Welcome to our new authoritarian ‘tolerance’ in Australia, by Mark Powell.

Two years ago, in late August 2015 … I received an email that included the flyer below. It announced that all students at Burwood Girls High School in the inner-west of Sydney were required to attend a special film, “Gayby Baby.”

Attendance was compulsory and students were informed that they would need to be specially dressed for the occasion, eat unusual food, and assemble under a rainbow flag. The flyer was sent to all parents at the school.

Attendance was compulsory and students were informed that they would need to be specially dressed for the occasion, eat unusual food, and assemble under a rainbow flag. The flyer was sent to all parents at the school.

Now that you’ve seen it for yourself, note the following:

• All classes were going to be cancelled for two periods (including year twelves who were preparing for the HSC).
• All students were instructed to watch a certain movie with a clear LGBTIQ agenda.
• Every student was told to ditch their school uniform for the day and come clothed in one particular colour – purple – which included shoes, hats, scarves, tops, jumpers, pants, socks, jewellery, skirts.
• They were also told that they would then eat the same coloured food – I hope no one was gluten intolerant.
• And to top it off, they were to all have a fashion parade under the rainbow flag.

Now aside from the fact that the picture itself is a little creepy — who puts half-naked children on the front of their advertising material — what I came to realise is that this was a proverbial ‘straw in the wind.’ This is where the nation I grew up in and loved would end up if the homosexual political juggernaut continued to crash its way through our culture.

However, the thing that really stood out to everyone who received it was not necessarily what the flyer said, but what it didn’t say. i.e. there was going to be no ‘opt out.’ The students in the whole school were simply told what they would do. Shades of Orwell’s 1984? It couldn’t have been more comprehensive. Everything from watching a certain film, wearing certain clothing, eating certain food, participating in a parade, and finally pledging allegiance to a rainbow flag. Short of getting them to all engage in ‘orgy porgy,’ a Brave New World had finally arrived.

To be clear, our objection was not principally against the movie, Gayby Baby, but the implications for free speech and associated political coercion within the school. …

A number of parents who had daughters at the school contacted both me and my colleagues asking for assistance because they were too frightened of raising it themselves. Indeed, their children begged them not to say anything due to the negative repercussions they would have to endure from their fellow students and some of their teachers.

Similarly, after 2006 nearly all Western children were obliged to see Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, about the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. Often several times. That movie is fairly described as a political argument, because it is extremely light on for scientific material (and what little there was is contested).

hat-tip Stephen Neil