“If two consenting adults want to live together in close union and can find a consenting minister of religion to bless their union, who are we to object? The same applies to polygamy, polyandry, incest, or any other kind of union between consenting adults.”¹
– Sean Gabb at TakiMag, 17 February 2013.

As this year’s Sydney ‘Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras’ hit the streets last weekend, it was covered by most if not all major media outlets in anything but positive and celebratory light. Like the ‘Borg,’ resistance is futile, public and private opinion must be assimilated into the politically correct status quo, and ‘tolerance’ means never opposing but always accepting even propositions that counter millennia of human experience and intuition. In this environment, expression of any thought acceptable to the zeitgeist requires conformism of the most committed sort to the liberal status quo.

There is a risk therefore that impressionable members of the public may fall victim to the propagandising and political agenda that accompanies this yearly event, which has now oddly even been described as a feature on Australia’s cultural landscape. For this reason, it should not be forgotten that the left leaning parties in both the State and Federal Parliaments, as well as significant sectors within the nominally ‘conservative’ Coalition, have never lost sight of their major goal: the liberalisation of family policy by enshrining the concept of ‘gay marriage’ in law, followed closely by the introduction of other traditional aspects of traditional family life, such as the rearing of children, into ‘gay unions’. Calls for homosexual civil unions or full marriage as well as surrogacy and adoption are incessant on both a state and federal level, and in many states these have been accommodated to varying degrees by governments of either of the two major parties.

Events such as the Mardi Gras are at the core of the campaign to normalise so-called ‘alternative sexual lifestyles’. However, contrary to popular rhetoric, they cannot be said to serve or promote the equal rights of homosexuals any longer. This should be obvious when one considers that it is essentially impossible even to disagree with the pro-homosexual opinions or campaigns without suffering some form of social ostracision. No, when it comes to discourse in the public square, any individual who displays even the slightest reservation to either ‘alternative lifestyles’ or objects to their total equivocation with normative social and family values will undoubtedly suffer the ire of the progressive and politically correct pop-cultural leviathan. The Mardi Gras today can therefore only be seen as a form of ideological triumphalism by the sex-fetishist front of the cultural-Marxist camp of what use to be called the ‘Culture Wars’.

But what many fail to realise is that the liberalisation sexual norms which the Mardi Gras promotes is not static, and where the demands of agitating busybodies are met, others will surely follow. Given the comfort and ease with which homosexualism now finds itself across the cultural landscape, it can be confidently said that this sexual taboo has effectively been broken (and many times over). Now that the fight seems to be focusing on ‘gay marriage’ on the federal arena, next we will expect the adoption of children – this is not hyperbole, it is a logical inference drawn from observing history.

Let us not forget however that there have been tragic consequences and serious risks remain in the ‘progressive’ reform of reproductive ‘rights’, coupled with an unquestioning embrace of liberalising any and all sexual norms. An example which is still fresh in our memory illustrates how this blind mindset has lead to the horrendous violation of the very real rights of one young child by a homosexual ‘couple’ from Australia and New Zealand. Without wanting to go into the gruesome details, the two traveled to Russia and paid a woman who offered to be a surrogate to a child which would be adopted by them and brought to Australia. According to various reports, the child was pimped to paedophiles around the world by this ‘family’ for a number of years. The child was rescued by authorities when only six years of age, and is currently in state care in the United States. If this isn’t disturbing enough, consider the reaction by the media to this horror:

The two ‘fathers’ were first held up to be a model family environment for adopting a child by none other than the taxpayer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation.² When the ABC interviewed them in 2010, one of the paedophiles was asked whether the immigration authority’s delay in granting the child a visa to Australia was based on the suspicion that “something dodgy, something paedophlic going on.” One of the ‘fathers’ replied that “absolutely, I’m sure that was completely the concern.”³ Institutional ‘homophobia’ was considered the problem here, not the oddity of two men adopting a child from overseas. The interviewer, Ginger Gorman, had this to say in a report after the arrests of the two ‘fathers’ for crimes against the adopted child:

