Former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, said that you can be conservative and still have a well thought out policy agenda. The Prince-Knighting Nincompoop who embarrassed the country for 726 days, abbott, only had one agenda, which was to destroy the legacy of the Labor Government and appease his rich benefactors. Paul Keating was right.

And you can be an intellectual conservative or a reactionary conservative. The man who defeated the Prince-Knighting Nincompoop, Malcolm Turnbull, supported action on climate change and Marriage Equality. An intellectual conservative would acknowledge the respect that the LGBTIQA Community has for the institution of marriage, while a reactionary conservative cannot.

Many years ago, I knew a man, who is now deceased, who was a racist. One night, he and my father were out driving, when they saw an Asian woman whose car had broken down. My father suggested that they stop and help her, yet the man drew back on his cigarette and made a racist remark and continued driving. Two men in a utility following them stopped to help. Had the woman been blonde with blue eyes and statuesque, he'd have pulled over in an instant. Six years later, a Vietnamese man who was a client of the company where his wife worked invited he and his wife to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. He went. He could not justifiably say that he was not a racist because he ate Chinese food (that wasn't the only time) and went to dinner with the Vietnamese man. Five years earlier, after his mother died, his sister, who was not a racist, told him that their great-grandfather was Chinese, and yet he became more racist and denied his Chinese heritage!

Your parents are being like former Australian tennis player, Margaret Court, who is now a right-wing Christian pastor, who claims that her church helps LGBTIQA people with food, but she won't fly QANTAS because it supported Marriage Equality.

I am trans, myself, but am a bit scared of coming out to my mother. I knew a gay man some years ago, whose partner's father, after his partner's mother died, came up to him after the funeral and told him that he was only pretending for his wife and didn't want to see his son again. My mother claimed that he was entitled to do that! My father is more accepting.