Yeah, ok, I don’t know what the LGTBI community is saying because well, I don’t know all of the LGTBI people in the world. And I certainly don’t know anyone to whom all of the letters refer to. The whole headline is satire, but hey, Chaser got a lot of attention with their attack on fairy bread because the real outrage industry – shock jocks, Sky After Dark and Murdoch’s opinion writers (as opposed to people writing opinion pieces in Murdoch’s media) – started bleating about it…
Personally, I thought that surely the LGTBI community would embrace the idea of rainbow coloured hundreds and thousands on a piece of bread because well, doesn’t it suggest inclusion and…
Can I just stop myself here and ask what is this community stuff? I mean, why lump them all together as though they’re some sort of other community? As they’re all one and speaking with the same voice?
I guess this is what our PM is saying when he says that we’re all individuals and this identity politics is really, really bad… Of course, we all have to identify as Australians with Australian values and we can’t disrespect Anzac Day or prefer to say “Happy holidays” when it’s compulsory to say, “Merry Christmas”, but apart from that and few dozen other things you should be an individual and not identify as part of some group and complain that you’re marginalised because, well, women have been giving Scotty a bit of a hard time lately, so isn’t it time that they thought of themselves as individuals and stopped marching in large groups or, in Brittany Higgins’ case, taking one or two mates to their meeting.
Yes, the whole meltdown over the satiric post on fairy bread exposes the shifting nature of people’s values. In real, everyday terms most people think that – within certain limits – people should have the right to free speech. Obviously most people don’t support a right to me taking a megaphone and standing outside their bedroom window screaming obscenities but scaling back from there we enter the 18C area where some people argue that the speaker does have a right to offend. “We shouldn’t ban any speech,” the argument goes, “but instead we should expose it to the sunlight and disinfect it with reasoned debate.”
And I can certainly see some value in that argument. The only problem is that certain people hold megaphones while others have their lips sewn shut. As soon as some Alan or Andrew expresses an offensive view, any criticism is not treated by them as legitimate sunlight on their dank, unmoving waters, but is dismissed as an “attack on free speech” or “cancel culture”. It’s something along the lines of the religious freedom argument which, when explored, becomes: “People should be free to follow my religion!”
Perhaps I should start an actual petition to get the name changed to Rainbow bread and made compulsory in all kindergartens. It would be interesting to see if the actual outrage industry took umbrage at the brainwashing of the children or the heresy of changing something so iconic.
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