Arrogant gay marriage advocates risk losing support in Australia, by Paul Maley.
In the space of just two decades, barely the lifetime of a teenager, community mores around homosexuality have gone from locking gay men up if they kiss on the street to cheering them on as they kiss at the altar, at least insofar as our attitudes are reflected in our statutes. …
Suppressing debate, not trying to convince but to get their way by the methods of political correctness:
Already the marriage advocates are carrying on in a manner guaranteed to lose them support, if not the plebiscite itself.
Arrogant, highhanded and contemptuous of legitimate opposition, they have wasted the last 12 months trying to shut down debate rather than winning it.
In August last year Richard DiNatale said a plebiscite would be divisive and harmful. “We’re speaking to people in the sector right now who are worried that we’ll see young people take their lives on the back of a hateful and divisive debate in the community,” Senator DiNatale said.
Can anybody imagine an old Left warrior like Paul Keating saying something like this? Far from running from the fight he’d have charged headlong into it, marshaling arguments, countering his opponents, persuading the uncommitted.
When it was over he might have won, he might have lost. But you’d be in no doubt where he stood. More importantly you’d have heard the case for gay marriage put in its highest form. …
Alas, the advocates have shown none of that steel. They are dreadful polemicists. When they are not morally blackmailing us with the spectre of suicide, they are relying on lazy arguments that resonate with no one not already enlisted to the cause.
They tell us Australia will become the ridicule of the Western world if we do not pass this reform. They say the opinion polls make it a done deal. Or, most arrogantly of all, they tell us that change is inevitable and that to say otherwise is to stand in the way of history. …
Same tactics as over the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. Some suggestions:
They need to accept that most of those opposed to gay marriage are decent people not hardened homophobes. …
The result, whichever way it goes, will be much tighter than the polls predict.
And they need to get off social media — the people they’re looking for won’t be found on their Twitter feed.
They will also need to accept that some of the arguments against gay marriage have merit and will require a response. For example, marriage has been a bedrock institution for millennia and people are going to be reluctant to change it.
Frame gay marriage as about fulfillment and fairness, and its advocates will win. But if marriage is framed as about reproduction, then gay marriage is absurd and somewhat pernicious. The media and elite are only allowing discussion of it as about equality. Suggesting marriage is about reproduction has been driven underground, out of the public view, but many people think it — crimethinkers! Another case of PC propaganda versus an unmentionable reality.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
