OPINION
Tani Newton
I hope Brian Tamaki and his followers win their court cases against their local councils and their ‘rainbow’ initiatives. And I hope he wins against the drag queens who are suing him. But I wonder where it is all going to end.
Obviously, the whole homosexual agenda is built on the premise that some people are ‘just born that way’. The narrative that has been constructed is one of an oppressed people group gaining recognition and acceptance. Rainbow flags and rainbow pedestrian crossings are vital to the crusade as they are the symbols of a lifestyle, once hidden and shamed, becoming ‘visible’.
Drag queen story hour is a deliberate strategy of this movement; any doubts I might have had about the connection were quickly dispelled by the protest where the counter-protestors were displaying its symbols and chanting its slogans. Nor is it any secret that the drag queens involved openly advocate for children ‘coming out’ and ‘questioning their gender’. And they are aggressive: just watch one of the recorded interviews with them. Their seething ferocity is barely concealed behind their plastic smiles. One gets the impression that they would be quite happy to reinforce their points with a well-sharpened meat cleaver.
What about the opposing point of view? What, in fact, is it?
Back in the 1980s, when the Homosexual Law Reform Bill was before Parliament, the conservatives were out on the street with a petition against it. Only a decade later, when the Christian Heritage Party was campaigning on a platform of traditional morality, they had to make it very clear that they were “not going into Parliament to recriminalise the homosexuals.” Another ten or twenty years on, the conservative position has become “people can do what they like in the privacy of their own homes; just don’t force it on our children.”
Call it what you like – moral decline, political expediency, a slow march backwards – it shouldn’t take very many seconds to see that this position is not tenable. Either a thing is alright or it isn’t. If it is alright, then there is no reason to be ashamed of it, or hide it, or keep it to yourself. That’s what the whole “coming out of the closet” thing is about. Drag queens and rainbow crossings do not inform children about where babies come from, a topic that is rightly left for parents to discuss with their children when they are old enough to need to know. Other related matters – how we dress, what makes up a family, getting married, raising children – are not sexually explicit and are visible to everyone in society, including children, as a normal part of life. If homosexual and transgender behaviour is OK, then it is OK to talk to children about same-sex ‘weddings’ or read them a story about two bulls or two lionesses raising young. If it is alright for men to dress up as women, and if it is alright for women to walk down the street with hardly any clothes on, then it is alright for men to walk down the street with hardly any women’s clothes on.
But, as usual, the doughty conservatives are seeking the fabled Elysium of the Middle Ground, the nonexistent Common Sense Land where we can all do our own thing without getting on each other’s nerves. However good their intentions are, this is a losing battle, and the liberals may not be as wrong as we would like them to be when they characterise it as mere resistance to change that will be overcome in time.
I have nothing to say against Brian Tamaki. He knows how to play the populist game, and he does good doing it, even if he is not quite the hero we’ve all been waiting for. I only hope we have it clear in our own minds that winning this battle will not win the war, and that there is no home waiting for us in Common Sense Land.