By Ad astra

Now we see it, the Christian-Right Liberal reactionaries digging their cruel claws into PM Turnbull over the ‘Safe Schools’ program, one specifically designed to help kids understand that different individuals have different feelings about their sexuality, and that all of us ought to understand, respect, and accept these differences.

‘Safe Schools’ is aimed at helping lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and/or intersex (LGBTI) school students. According to its website, the ‘Safe Schools Coalition’ offers “… resources and support to equip staff and students with ‘skills, practical ideas and greater confidence’ to create a safe and inclusive environment for same-sex attracted, intersex and gender diverse students, staff and families.”

One end point of the program is to lessen the bullying which differences in sexual identity and sexual preferences too often engender. Bullying and ridicule of those whose sexual orientation does not match their gender have superseded the bullying and ridicule heaped upon kids with red hair or freckles or short stature that we once saw when we were young. This pernicious social transformation has resulted in distress, depression and sometimes suicide. ‘Safe Schools’ was developed as an antidote; its website explains that it is: “… aimed at creating safe and supportive school environments for these same-sex attracted, intersex and gender diverse people by reducing homophobic and transphobic bullying and discrimination in schools”

Do the reactionaries see it that way? No, they see it as an assault on their ‘Christian’ beliefs. As they see it, God has ordained that there should be men and women with clearly defined and different sexual attributes. Men should be attracted to women and vice versa. No in-between position is allowable. ‘Safe Schools’ accepts the reality of a variety of different sexual orientations that do not match gender. The reactionaries do not, and never will. There is right and wrong, and they believe they are right – God and the Bible say so.

Prominent among the objectors are the usual suspects: Cory Bernardi and Eric Abetz, as 2353NM mentioned in Karma is a bugger.

Bernardi told the ABC that the program was seeing children “… being bullied and intimidated into complying with a radical program”, and called on the Government to withdraw funding for the program. For starters, he demanded an enquiry into the program. “’It’s not about gender, it’s not about sexuality,’ he said. ’It makes everyone fall into line with a political agenda. Our schools should be places of learning, not indoctrination.’”

PM Turnbull has gone along with Bernardi and other Liberal agitators and has requested an investigation into the Safe Schools program. Simon Birmingham, Minister for Education and Training, will carry out the enquiry.

Appearing on The Drum Abetz acknowledged that everyone supports stamping out bullying and protecting students, but insisted that the Safe Schools program went far beyond this. He told John Barron “… trying to lock young people into the Safe Schools program’s particular views about gender and sexuality is ‘unhelpful and unhealthy’, and that a clear distinction between boys and girls, ‘especially at primary school’, is something that should be protected.

“[There are] circumstances where this program suggests that if a boy feels like being a girl, he should be allowed to use the girls’ toilet facilities, which might be good for him, but what about all the girls that are then submitted to a boy being in their change rooms or in their toilets?”

Abetz also argued that many members of the community did not support the Safe Schools program: “It is a program of social engineering where parents, when they get to understand what it is, rebel against it and in fact vote for their schools not to be involved.”

Now ghost-from-the-past Tony Abbott has chimed in with: “It’s not an anti-bullying program, it’s a social engineering program. Its funding should be terminated.”

Writing in The Guardian, Shalailah Medhora writes that of the 495 schools in the program, only one school has quit the Safe Schools program after parents’ objections. Another example of Abetz’ overblown rhetoric.

Bernard Keane of Crikey hit the nail on the head in his article: The rise and rise of Malcolm Abbott and the sex-obsessed right with these words:

“This is simple cultural warfare by the extreme right within the Liberals, and it’s no surprise to see the likes of Andrew Nikolic and Andrew Hastie involved.

“Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews nailed it when he said: “I don’t think these extreme Liberals are actually offended by the structure of the program, or the teachers who lead it. I just think they’re offended by the kids who need it.”

Keane continued:

“These are politicians who are obsessed with sex – specifically, people who might be sexually different to their own white middle-aged heterosexual male selves. Obsessed enough that it’s all they want to talk about in their party room meeting, bandying about terms like ‘cultural Marxism’ because they read it in the paper the other day. Not merely does the idea of alternative forms of sexuality offend them, it terrifies them, because it’s yet another symbol of a world that no longer grants automatic ascendancy to men like them.

