One of the most obvious excesses of liberalism is the explosion of all things LGBT.
One can hardly turn a corner these days without bumping into one sign or another of our gay mania. If future historians assign an emblem to our age, it will surely be the rainbow flag.
In Melbourne, clearly our new gay capital, the evidence is everywhere. Not only is there the Midsumma Pride March in St Kilda, there are Queer Pool Parties across the city and a series of gay photo events. Even the transport down south is LGBT.
It’s not only the infrastructure but the buildings themselves that are rainbow-themed. Staying in Victoria this is both an urban and rural concern. Not content with the colossal Pride Centre in St Kilda, the left-liberals who run the state have approved a Big Rainbow for the country town of Daylesford.
In NSW the same trend is at work. Indeed, it was only last week when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Premier Chris Minns helped open Qtopia – “the world’s largest museum dedicated entirely to the queer history and culture of the LGBTQIA+ community” – in Darlinghurst.
In 1978, dozens of LGBTQI people were arrested at Sydney’s first Mardi Gras.
Today we’re opening the QTopia Museum to honour their legacy.
It tells the stories of people who have dedicated their lives to the campaign for equality. pic.twitter.com/T0s4v1pZXs
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) February 23, 2024
All of this comes on top of the well-established sexual liberalism of the corporate world. Alongside the illogical they/them pronouns seen in every office, there are deeper forces at work. A key one is the homosexualisation of events that have hitherto been politically neutral: like a Pride game in the AFL or rainbow jerseys in the NRL. Even the tennis hasn’t escaped unscathed, with the Australian Open now home to gender-neutral toilets, a Pride Day and a “Glam Slam”.
It doesn’t end there. We now have same-sex marriage, of course, legislated by our ostensibly conservative Coalition in 2017. There are gender-fluid birth certificates in a number of states. There are even Drag Queen performances for children, including ones given in parliament.
Yet the most frightening trend is the rise of transgenderism.
Almost unknown at the turn of the millennium, we are now witness to a panoply of trans-related events and issues.
And it’s not just affecting adults – The Royal Children’s Hospital in Victoria saw a 200 percent increase at its Gender Service in the decade to 2018, going from just three referrals from 2003 to 2007 to over 1,000 by 2018.
This is just the tip of the trans iceberg. As noted, there are now thousands seeking such services, including an array of adolescents. Among them are teenagers like Korra. A 16-year-old in 2018 who had already been on hormone therapy for a year and whose final destination was “probably sexual reassignment surgery”.
What Korra now faces is potentially catastrophic medical interventions with little knowledge of the wider effects. As American writer Wesley Wang remarked of our LGBT trends: what we are doing is persuading “unstable teenagers that their lives depend on access to chemical castration drugs for which no high quality evidence attesting to their safety or efficacy exists”.
It’s worse still. Scores of Australians now undergo “gender-affirming” surgeries at home or abroad. Among the procedures undertaken are “mastectomies, breast augmentation, facial feminisation and vocal chord surgery”.
Most pointedly, many seek what is known as “bottom surgery” – an expensive and invasive genital reconstruction that involves the cosmetic creation of a teleologically useless vagina or penis – a “vaginoplasty” or “phalloplasty” for the medically inclined.
Instead of eschewing these procedures as an affront to nature or a rejection of our national ethos, Australians have embraced these trends as well as many others. Our hospitals are “inundated with hundreds of requests”. An assortment of clinics now offer these services.
To take one example, Dr Kieran Hart at ACT Urology in Canberra said he had been “swamped with requests for vaginoplasty and orchiectomy (removal of testicles) procedures”. During his first year in 2018 he “performed three gender-affirming surgeries. [In 2022] he did 60”. He now has around 150 people booked for surgery and another 100 for consultations. Similar currents are seen nationwide.
This is all part of a global trend, of course.
There are Pride events all around the world. “Rainbow-washing” is a common term. Some 37 countries have now legalised gay marriage. The catalyst for this is our imperial hegemon, with the United States perhaps the most eager of all in its LGBT advocacy and in installing LGBT personnel. Gay rights are even part of America’s foreign policy.
