News & Comment
Absurd and dangerous
Think you’re safe in St Kilda? Think again.
The Victorian LGBT community has no excuses for ignoring the threat of the Exclusive Brethren.
Immediately after the March Tasmanian State Election was marred by a flood of LGBT-hate pamphlets and ads authorized by members of the Exclusive Brethren, I warned Victorians that the same thing will happen in their November State Election.
The possibility of the new Upper House electoral system returning Green MPs for the first time, made an EB intervention inevitable.
Now the Melbourne Age and the ABC have raised the alarm as well.
The Age reports on a meeting between Breth reps and National Party leader, Peter Ryan, during which “gay rights” were discussed, while the ABC notes that Liberal leader in the State Upper House, Philip Davis, has also met the Breth.
Ryan has since denied taking EB funds. That might be good news for people concerned about electoral funding disclosure, but it’s cold comfort for LGBT people.
As academics and investigative journalists have shown, links between the Brethren and right wing elements of mainstream conservative parties go far beyond cheque books.
Evidence from the Tasmanian election strongly suggests that these right wingers are using the Brethren to trumpet the hatefulness they are restrained from declaring openly.
As much as the Brethren are using political parties for their own theocratic ends, the Brethren are being used by these parties for the most tawdry of electoral purposes.
Finally, there are reports from New Zealand that the Breth are behind a campaign to “out” Prime Minister, Helen Clark’s husband, Peter Davis.
If Clark has correctly accused the Breth of hiring private detectives to trail her husband, what more evidence do you need about the Brethren’s political and ethical standards?
As well as warning Victorians of what awaits them, I provided a rough guide to meeting the Breth challenge.
I’d be the first to acknowledge that Victorians might want to do things differently. Jeff Kennett, Bruce Ruxton and the Herald Sun aside, Victorian politics is generally more genteel than its Tasmanian counterpart.
But what makes my blood boil is the indifference I see to the gathering storm.
Frequently I hear excuses like “the Brethren are just a fringe group nobody pays attention to”, “ordinary people shy away from that kind of overt religious prejudice”, “the Vic Libs would never associate with sects”, “the Brethren ads are aimed at the Greens and we’re not partisan”, or the stupidest of all “it can’t happen here”.
My response:
The Breth don’t show themselves. They parade as individual citizens concerned about “families”, usually in those small communities where LGBT people are most vulnerable (they’re also very good at flat-out, who-us?-style denials).
Perhaps religious hate is a turn-off for most people, but the EB brand is designed to incite that minority of people already disposed to discriminate or bash. Moreover, the Breth carefully focus on those issues - “gay marriage” or transgender and intersex human rights – where the level of community ignorance, confusion and the potential for anxiety is greatest.
Moderate state conservatives may have no time for “sects”, but as the Tasmanian election showed, Breth interventions in state elections are co-ordinated from the national level. No matter how open-minded moderate Liberal leaders like Will Hodgman or Ted Baillieu might be, they’re frozen out of all Breth-related decision-making.
In Australia most Breth ads are aimed at the Greens, but this is only because Australian Labor is currently so weak on social reform. British and NZ Labour, US Democrats and Canadian Liberals have all been attacked by the Brethren. The one constant within all these attacks is that they are about LGBT human rights. In this light, the Brethren’s ads and pamphlets are not anti-Green interventions that just happen to be aimed at LGBT people. They are anti-LGBT interventions that just happen to be aimed at the Greens.
Finally, is Victoria so different to the US, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the other Australian states, that it is somehow immune to gay-hate? Sure Family First and One Nation have never drawn hordes of voters in Victoria, but they've drawn even less in Tasmania and this didn't stop the Breth having a major impact in the island state. Perhaps the Breth won’t reach Brunswick or Chapel Sts. But that still leaves hundreds of thousands of suburban, regional and rural households whose letterboxes will be sullied by EB prejudice. Then there’s the huge newspaper ads the Breth will inevitably run.....scrub what I said about Brunswick and Chapel Sts; inner-city Hobart, Auckland, Vancouver and Tampa were all, in their turn, hit hard. It’s absurd to think inner-Melbourne will be spared.
Absurd, and downright dangerous.
There comes a point where indifference to threat is as dangerous as the threat itself, and the victim, therefore, as guilty as the perpetrator.
The Victorian LGBT community is rapidly approaching that point.
Let history record that the Victorians have been warned.
May it not record that lives were diminished and destroyed because they failed to heed these warnings.
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Comments
Has anyone asked Peter Ryan how he justifies spending his time in meetings with people who don't vote?
Sure, anyone can seek a meeting with their elected representatives, but ultimately, the point of the meeting will be to influence policy in exchange for votes.
With no votes on the table, what was the objective of the meeting, from Ryan's side, at least? What did he think he was going to get out of it?
Of course, we know how he thought he might benefit, but that benefit would appear to be a circumvention of the Victorian Electoral Act's provisions on electoral advertising / funding.
And why isn't the Labor Party acting against this? Because they want some of the back-door advertising dollars too? Because they're happy to turn a blind eye when someone tries to stick it to the Greens (and the queer communities are just collateral damage)?