“I was putting together a series of interviews on gender. This particular interview was with a couple who were gay dads, and they had been on a long journey to have a child via surrogacy […] I felt no sense that anything was wrong. For all intents and purposes this appeared to be a loving family and a loving household. And I’ve gone over and over it in my brain and I just did not feel that anything was wrong […] I’m profoundly shocked and disgusted by what’s happened. Since then I am just revolted and I find myself quite despairing about the turn of events.”⁴

It is accepted that Gorman’s beliefs and intentions in 2010 were nothing but entirely sincere, but only a person divorced from common sense would feel “no sense that anything was wrong” in the radical proposition that a child can be born from one woman, in another country, and adopted to two men, and brought to the other side of the world, and that this is somehow morally equivalent to a traditional family structure, worthy of celebration and support by government and media alike.

Reporter Leigh Sales commenced that this is “a case that defies belief and goes against every principle of parenthood.”⁵ Wrong, Leigh. Us traditionalists have been warning society of these risks ever since ‘progressives’ have been championing the liberalisation of family policy and re-engineering the institution of marriage; this was indeed a predictable disaster and therefore absolutely ‘believable’. And if it’s “principles of parenthood” that the left is so concerned about, we suggest that they stop undermining them with radical policies such as surrogacy and ‘gay marriage’.

One expected reaction from the radical lobby would be to dismiss this as a remote and random example of a horrendous crime. Unfortunately, it is not remote or random at all. In 2009, a paedophile ring lead by a “gay rights campaigner” was apprehended by authorities in the United Kingdom.⁶ The MailOnline reports that a three month old baby was abused by an “executive adviser on child sex issues.” Another perpetrator was the head of “a publicly-funded support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people” who received £40,000 a year and “became the Executive’s most important and influential advisor on gay issues affecting children.” The report continues that the group “backed proposals to allow gay adoption.”⁷ Of course it did.

Again, is that a remote and isolated example? Again, no. Matt Barber, writing for the World New Daily Commentary, states that “[t]here is categorically a movement to normalize pedophilia” in the United States as well.⁸ He continues:

“I’ve witnessed it firsthand and, despite ‘progressive’ protestations to the contrary, the ‘pedophile rights’ movement is inexorably linked to the so-called ‘gay rights’ movement.
“Two years ago I – along with the venerable child advocate Dr. Judith Reisman – attended a Maryland conference hosted by the pedophile group B4U-ACT. Around 50 individuals were in attendance, including a number of admitted pedophiles (or ‘minor-attracted persons,’ [MAPs] as they euphemistically prefer).
“Also present were a few self-described ‘gay activists’ and several supportive mental-health professionals. World renowned ‘sexologist’ Dr. Fred Berlin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address, opening with: ‘I want to completely support the goal of B4U-ACT.’”⁹

Barber then lists some of the major points raised at this conference. The various notes he took include some of the following: “[p]edophiles are ‘unfairly stigmatized and demonized’ by society” that “[a]n adult’s desire to have sex with children is ‘normative.’” and that “[t]hese things are not black and white; there are various shades of gray.”¹⁰ Moreover Barber also noted that:

“A consensus belief by both speakers and pedophiles in attendance was that, because it vilifies MAPs, pedophilia should be removed as a mental disorder from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, in the same manner homosexuality was removed in 1973.”¹¹

In his report, Barber referred to a short online piece at the American Spectator by Robert Stacy McCain.¹² In that brief article, McCain described the process where there has been an attempt to desensitise or remove the stigma over paedophilia in the US. There, he wrote:

“This is hardly the first or only such manifestation of what we might call the ‘jailbait rights’ movement. More than a decade ago, I reported that some academics were justifying sex with minors. One of those academics – Theo Sandfort, a former editor of the notorious Dutch pedophile journal Paidika, author of the 2001 book Childhood Sexuality and co-editor of the 1990 book Male Intergenerational Intimacy – is now on the faculty of Columbia University.”¹³

