing of eros, but by abolishing the difference between the sexes, it has made sexual acts self-referential—even those that are not performed alone. Men and women are not interchangeable, and our effort to make them so has only increased the loneliness and disaffection of American life. We cannot have both eros and strict equality between the sexes. Saving one requires sacrificing the other.

Mark Regnerus is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, senior fellow at the Austin Institute, and author of Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy.

SSM consequences

The Spectator

What’s changed in Britain since same-sex marriage?
David Sergeant

David Sergeant

7 September 2017

12:54 PM

Four years ago, amid much uncertainty, 400 British members of parliament voted to redefine marriage in the United Kingdom.

Then prime minister David Cameron announced that, despite having made no mention of the issue in his party’s pre-election manifesto, it would be MP’s who decided the fate of marriage.

Now, it’s Australia’s turn to choose. There’s one key difference. Unlike in Britain, it will be the people who decide.

Everyone agrees, whether they admit it or not. This is a decision of enormous significance.

Therefore, it seems sensible to analyse the consequences of the potential change, within nations in which redefinition has previously been carried out.

In the United Kingdom, it has become abundantly clear that redefinition has affected many people, across many spheres. At first glance, these spheres appeared distinct from marriage redefinition. However, subsequent changes, have proved that they are entirely intertwined.

Gender: Current Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, has revealed proposals to abolish the need for any medical consultation before gender reassignment. Simply filling out an official form will be sufficient. A ‘Ministry of Equalities’ press release, explicitly announced, that the proposals were designed to: ‘build on the progress’ of same-sex marriage. Guardian journalist Roz Kaveney boasted that changing your gender is now: ‘Almost as simple as changing your name by statutory declaration’.

Manifestations of the ‘British gender revolution’ are not difficult to find. Transport for London, have prohibited the use of the ‘heteronormative’ words, such as ladies and gentlemen. Meanwhile, universities across the nation are threatening to ‘mark down’ students, who continue to use the words ‘he’ and ‘she’. Instead, ‘gender neutral pronouns’ such as ‘ze’, must be uniformly applied.

Such gender-theory radicalism has delighted Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT lobby. Their Orwellian tagline: ‘Acceptance without exception’, can be seen plastered on posters and adverts. Politicians, attempt to ‘out-radical’ one another, in the race to be an original champion, in the next emancipatory front of ‘Trans-rights’.

Freedom of religion: Much was made in the UK, about supposed exemptions, designed to ensure that believers would always be allowed to stay true to their convictions.
Four years later, the very same people who made ‘heartfelt promises’, now work tirelessly to undermine them.

Equalities minister Justine Greening, has insisted that churches must be made to: ‘Keep up with modern attitudes’. Likewise, the Speaker of the House of Commons, a position supposedly defined by its political neutrality, had this to say: I feel we’ll only have proper equal marriage when you can bloody well get married in a church if you want to do so, without having to fight the church for the equality that should be your right’.

It became clear, during this year’s general election, just how militant the LGBT lobby have become, following marriage redefinition. The primary target was Tim Farron, leader of England’s third largest political party, the Liberal Democrats. High-profile journalists had heard that Farron was a practising Christian. In every single interview thereafter, they demanded to know. Did he personally believe homosexual sex to be a sin? He practically begged the commentariat, to allow him to keep his personal faith and legislative convictions separate. For decades, he pointed out, he had out vocally and legislatively supported the LGBT Lobby. Likewise, he had long backed same-sex marriage, voting for it enthusiastically. This simply was no longer enough.

Shortly after the election campaign, Farron resigned. He stated that it was now impossible, for a believing Christian to hold a prominent position in British politics.

In a heartbreaking development and in spite of Britain’s ‘foster crisis’, aspiring foster parents who identify as religious, face interrogation. Those who are deemed unlikely to ‘celebrate’ homosexuality, have had their dreams of parenthood scuppered. This month, Britain’s High Court, ruled that a Pentecostal couple were ineligible parents. While the court recognised their successful and loving record of adoption, they decreed that above all else: ‘The equality provisions concerning sexual orientation should take precedence’. How has Great Britain become so twisted? Practicing Jews, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, who want to stay true to their religious teachings, can no longer adopt children.

