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Team Rainbow’s inexorable march through the institutions has been marked by clear strategic phases. There was the legalisation phase, cheered on by most small-l liberals and just about everyone else. Not many people thought locking up homosexuals was a good idea. Then we had the same-sex marriage debate. Then came the adoption-of-children push and the normalisation-of-lifestyle phase.

After that, the anti-discrimination-in-employment campaign, with Christian and other religious schools professing hetero-normativity (aka homophobia, as the activists paint it) in the cross-hairs. This was and remains part of the broader affirmation phase. We all have to approve and to love, not just tolerate.

Now we arrive at the mopping-up operations. Resistors must be chased from the public square. Those who do not affirm “the other” are the enemy. This now includes those who seek to stand up for the rights of those experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction and who desire professional help. In some cases, members of this cohort of undetermined size want to diminish same-sex attraction, others to reverse it.  Still others just wish to make sense of it. Some even want to learn how to be chaste, once considered by many to be a virtue.

And so we arrive at the issue of so-called “gay conversion therapy”.

No Changing Sexual Attraction

In this context, the Sydney Morning Herald, now firmly part of the PGGW (progressive, green, globalist, woke) Channel Nine-ABC industrial complex, has sensed the whiff of an opportunity to again hoist the NSW Premier on a Catholic petard. The issue of church versus state has entered the NSW state election campaign, focusing attention on the Perrottet government and so-called gay conversion therapy. This amounts to a follow-up blow after the recent Four Corners hit job on Pared schools.

Australian states and territories, including Victoria, Queensland and the ACT, have moved to ban practices aimed at changing or suppressing the sexuality or gender identity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, asexual or gender and sexually diverse (LGBTQ) people. Legislation is also under preparation in Western Australia. However, the practice remains legal in NSW.

It is surprising that the Herald is “surprised”. After all, it has been leading the charge in politicising so-called conversion therapy. And it has worked in record time. The NSW Premier has caved, very quickly even for him, as he has on just about every cultural issue with which he has been confronted. His retreat was, sigh, entirely predictable.

Should Perrottet have surrendered on this issue? Is conversion therapy “atrocious”? Is it even conversion therapy?

“Counselling” is a more accurate and less loaded term than “therapy”. Banning it would be “a totalitarian act”, as the Queensland medico and bete noir of the rainbow coalition, David van Gend, has called what the Herald champions and the NSW Opposition proposes. He has told the story well, over and over.  Initially in response to the inevitable leader of the pack, Daniel Andrews. The compelling case van Gend has made is that this is an innocent and, in many cases, worthwhile practice. Very rarely is it “harmful”. As David says, ban therapy and you ban liberty.

There is something sick in the body politic when rigidly ideological politicians strive to prevent individuals from seeking their own well-being. This is a plea to keep political agendas out of the path of such individuals, to not ban their liberty by banning safe, effective, professional therapy all for the sake of enforcing this intolerant gay orthodoxy.

It seems that it is now intolerable for anyone to be homosexual (or even think they might be) and to not want to be — to want to bat for the other side, as we used to say. What about their rights? I am not seeing why those seeking help for a problem they identify in themself should be either branded “atrocious” or made illegal.

Van Gend talks about the ignorance and contempt for suffering displayed by those who seek to ban conversion therapy. What the rainbow activist position on this issue amounts to is either (a) an assertion that unwanted same-sex attraction does not exist, or (b) that it is utterly unimportant.  Either conclusion is quite damning for its position. In reality, unwanted same-sex attraction is an inconvenient truth always to be denied. Look, over there, at those homophobic religious bigots!

This is cruelty dressed up as a concern for the rights of homosexuals to be protected from what is seen by rainbow activists as oppression by the heterosexual state. Drawing on multiple peer-reviewed studies, van Gend calls the outcomes of counselling “overwhelmingly beneficial”, not ineffective and not harmful. Contrary to the conclusions of the anecdotal, statistically invalid, rent-a-victim approach of the inevitable and much-quoted La Trobe University hit job, the go-to text for activists.

Freedom vs Compulsion

Resources for the same-sex attracted are available internationally, and I assume that any forthcoming NSW legislation would make the provision of such resources illegal in the state.  The Catholic one is called Courage, which isn’t even about “conversion”, as the summary makes clear:

A Roman Catholic ministry that helps same-sex attracted men and women live chaste, holy and fulfilled lives, in accordance with the official teaching of the Catholic Church. They do not focus on recovering one’s heterosexual potential, but rather on learning to overcome the temptation to sin by giving over one’s life to Jesus Christ and by building healthy fellowship with others who share in similar struggles (emphasis added).  

