Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) managing director, Lyle Shelton, had the shock of his life when he checked out the RSVP’s to his show, Making sense of our time with Lyle Shelton, on the morning of Tuesday, 21 February 2017. While his administrators were sleeping (or busy drafting homophobic PowerPoint slides), the internet went wild.
Approximately one thousand ‘activists’ were keen to send a message to the out-and-proud, anti-LGBTI crusader, and registered over 54,000 fake people to attend the event held at the Melbourne Heathmont Baptist Church on 25 February 2017. There was ‘Hugh Janus’, ‘Alternative Facts’, ‘Dolan Turmp’, ‘Lotsa Butthurt’ and ‘Lyle Shelton has a very scary face and I don’t like it’, to name just a few.
The epic trolling received a horrified reaction from Shelton. Disgusted by the rude, crude, satirical and comical made-up names, Shelton took the opportunity to blame the gays and cry victim. In fact, such was his fear of The Gay, Shelton felt compelled to hire three security guards to keep him safe from any foul-mouthed, filthy activists who might bother turning up to the event to hurl hurtful, made-up names at him.
While Shelton was busy being precious about his feelings, telling media the RSVP’s included “the foulest, most degrading, most obscene written forms of communication I have seen in my life,” he spares little thought for the consequences of his relentless vilification of the LGBTI community.
Satirical identity and the initiator of the RSVP campaign, Pauline Pantsdown, says that the “capacity of Lyle Shelton and the Australian Christian Lobby to falsely paint themselves as victims knows no bounds” and that it is “no surprise that the ACL attempts to reverse this narrative when activists oppose their frightening and dangerous behaviour”.
Pantsdown further states that the ACL has previously made “documented false statements about ‘death threats’ in relation to an earlier protest involving the Mercure Hotel” and that Shelton “[rubbished] federal police investigations about a suicide attempt because [ACL] weren’t painted as being victims”. Shelton’s victim mentality has now extended so far as to hire three security guards because “someone RSVP’d to their event as ‘Ben Dover’.”
Despite some of the names being undoubtedly obscene and likely to cause moral indignation and outrage, the campaign was entirely harmless; unlike the ACL’s agenda. Claiming to be a Christian organization, Shelton uses his position to further his personal vendetta, rather than fostering a caring, inclusive and compassionate society. Given Shelton’s open condemnation of the LGBTI community, it is little wonder he jumped at the chance to hold them entirely responsible for his angst over a few rude words.
But while Shelton was momentarily morally violated by the obscenities, the impacts of the ACL’s campaigns have far more serious consequences.
Shelton has a history of obsessing about the gay community, with approximately 69% of his Tweets anti-LGBTI. Terrified that people will think he’s gay, he jumps at the opportunity to discuss LGBTI issues, hiding his anti-gay rhetoric behind faux-concern for ‘the children’.
He is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and the anti-bullying Safe Schools program, and is critical of other conservatives for not standing up to LGBTI community and the “unthinkable things” they support. He believes that implementing programs to address the high levels of bullying of LGBTI students is based on a “terrible ideology”, comparing the LGBTI movement to the rise of the Nazi’s in the 1930’s.
However it seems that Shelton is only concerned with the wellbeing of heteronormative children.
Pauline Pantsdown states that the ACL is “an organisation that places vulnerable transgender children under direct threat” and has “screwed up photographs of transgender children, re-photographed them and re-published them as a source of derision. Some government publications of lists of schools that support transgender children were withdrawn after children were harassed at schools, yet Shelton and his team continue to relentlessly hammer politicians to give them access to these lists.”
LGBTI people have significantly poorer mental health and higher rates of suicide than other Australians, with discrimination and exclusion key causal factors. The average age of the first suicide attempt is only 16 years of age.
Shelton’s gross overreaction to the ridiculous RSVP trolling provides a good insight as to what he considers to be acceptable ‘Christian’ behaviour: Obscene language and sexual references are morally reprehensible, even if no one is harmed, and divisive, anti-gay campaigns which contribute to the suicide of young people are perfectly fine as long as there is no profanity.
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