The ‘slippery slope’ argument has often been raised by traditionalists and conservatives against both the cultural normalisation and legal recognition of ‘gay marriage’. The argument suggests that where one concession is made to principle (here being the principled definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and the acknowledgment that normative sexual relations is binary, i.e. between the male and female sex) then all other restrictions become merely arbitrary, and thus open to further and incessant ‘reform’. The ‘reform’ is eventually the total repudiation of the traditional paradigm over time, and the arbitrariness of any compromised opposition is a weakness which the ‘reformers’ never fail to exploit when pushing for further ‘reform’. Witness the November 2011 article by Peter Tatchell in the Huffington Post which questioned Professor John Ashton’s proposals to reduce the age of consent in the UK to 15. Some of the salient aspects of Tatchell’s articles included the following observations:

“Professor Ashton suggested that the age of consent could be reduced to 15. However, he never explained why 15 and not another age […] Half of all UK teenagers have their first sexual experience by the age of 14 […] We need this debate because the current age of consent of 16 ignores reality and potentially penalises young couples involved in victimless behaviour […] the average age of puberty and sexual arousal has fallen dramatically to around ten to 11 […] Given that the average age of first sexual experience is 14, then an age of consent of 14 might be more realistic and reasonable than 16. If sex at 14 is consensual, and no one is hurt or complains, is criminalisation in the public interest? Is it in the 14-year-old’s interest?”¹⁴

A writer publishing under the pseudonym of ‘Basil Conrad’ at Tweed Renegades finds the slippery slope argument unconvincing because it doesn’t address homosexuality per se. Perhaps this is an objection to the arbitrariness of a compromised position by mainstream conservatives to progressive reforms. However, in January of 2013 he noted a report in the UK Guardian by Jon Henley, which discussed a 1976 submission by the National Council for Civil Liberties to the Parliamentary Criminal Law Revision Committee in which it was stated that “childhood sexual experience, willingly engaged in with an adult […] resulted in no identifiable damage.”¹⁵ Conrad states that:

“society is clearly trending further and further away from traditional sexual morality, and I have no doubt that subversive forces are consciously moving it in this direction. Articles of this kind serve as a test balloon to gauge the public’s willingness to accept the next level of perversion, as well as a catalyst for debate. The more an issue such as this is debated, the more it is brought out into the open and legitimised. On the other hand, not responding to these outrages gives the subversives the last word.”¹⁶

The NCCL submission was broadly couched in the terminology of civil liberties and ‘gay’ rights. This is just another example how an unsavoury agenda can be promoted under the cloak of a more innocuous push for legal reform. The NCCL has again recently again been in the news, this time as former Labour Cabinet Minister, Patricia Hewitt, was forced to apologise for her associations with a paedophile network affiliated with the NCCL in the 1970s. The UK Daily Mail opens with the following:

“Explosive documents in Patricia Hewitt’s name arguing for the age of sexual consent to be lowered and that incest should be legalised have forced the former Labour minister into a humbling apology.
“The former Health Secretary finally said sorry after more official paperwork laid bare the disturbing links between National Council for Civil Liberties and the vile paedophile group that campaigned to allow sex with children.
“Miss Hewitt finally apologised when doubt was cast on her claims she had never ‘condoned’ child abusers from the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).
The Labour minister was the sole name on an NCCL press release issued in March 1976 which says ‘NCCL proposes that the age of consent should be lowered to 14 with special provisions for situations where the partners are close in age’.
“The press release came out as NCCL issued a report on sexual law reforms, The Sun said.
“In further remarks, Miss Hewitt added: ‘The report argues that the crime of incest should be abolished. In our view, no benefit accrues to anyone by making incest a crime when committed between mutually consenting persons over the age of consent.’”¹⁷

The Daily Mail then provides images of relevant documents proving how naïve some of these ‘civil rights’ campaigners were in allowing themselves to be used by criminal elements.

