Freedom of speech should not confer the right to tell blatant lies but, time and again, that is what we see happening.
That bastion of bigotry and bullshit, Miranda Devine, informed us last year that Cheltenham Girls High School had banned the use of gender specific terms like “girls”, “women” or “ladies” and that teachers were told “that if they did not support decisions of LGBTI students they would be breaking the law, would be considered homophobic and were not welcome by the school.”
The story was a lie.
Every year we hear that Christmas carols have been banned and every year it is shown to be another lie.
The Coalition for Marriage aired an ad where mother Cella White, an avid campaigner against the Safe Schools program, tells viewers that her son’s school told him, “… he could wear a dress next year if he felt like it.”
Except it never happened.
Neo-Nazi group Antipodean Resistance distributed a poster that claims, “gay marriage enables paedophilia” and “gay couples are thirty times more likely to molest children.”
Total crap again. According to the American Psychological Association and multiple studies children are no more likely to be molested by LGBTI parents, than by male-female parents.
Another poster that appeared in Melbourne with the charming headline “Stop the Fags” claimed that 92% of children raised by gay parents are abused, that 51% have depression, and that 72% are obese.
These claims are refuted in a review by Columbia Law School earlier this year which looked at 79 different studies into the wellbeing of children with gay or lesbian parents. That study, the most comprehensive of its kind, found kids with LGBTI parents do as well as other children emotionally, physically, educationally and socially.
In Hurstville in Sydney, an anti same-sex marriage flyer printed in both English and Chinese claims that “the number of victims being raped in public female changing rooms and bathroom in those countries that has passed the same sex marriage legislation is a stunning fact to all!”
This, of course, is completely fictitious.
Last year, the Marriage Alliance created an ad that showed a troubled looking office worker with a rainbow noose around her neck.
“Same sex marriage increases PC bullying in the workplace,” said the ad which was banned for being extreme and an unjustifiable depiction of violence.
An email from the Marriage Alliance’s Sophie York has accused the ‘yes’ campaign of bullying and threatening “to destroy our entire Aussie way of life.”
Seriously!
This debate has nothing to do with freedom of speech or political correctness. It is about a bunch of silly people telling big fat lies.
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