Yet this is only one aspect of an LGBT eruption in America, especially among the young. According to one study, the number of US youngsters who identify as transgender has almost doubled in recent years. It’s further reported that anywhere from one in five to one in three young Americans are somewhere on the LGBT spectrum. We too are seeing the same trends, with “between a quarter and a third of Gen Z” Australians identifying as LGBT.
What is striking though is how incongruent this is with regards to the non-Western world and our own history. Adopting a nature over nurture hypothesis to homosexuality, we note that only around 3-4% of Australians have typically been classed as gay. Similar figures are seen elsewhere. The majority of humanity is not gay; and outside the West they’re certainly not LGBT.
The West’s LGBT mania, then, is unlike anything ever seen. Why?
The most plausible answer is the “social contagion” theory favoured by the likes of Jonathan Haidt, and the standard social pressure to conform. To invoke Orwell, “2 + 2 no longer equals 5” but to suggest that “he + he is not a fully-functioning family” is grounds for a chat with our new rainbow-haired Big Brother.
What is most politically salient, however, is that our liberal elites have done nothing to stop this trend. At every turn they’ve further enflamed an already flagrant homosexuality craze and done little to retard its progress. As noted, even the trains are now gay.
Why is this issue so important for our liberal elite? What explains their trans mania? One explanation is that it’s not the LGBT issue per se that is essential; it’s rather that LGBT rights are one part of a more crucial elite-led consensus concerning diversity and difference.
Gay rights are one plank in a broader left-liberal platform of racial, religious and cultural minorities that form a governing alliance for our new elite. Gay rights are a sole yet indispensable part of our reigning rainbow union; a key component of our “coalition of the ascendant“.
As from the liberal view, if the LGBT edifice falls, who knows what will follow? If Stonewall is shattered, what’s next? Perhaps the ostensible beneficence of mass immigration and multiculturalism will be called into question? This clearly cannot be allowed to stand.
Evidence of this cosmopolitan liberalism is everywhere. It’s in comments from the Mayor of London – “[Our] diversity is our greatest strength”. It’s in the American President. And it’s clearly in our own PM. It’s even seen in the response to events that inevitably upset that left-liberal apple cart.
The LGBT agenda is thus a political weapon. It’s one wielded by liberals against conservatism and conservatives.
In effect, gay rights are a rainbow cudgel the left uses to bash the right.
This is something they never tire of doing and that we see time and time again. Take the mere fact the ALP – not to mention the Greens or Teals – hold power in every state except one. Or take ex-Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and his annual trips to Midsumma; his raising of the “rainbow jack”; or in his constant refrain of Victoria being our “most progressive state”.
There’s a new flag flying outside the offices of the Victorian Government.
Because we’ll always respect you.
And we’ll always have your back. pic.twitter.com/Mw6hOuq10b
— Dan Andrews (@DanielAndrewsMP) March 21, 2023
This is an observation also made by American author Helen Andrews. In an excellent essay at the American Conservative, Andrews rightly notes that: “Gay rights have always been a useful mechanism for liberals to politically neutralise conservatives”.
More crucially, like the Civil Rights revolution did for race, the LGBT issue has become much more politically powerful as it has begun to be backed by the law.
As Andrews observes of the American context:
“When it becomes illegal to disfavour homosexuality in any way—which is what anti-discrimination protections do—it becomes difficult for any person or institution with traditional values to operate in the public square”
Hence the opprobrium and potential legal sanction that await right-leaning entities like religious groups, traditionalists or even humble cake makers. As Andrews notes of her homeland: “Catholic adoption agencies, Yeshiva University, and [a] poor funeral home director…were all told that their beliefs were incompatible with running a charity, a school, or a business”.
Conservatives, therefore, are essentially unwelcome in public. A stance we’ve seen with our own religious groups and in the appalling treatment meted out to the likes of Israel Folau.
The right has thus been rendered politically impotent. As Andrews notes:
“Traditionalists can believe what they want only on the condition that they remain politically and commercially inert”
This is why everything is now LGBT and why our cynical liberal elite promote it.
And like the many other victims of liberalism – such as the obese, the drug addled, or the murdered – those being sacrificed on the altar of LGBT-ism won’t be apologised for, and the harm can never be undone.