Let us be perfectly clear: we are not suggesting that homosexuality equals or leads to paedophilia or that homosexuals are paedophiles. We are however arguing that any departure from a traditional archetype will eventually lead to chaos and the kind of disorder we witness in the above reports; it is argued that any legal departure from normative sexual relations is extremely risky and may lead to unspeakable horrors in the future. Indeed, any person of goodwill who is concerned about the welfare of children, whatever that person’s sexual orientation, would naturally oppose any attempt to liberalise sexual norms, and would object to the concept of homosexual marriage as well as any other related propositions. Simon Berger, a clear thinking homosexual himself, asks in the February 2006 issue of the Conservative:

“Is there a cultural factor – that when an entire community is defined by sex, the preoccupation becomes self-perpetuating? […] the ‘conservative’ in me nonetheless believes that the family is too important an institution for governments to tinker with and too important a cultural foundation for government to undermine.”¹⁸

While arguing for the traditional paradigm of family policy, Senator Cory Bernardi extensively quotes Berger in his recent book The Conservative Revolution and concludes with the following:

“Simon Berger’s argument is rational, reasoned and lucid. In today’s sensationalist environment, where almost all opposition to ‘progressive’ policy is treated as some kind of personal affront, Berger’s level-headed reflections are rare. Men of reason should be thankful for his courage in ‘coming out’ as a policy analyst who is not swayed by his personal inclinations. He provides evidence that a conservative can oppose the radical policy initiatives that redefine ancient institutions without having to be motivated by malice or ‘hate’.”¹⁹

Bernardi has in the past been condemned for essentially repeating the claims of progressive icons such as Barack Obama and Peter Singer.²⁰ As a conservative politician, he is an obvious target for the left when it seeks to discredit those who are opposed to its programmes and initiatives. But those who ought to be condemned instead are the supposed intellectuals who reject what was once acknowledged as simple common sense. This short editorial opened with a quote from Sean Gabb, whose ideological reductionism has lead him to positions one struggles to believe could be held sincerely by any sane individual. Consider also this comment from Richard Dawkins in September of last year: “I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”²¹ The kind of activity that Dakins was referring to included one occasion where the school master “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”²²

How is it that allegedly intelligent individuals can come up with such disturbing nonsense? Because in the era where equality and egalitarianism is worshiped as an undisputed good, nobody wants to be accused of ‘discrimination,’ and thus popular opinion shifts towards the legitimisation of ideas that not long before would be universally considered subversive. Of course, having a subconscious bigotry of one’s own can help push one along the way too: for Gabb and Dawkins, a libertarian and atheist respectively, the moral aspects of social conservatism derived from Christian ethos might provide the inertia their bias demands.

Progressives and liberals of all stripes keep telling us that our fears of a slippery slope are unfounded, yet what do the words uttered by Gabb and Dawkins prove if not the power of desensitisation to traditional taboos? What does one make of the filth masquerading under the banner of ‘civil liberties’ and ‘civil rights’ as described by Matt Barber, Robert McCain and others above? This process ought to be stopped at its core, else society enter a truly disturbing epoch where the most vulnerable are exploited with the consent of the law and its enforcers.

Yet minors are regularly taken to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mari Gras. Recently, Bernard Gaynor noted that a high school principle encouraged his students’ involvement in last week’s parade as a form of advertising for the school.²³ Gaynor’s report identified that the school children were participating in an event with members of what is known as the ‘Leather Pride’ Association which promotes some of the most extreme sexual perversions including “pederasty”.²⁴ Not only do the authorities do nothing to prevent minors’ exposure to what transpires at these events, but they offer sponsorship for them.²⁵ Given the law’s strict requirements that films, music and even video games be labelled for inappropriate content, and in some cases restricted for purchase, this principled inconsistency only highlights the indeed perverse irony which characterises modern liberal society and its politically correct sensibilities.

And they have the gall to call us “extremists” for opposing them.