Freedom of speech: In the lead-up to the Parliamentary vote, we witnessed almost incomprehensible bullying. David Burrows MP, a mild-mannered supporter of the ‘Coalition for Marriage’, had excrement thrown at his house. His children received death threats and their school address was published online. Similarly, ‘Conservative’ broadcaster Iain Dale promised to, ‘publicly out’ gay MP’s, who did not vote for redefinition.

Many hardworking Brits have lost their jobs. Consider Adrian Smith, sacked by a Manchester Housing Trust, for suggesting that the state: ‘shouldn’t impose its rules on places of faith and conscience’. Or Richard Page, fired for gross misconduct after articulating, that children might enjoy better outcomes, were they to be adopted by heterosexual couples.

Simultaneously, contrary to ‘steadfast’ government assurances, small businesses have been consistently targeted. Courts in Northern Ireland ruled that the Asher’s Family bakery had acted unlawfully. What crime committed by this tiny business? Politely declining to decorate a cake with a political message in support of same-sex marriage. The courts maintained that business owners must be compelled to promote the LGBT cause, irrespective of personal convictions.

Even the National Trust, a British institution with over 4.2 million members, has decided to join the bullying LGBT crusade. A message went out. Each of the Trust’s 62,000 volunteers, would be required to wear a compulsory same-sex rainbow badge. Those who said they’d rather not were told they would be ‘moved out of sight’until they were prepared to publicly demonstrate inclusive tolerance.

In retrospect, the silent majority in Britain remained silent for too long. Reflecting on redefinition, Ben Harris-Quinney, Chairman of the Bow Group think tank pondered that:‘Same-sex marriage was promoted in the UK, as an issue of supposed tolerance and equality. What we have seen, is the most unequal and intolerant outcomes of any political issue in recent history’.

Children: Across the UK, ‘sex education’ has been transformed and disfigured. TV programmes, aimed at children as young as three, promote ‘gender fluidity’, as an enabler of thoughtfulness and individuality.

At the same time, Ministers have denied worried parents the right to withdraw their children from primary school classes. Meanwhile, ‘outside educators’ teach children about sex positions, ‘satisfying’ pornography consumption and how to masturbate. Concerns regarding STI’s and Promiscuity, are derided as ‘old-fashioned’.

Independent religious schools are under intense scrutiny. Dame Louise Casey, a senior government advisor, recently insisted that it is now: ‘Not Ok for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage’.
Ofsted, the body responsible for school-assessment, has been wildly politicised. In 2013, Prior to the redefinition of marriage, Ofsted visited Vishnitz Jewish Girls School. They passed the school with flying colours. In fact, they went out of their way to highlight the committed and attentive approach to student welfare and development. Four years later, Ofsted returned. This time, they failed the school on one issue alone. While again, noting that students were ‘confident in thinking for themselves‘, their report, pointed to the inadequate promotion of homosexuality and gender reassignment. As such, it was failing to ensure: ‘a full understanding of fundamental British values’. It is one of an initial seven faith schools that face closure.

I mentioned that I was writing this article to a good friend in the Conservative Party, back at home. He expressed his genuine concern. Had I not considered the consequences? Did I not realise that what I said in Australia could be found when I returned to the UK? ‘LGBT progress is an unstoppable tide’. He assured me, that it was ok for me to ‘privately’ believe that marriage was between one man and one woman. He even privately agreed, that the stuff being taught in primary schools was too much.

But to say it out loud? To actually have it in print? It would blight my career and my personal relationships.

Good God. How much more important the institution of marriage and freedom of thought, religion and speech. How much more important the future of our children, than any naïve career ambitions I might harbour.

I urge every Aussie to examine the evidence, analysis the results and be clear about what you’re voting for. If it was solely marriage, it would worth preserving.

It’s infinitely more.

SSM The No Vote Case

‘No’ vote best for human flourishing

• MARK COLERIDGE
• The Australian
• 12:00AM September 11, 2017

I’ve been told people are looking for guidance on same-sex marriage as we move towards the postal vote. That may be so, though I suspect that most people have already made up their mind on the issue and, if they’re looking for anything, they’re wanting some authority to support their position publicly. But that’s not really what I want to do here. By now the arguments for and against same-sex marriage are well enough known to those who want to know them, even if much of the debate has been too shallow or slick to do justice to the deeper issues. So there’s no need for me to go over well-trodden ground. But in a debate where the language has often been slippery it may help to clarify a few points that can be unclear. I wrote something like what follows a while ago. In the meantime, the debate has become more complex and heated, so I’ve made a few changes to take account of that.