Here is a question:  In the end, just who is converting whom here?  Who is doing the grooming?  The heterosexuals or the homosexuals?

On the one hand, we have a non-stop barrage of force-fed rainbow culture insinuating every sphere of life across the public square. We have all the funding grants, the community programs (like drag queens in libraries), the inculturation in schools and universities, the attempts by education departments to dress up grooming as “consent education”, the legislative strategies, the endless nudging by the legacy media and the rest.

No wonder there has been a substantial increase in people identifying as homosexual. (Just as there has been with people suddenly identifying in big numbers as Aboriginal). It is trendy and rewarding. One in six Gen Z Americans are homosexual, according to the Washington Post, part of the gay cheer squad. In the old days, it was thought to be about two per cent.

If the LGBT push has been part-recruitment drive, it has been extremely successful. Society has been groomed. The aforementioned La Trobe University has been at the forefront of the battle, a non-stop advocate for the march of gaydom that drove the notorious Safe Schools program, a front for the grooming of young people for the actively homosexual life.

On the other hand, we have religious and non-religious people who experience unwelcome and distressing same-sex attraction — and, as adolescents, many of us have been there — seeking help to overcome what they themselves see as an affliction. No victim status or sympathy for the gay refuseniks. We will make their suffering compulsory!

Irony

By the way, the targeting of Dominic Perrottet over the issue of conversion therapy and implied homophobia is a bit ironic, really.

The Perrottet Government is the gayest government since, well, Bob Carr’s. Think Gareth Ward — currently fighting sex abuse charges, alas — and the mercifully retired Don Harwin. Think Gladys rocking the Mardi Gras in her rainbow Liberals T-shirt. Think the Rainbow Coalitionists, aka the brokeback Nats. Most of all, think Sydney WorldPride month (or year, or decade, or whatever it is).  Here is the NSW Minister for the Arts and Tourism, one Ben Franklin:

“The NSW Liberal and Nationals Government is a proud delivery partner of Sydney WorldPride and we welcome everyone to the Pride Villages to take the rainbow-coloured party to the streets for WorldPride,” Mr Franklin said.

“Pride Villages will create a vibrant festival atmosphere, giving an expected 78,000 visitors to Sydney free and open spaces to gather, celebrate and enjoy the festival.

“Sydney WorldPride 2023 will showcase NSW to the world and we’re anticipating more than 500,000 people will attend this global event which will inject $112 million into the NSW economy.

“Sydney will be buzzing with excitement and activity which will turbocharge our 24-hour economy, create jobs and support local businesses across our State.” 

Buzzing with excitement at the rainbow invasion! Even the Roads Minister is excited:

“Incredible pictures of 50,000 people marching across our iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge will be beamed across the world on 5 March, thanks to extensive planning…

That would be the same bridge that now has an Aboriginal flag and no New South Wales ensign atop it.  Perhaps by March 5, there will be a rainbow flag aloft. And here is the Sydney WorldPride website:

The NSW Government is proud to support Sydney WorldPride in 2023.

The NSW public service strives to be a reflection of the community it serves. We actively promote employee networks and campaigns that encourage understanding of inclusion and diversity, and are committed to creating an inclusive and supportive workplace for all.

Across the sector, we lead or participate in a wide range of LGBTQIA+ initiatives, including the Diversity Inclusion Network, and Diversity and Inclusion Council, established by the Department of Premier and Cabinet and NSW Treasury; the Transgender, Gender Diverse and Intersex Working Group established by NSW Police; and membership of the national, not-for-profit Pride in Diversity employer support program.

There you go! A homophobic government if ever there was one.

Team Rainbow has little need for dishonest, sneering leftist media editorials to champion their progress.  They have already captured the commanding heights of the debate. They have won. Meantime, the rights of the unwilling same-sex attracted even to pray with a sympathetic pastor are shredded. This is the age in which we live. Gay nirvana. And no sexual liberation for those would actually like to be “converted” the other way.

We have been groomed, and conned. Scammed. Colonised by rainbow grifters. It seems clear who is winning the conversion wars. And no one in New South Wales minded to resist the rainbow tsunami can look to this conservative Catholic Premier for assistance, or so it seems.

All of which raises a broader question: what is the point of even being in politics if you believe in things but simply set them aside as if they do not matter? Paraphrasing St Thomas More’s words to Richard Rich (as attributed to him by Robert Bolt in A Man For All Seasons), one might inquire of Premier Perrottet, “Dominic, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for New South Wales!”

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By Paul Collits
Originally published at Quadrant Online. Photo by Anete Lusina.