– SydneyTrads Editors

End notes

1. Sean Gabb, ‘Let us have gay marriage, but not yet’ TakiMag (17 February 2013) <www.takimag.com> (accessed 19 February 2013).
2. Ginger Gorman, ‘Two Dads Are Better Than One’ Australian Broadcasting Corporation – Far North Queensland via Google Cache (23 June 2013 at 11:34:45) <webcache.googleusercontent.com> (accessed 9 July 2013). This piece has been pulled from the ABC’s website, perhaps due to the news corporation’s embarrassment at promoting these two vile criminals as a model ‘family’. Nevertheless, conservative activists online have captured and saved the content as well as related media for the public’s benefit. See for example: Anonymous, ‘“Two Dads Are Better Than One”: Pro-Gay Adoption ABC Profile of Convicted Pedophile’ Wintery Knight (blog) (1 July 2013 at 6:00pm) <winteryknight.wordpress.com> (accessed 9 July 2013).
3. Nick Ralston, ‘Named: The Australian Paedophile Jailed for 40 Years’ Sydney Morning Herald (online) (30 June 2013) <www.smh.com.au> (accessed 9 July 2013).
4. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Disturbing Child Abuse Case Links Australians to Paedophile Ring’ The 7:30 Report (online transcript) (2 July 2013 at 8:13pm, as updated) <www.abc.net.au> (accessed 9 July 2013).
5. Ibid.
6. Anonymous, ‘Gay rights campaigner lead a double life as leader of paedophile ring that carried out a catalogue of child abuse’ Daily Mail (online) (8 May 2009 at 10:57am, as updated) <www.dailymail.co.uk> (accessed 9 July 2013).
7. Ibid.
8. Matt Barber, ‘Left’s New Crusade: Adult-Kid Sex’ World Net Daily – Commentary (blog) (10 November 2013 at 6:14PM) <www.wnd.com> (accessed 1 March 2014).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Robert Stacy McCain, ‘Kaitlyn Hunt is guilty and, yes, there is a movement to “normalise paedophilia”’ American Spectator – The Spectacle (blog) (10 April 2013 at 10:01AM) <spectator.org/blog> (accessed 1 March 2014).
13. Ibid.
14. Peter Tatchell, ‘The Current Age of Consent of 16 Doesn’t Protect Young People, It Criminalises Them’ Huffington Post (21 November 2013 @ 9:08) <www.huffingtonpost.co.uk> (accessed 9 March 2014).
15. Basil Conrad, ‘Got your slippery slope right here: The Guardian urges objectivity on paedophilia’ TweedRenegades (9 January 2013 @ 7:58AM) <www.tweedrenegades.com> (accessed 19 February 2013).
16. Ibid.
17. Michael Seamark, Mark Duell and Martin Robinson, ‘Explosive new evidence links Patricia Hewitt to paedophile group’s calls for age of consent to be lowered to just 10 and that incest should not be a crime’ Daily Mail (online) (27 February 2014 @ 19:16; updated 28 February 2014 @ 13:09) <www.dailymail.co.uk> (accessed 9 March 2014).
18. Simon Berger, ‘Coming Out as a Conservative Liberal’ Conservative No. 2 (February 2006) pp 22-23.
19. Cory Bernardi, The Conservative Revolution (ConnorCourt, 2013) p 77.
20. See for example: Editorial, ‘Bernardi Takes Knife for Excessive Honesty’ SydneyTrads (22 September 2012) <www.sydneytrads.com> (accessed 1 March 2014).
21. Katei McDonough, ‘Richard Dawkins defends ‘mild paedophilia,’ says it does not cause, “lasting harm”’ Salon (11 September 2013 at 5:47AM) <www.salon.com> (accessed 1 March 2014).
22. Ibid.
23. Bernard Gaynor, ‘Milestones & Macquarie Grammar School’ Bernard Gaynor (blog) (6 March 2014) <www.bernardgaynor.com> (accessed 9 March 2014).
24. Ibid.
25. Tony Crandell, ‘NSW Police at Mardi Gras’ GNNSX (18 February 2014) <gaynewsnetwork.com.au> (accessed 1 March 2014).

SydneyTrads is the internet portal and communication page of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum: an association of young professionals who form part of the Australian paleoconservative, traditionalist conservative, and independent right.