A new tax-payer funded booklet, My Friend is Gay, is yet another attempt to confuse young people while promoting the homosexual agenda. The 42-page booklet is put out by the Pride and Diversity Project and the City of Monash Youth and Family Services. The purpose of the booklet, according to the authors, is to be a “peer group support service” especially for “young people”. Yet a more fundamental purpose seems to be to affirm the normality of homosexuality and ensure its acceptance in the general community.
Indeed, from the opening pages and throughout, this booklet is all about how homosexuality is just one of many sexual options, neither good nor bad, safe nor risky. Homosexuality, these young people are being told, is common, is normal, is acceptable, and something to be proud of. The booklet opines, “the world is diverse” and goes on to say that “sexuality is an aspect of a person’s identity – just like their taste in music, their favourite subjects and eye colour”.
This is quite a confusing and jumbled statement, given that many of the contributors to this booklet (as listed on the inside front cover) are academics, professionals and experts. The statement in fact mixes apples and oranges. One’s tastes and favourites are of course a matter of choice and preference. Eye colour is not. Such fuzzy thinking complicates matters later on when the authors try to assure us that homosexuality is innate, and not a matter of choice or preference.
The booklet makes much of “homophobia”, which according to the authors is simply any dislike, disapproval or rejection of homosexuality. Indeed, more confused thinking arises here: “Homophobia is similar to racism and sexism and any other form of prejudice.” Sorry, it is not. Racism and sexism are wrong because people are being discriminated against because of something they cannot help: their race or sex, both innate conditions present from birth.
Homosexuality is not in the same league. It is instead mainly a lifestyle, a chosen behaviour. That same-sex attraction may arise early in life neither means it is innate nor genetic. The more honest homosexuals have all attested to the fact that real choice is involved in homosexuality.
And the assumption that to be concerned about the high-risk lifestyle of homosexuality is to “spread hatred” is just foolish. Given that HIV/AIDS in Australia is overwhelmingly due to homosexual activity, the most loving thing a person can do for homosexuals is seek to help them to leave that lifestyle, or warn those who are considering it not to do so.
In another ingenious, if ludicrous, attempt to promote homosexuality, the booklet tells us to be wary of this horrible condition: heterosexism! Heterosexism, we are told, is “the assumption that heterosexuality is the only norm and that non-heterosexuality is ‘alternate’ and inferior”. There you have it: a new vice to eschew, heterosexism. But given that heterosexuality is the norm the world over, what is wrong with simply stating the truth of the matter?
One might as well warn of the sin of “airism”, the nasty assumption that breathing air is the norm for people, or “foodism,” the bigoted assumption that eating food is the norm.
This book is marred by what it does not say just as much as by what it does say. Nowhere in this booklet are we told about the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle. Nowhere are the health risks and other problems of the lifestyle mentioned. Given that this booklet is aimed at young people, such omissions are irresponsible and dangerous.
The truth is, government-funded information should be warning young people about the dangers of this lifestyle, just as it warns about the dangers of drink-driving or tobacco use. Tax-payer funded booklets should not be seeking to mislead young people into thinking that the homosexual lifestyle is just another lifestyle choice, and something that all young people should be free to explore and experiment with.
Indeed, this book positively encourages young people to seek out “organisations and places where they can safely meet other same-sex attracted young people”. At the end of the booklet it even offers a list of pro-homosexual books, films and organisations.
Is one book, film or organisation that warns about the dangers of homosexuality listed? Of course not. Is there even one mention of an organisation helping those who want to leave the homosexual lifestyle? Of course not. It does not even inform its young readers that such organisations exist.
Instead it tells us that it is a “myth” that people either turn to or away from homosexuality. Thus it basically implies that the thousands of people who have successfully left the homosexual lifestyle are liars. Or that the many heterosexuals who at a late age turned to homosexuality just do not exist.
People just “can not simply turn gay or straight” the booklet insists. Try telling that to the many thousands who have.
Another myth we are warned about is that same-sex-attracted people are mentally ill. It proves this point by stating that the American Psychiatric Association does not believe this. Of course it does not inform its readers that the APA always did believe homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder, until militant homosexual activists forced it to withdraw homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders in 1973.
It also warns of the myth that AIDS and homosexuality are in any way related: “AIDS is not a ‘gay disease’. Most of the people in the world who have AIDS are heterosexual.” This would be great advice if this booklet were intended for, say, African young people. But it is designed for Australian young people. With around 85 per cent of HIV/AIDS cases in Australia due to homosexual activity, this misleading information is not only irresponsible, it is negligent as well.
One wonders what it will take to get the truth published in these sorts of booklets. Perhaps a young person who contracts AIDS due to his same-sex experimentation, suing the government and authors of this book, because he was misinformed and mislead.
In sum, it seems this booklet is not designed to inform and educate, based on objective fact and the latest medical and scientific information. Instead, it is about advocacy and promoting the homosexual agenda. Homosexual activists are of course welcome to push their agenda all they want. But they should not count on funding by tax payers and responsible governments to do so.