“Safe Schools is one more reminder that the planet no longer revolves around them. That its purpose is to protect kids, to prevent them from being bullied, is of no moment; these men were never the ones bullied at school for being different. They’ve always enjoyed privilege, entitlement, status.

“Turnbull might think that giving them an inquiry is the smart play – the inquiry will be controlled by the civil and sensible Education Minister Simon Birmingham. The inquiry will find no, or minor, concerns; further complaints can be addressed by noting the program has been reviewed and all’s well.

“Except, the review also legitimises this kind of cultural war, a war in which LGBTI kids are collateral damage, just like domestic violence victims are collateral damage in the culture war waged by the likes of Mark Latham and Miranda Devine against their mythical ‘middle class feminist’ enemy. And reviews are never enough for the far right – their concerns validated, they will push into more areas. For middle-aged white reactionary males, there’s always something about the 21st century to be outraged by. In fact, they’ve barely finished getting upset about the late 20th century.

“Turnbull might merely be playing for time – to hold out until the election, then once he has secured victory, move to positions that more closely match his own principles. But if there’s one truth we’ve learnt from recent years and especially from Tony Abbott, it’s that it’s awfully hard to change your style once you’re in power. Abbott could never shed his relentless negativity once he became prime minister. If Malcolm Turnbull thinks he can veer back to the middle after pandering to the right, it might be much harder than he thinks.”

The response of these reactionary Liberals to the Safe Schools program points to an entrenched way of thinking about sexuality. We saw it just a short time ago during the sexual equality debate. We saw similar delaying tactics. Abbott’s insistence that this matter could not be resolved by a parliamentary debate, and instead must be put to a plebiscite of the people after the next election, was simply obfuscation writ large. His hope was that this delay would kill the idea of sexual equality and its awful sequel – same sex marriage! There was the hope too that the delay would force a public debate, which would allow the Australian Christian Lobby to spread its biased propaganda, propagate its nasty attitudes, and strike fear into those unprepared for the distasteful diatribe that would surely follow. A taste of what the ACL will do and say comes from its director, Lyle Shelton, who is already mouthing off about the Safe Schools program, which he describes as “radical sex experimentation”. He has a petition to the Queensland government with almost 11,000 signatures asking for the cessation of the program. If you want to see how this man operates, and how divisive he is in this debate and the one on sexual equality, take a look at the February 29 edition of Q&A, where he proclaimed: “… gay people are stealing babies”!

Now the outspoken radical George Christiansen, in a speech to the House last week, shocked parliamentarians by likening the Safe Schools program to ‘grooming’ undertaken by sexual predators: “If someone proposed exposing a child to this material, the parents would probably call the police, because it would sound a lot like grooming work a sexual predator might undertake …”. Such men seem unconstrained in their language and vitriol.

Writing in Daily Life, in Safe Schools is important, because LGBTQI students shouldn’t need to justify their right to exist, Maeve Marsden notes: “It should come as a surprise to no one that the Prime Minister is…interested in placating the right-wing factions of his party…it is utterly predictable that he would throw the rights of LGBTQI kids to enjoy a safe school environment and better mental health outcomes under the bus.”

In her article in The Age: Safe Schools program: why zealots are trying to drag us back to the dark ages, Jill Stark reveals the disturbing statistics that made the program necessary:

“It was set up in Victoria in 2010 in response to requests from teachers to help them support a growing number of LGBTI students who were wrestling with their identity. It has the backing of beyondblue, the Australian Secondary Principals Association, the Australian Education Union and the Australian Council of State School Organisations.

“Adding to teachers’ concerns were alarming statistics from La Trobe University’s 2010 Writing Themselves In study which revealed 75 per cent of LGBTI young people had experienced physical or verbal homophobic bullying. Eighty per cent said the abuse happened at school. These students are up to six times more likely to attempt suicide and self-harm than their peers.”