Is same-sex marriage about love?

There are many forms of love — parent-child, siblings, friends, carers and so on. But not all are nuptial. In fact, only one form of love is nuptial — the love of man and woman which is free, lifelong and open to children. Other forms of love may indeed be love and often are. That means that they have value, yes; but it doesn’t mean that they are or could become marriage.

Is it about equality?

It’s true that all human beings are equal. But that doesn’t mean they are the same. Same-sex marriage ideology implies that equality means sameness. But it doesn’t. I may be different, but I’m still equal. Marriage policy has almost always “discriminated” against certain people: parents can’t marry their children, brother and sister can’t marry, those under age can’t marry. Nor can people of the same sex. That doesn’t make them any less equal.

Is it about civil rights?

Here the link is made to women’s rights and racial equality. But the law already offers ample protection for people in same-sex unions in a way that wasn’t true of women or people of other races in earlier times. Are people in same-sex unions excluded from voting, entering shops or using public transport? Justice can be done to people in same-sex unions and their human dignity can be respected without resorting to an artificially constructed “right” to marry.

Are heterosexuality and homosexuality equivalent?

In the construction of any human society, heterosexuality has been privileged because it alone can secure the future by producing children. Only a society which sees children as optional and the future as something of no great concern would see heterosexuality and homosexuality as equivalent.

Are children an optional extra?

Without resorting to extraordinary measures, same-sex couples can’t produce children — not just because of age or sterility but because of biological impossibility. Yet bringing children to birth and raising them in a stable environment is fundamental to marriage, which remains true even if a married couple can’t conceive. The two purposes of marriage are unitive and procreative. They are deeply interrelated. Yet same-sex marriage would separate them radically, which means that it can’t be marriage.

Is marriage only about two individuals?

Marriage has always been regarded as essentially social, binding families together in new configurations and serving as the basic cell in constructing a human society which has a future. Marriage is a social institution. That’s why it’s important to speak of the common good when speaking of marriage; it’s also why same-sex marriage ideology focuses much more on supposed individual rights than on the common good.

Do gender and biology matter?

Same-sex marriage ideology says that gender difference is a social construct and that it doesn’t matter for marriage. It also says that the body, or biology, is of no final significance. This is linked to a denial of “nature” — to a sense that anything may be “natural” or “unnatural”. It implies a refusal to accept that there are any “givens” and an insistence that autonomous individuals can make of themselves what they will.

Has humanity got marriage wrong until recently?

Same-sex marriage ideology is a dramatic form of the Western myth of progress which the facts of history have never confirmed. It seems arrogant or ignorant to claim that all cultures through the millenniums have been wrong on this fundamental point. Not that every society has got marriage right in every way. But societies have agreed that marriage is between a man and a woman. To disregard this time-tested, cross-cultural wisdom is to succumb to the amnesia which is one of our cultural wounds.

Will the non-Western world eventually catch up with the West?

Non-Western cultures are often perplexed by the push for same-sex marriage in the West, but this isn’t necessarily a sign that they are less civilised — even though the West tends to think that the rest of the world, if it isn’t like the West, either should be or will be eventually. It may well be that non-Western cultures will help preserve for humanity values which were once fundamental to Western cultures.

Are those who don’t favour same-sex marriage homophobic and bigoted?

It’s possible to oppose same-sex marriage in ways that are respectful and open-minded. But in an ideologically conditioned world of “all or nothing” or “black and white”, those who oppose same-sex marriage are often denigrated in an attempt to discredit or silence them. There’s a violence in this, which is resistant to the truthful debate we need.

A former federal minister once claimed that truth counted for little in Australian politics. That may be so. But truth surely counts for much when a society and its political leaders are making decisions about something as fundamentally important as marriage. That’s why the claims made by those pushing for same-sex marriage are an unreliable basis for a decision which is much more than political. This debate is about the meaning of marriage, and that’s why it’s important that everyone has their say in the postal vote. I’ll be voting No, not because I wish ill of any kind on those in same-sex unions who have the same need for love and the same right to happiness as anyone else. I’ll be voting No because I think it’s the only way available of affirming values which are fundamental to true human flourishing and of guarding against unwanted consequences in the long term. A No vote may seem negative but, in a debate where things have rarely been what they seem, No is Yes and Yes is No.

Mark Coleridge is the Archbishop of Brisbane.