Another day, another panic-mongering, deceptive, anti-social headline from Family First, as reported on Twitter …
This time they’re going for Rainbow Youth’s literally life-saving anti-bullying programmes. Inside Out is described on Rainbow Youth’s website as:
A friendly and accessible learning resource to help increase understanding and support of sex, gender and sexuality diversity, so we can all belong
The horror.
Family First is playing a very boring old tune. But it’s illuminating how insistent they get on these matters. Programmes like Inside Out are literally doing nothing more than saying “being a teenager is super complicated and you’re working out who you are and let’s provide a safe environment for you to do that in.”
And this cannot be allowed. We cannot give kids a platform to ask questions about their gender or identity or role in society. We cannot provide people with meaningful choice in the kinds of relationships they have with others. This way lies the total destruction of our society.
Which is true …
Family First’s worldview – a mythical ~1950s Golden Age~ of heterosexual, monogamous, sex-for-procreation-only families with 2.5 kids – is dying. And they know it.
Their society cannot survive even the merest acknowledgement that there are other ways to be than cisgendered, heterosexual, and monogamous.
This is their problem: not that there’s no place in the world for hetero cis folk in monogamous relationships – heck, I’m one, raving feminist lefty that I am! – but that Bob McCoskrie and his little band of bigots are so insecure that they can’t comprehend other people choosing different things to them. To patriarchal, religious extremists, their way must be the only way.
And it’s simply not. There are many different kinds of people, with many relationships and family arrangements, and many, many different ways to love. All are valuable. And untold harm is done to people – especially to young people – when we try to jam everyone into one narrow box and ignore all the other ones which are also labelled “family”.
Here’s No Doubt’s take.
Stephanie Rodgers 