Jill Stark backs up her statistics with a real-life example in her article in The Age: Go kill yourself, faggot’: Gay teen says Somerville Secondary ignored bullying. 15-year-old Nathan Whitmore, who attempted suicide after being terrorised at school for two years and beaten with a skateboard says he was bullied for being gay and told: ‘You’re a gay faggot who everyone hates, just go kill yourself and get it over with, everyone would be happy and better off’. He claims his school failed to protect him and he is planning legal action against the Victorian Education Department, arguing that his pleas for help were ignored for two years.

Writing in the AIMN in Turnbull sells out young people to the deranged, to save himself, Jennifer Wilson says: “Turnbull’s support of those who would cause suffering to the young, based entirely on religious ideology, must be greatly discouraging to young people as well as to those adults who want to make acceptance of difference commonplace. Turnbull has made a Mephistophelean covenant with religious extremists. If there is such a thing as a soul, he has likely sold his in an exchange that benefits himself to the detriment of the young.”

There are some stark realities about these issues of sexuality and the reactions to LGBTI matters that need to be accepted.

The Christian Lobby, and the likes of Bernardi, Abetz, Christensen, et al will never be persuaded from their views; indeed they cannot change them. Their views and attitudes are hard wired into their brains; they probably have been since their upbringing as small children. Facts, figures and logical reasoning cannot change them. Argument and reasoning are useless.

As a political strategy, there seems to be just a few things that can be done:

• Use facts and reasoning to persuade those voters frightened by the rhetoric of the radicals that their facts are wrong, their conclusions flawed, their demands unreasonable and unnecessary, and that the need for the Safe School program is backed by hard evidence and sound professional opinion. The radicals are inconvincible, but the public can be convinced.Use political force to counter the radicals. They understand counting and votes. Don’t concede an inch, as Turnbull has foolishly done, because, as Keane points out, no matter how positive the outcomes of an investigation turn out to be, the radicals will never accept them. They will not go away. They will wage a war of attrition. Brute force is the only response they understand.

What we need is not just Safe Schools; we need Safe Politicians. It is a national disgrace that in our federal parliament we have such a motley collection of Unsafe Politicians: radical, heartless reactionaries who believe they are absolutely right and their opponents always wrong, ever ready to intimidate those whose opinions differ from theirs, primed to bully them into submission, and if they don’t succumb, to cast them cruelly into outer darkness, where they believe they belong, along with the LGBTI school students these Unsafe Politicians refuse to support.

Writing in the AIMN in Turnbull sells out young people to the deranged, to save himself, Jennifer Wilson says: “Turnbull’s support of those who would cause suffering to the young, based entirely on religious ideology, must be greatly discouraging to young people as well as to those adults who want to make acceptance of difference commonplace. Turnbull has made a Mephistophelean covenant with religious extremists. If there is such a thing as a soul, he has likely sold his in an exchange that benefits himself to the detriment of the young.”

There are some stark realities about these issues of sexuality and the reactions to LGBTI matters that need to be accepted.

The Christian Lobby, and the likes of Bernardi, Abetz, Christensen, et al will never be persuaded from their views; indeed they cannot change them. Their views and attitudes are hard wired into their brains; they probably have been since their upbringing as small children. Facts, figures and logical reasoning cannot change them. Argument and reasoning are useless.

As a political strategy, there seems to be just a few things that can be done:

• Use facts and reasoning to persuade those voters frightened by the rhetoric of the radicals that their facts are wrong, their conclusions flawed, their demands unreasonable and unnecessary, and that the need for the Safe School program is backed by hard evidence and sound professional opinion. The radicals are inconvincible, but the public can be convinced.
• Use political force to counter the radicals. They understand counting and votes. Don’t concede an inch, as Turnbull has foolishly done, because, as Keane points out, no matter how positive the outcomes of an investigation turn out to be, the radicals will never accept them. They will not go away. They will wage a war of attrition. Brute force is the only response they understand.

What we need is not just Safe Schools; we need Safe Politicians. It is a national disgrace that in our federal parliament we have such a motley collection of Unsafe Politicians: radical, heartless reactionaries who believe they are absolutely right and their opponents always wrong, ever ready to intimidate those whose opinions differ from theirs, primed to bully them into submission, and if they don’t succumb, to cast them cruelly into outer darkness, where they believe they belong, along with the LGBTI school students these Unsafe Politicians refuse to support.