WHY IDAHOBIT DAY REMAINS NECESSARY.

Before my native Australia legislated to allow same-sex couples to marry, there was a postal survey where 62% of those who voted ticked Yes, and the No Campaign flooded television screens with misinformation. For example, there was an advertisement with three women where one stated that her son was told he could wear a dress to school. What she didn’t mention was that it was to raise money for girls in Africa to attend school.

Fast-forward six years, and Facebook trolls on a Labor politician’s Facebook page have taken to, in perhaps a benign form, saying that they didn’t like it shoved in their face and in a malignant form accusing trans and LGBTIQA Activists of being “groomers”. If people want a sense of what a groomer is, perhaps they need to think about this. Drag queens who read stories to kids but have no physical contact with the kids, in most parts of Australia require police clearance. They are entertainers! A groomer is typically somebody who makes a child feel special, then pounces upon them. For example, if we take someone in the clergy, they’ll say that a child has great potential and may approach the parents and ask if they can be an altar boy. The parents feel honoured, and agree. The clergyman then maybe says to the child, “Would you like to see this?” and the child feels happy and the parents think, “Oh, this is great.” Then, when they have the child where they are in a position of trust, they abuse them. Drag queens are NOT going out to schools and reading to kids and saying to parents, “Oh, so and so has the potential to do this,” building them up and abusing them. That is a paranoid delusion and distortion.

I remember, when I was 11, I was given some books by a family friend (their scapegoat son supposedly hated reading, and their golden son was too busy swimming and was supposedly brilliant) and one of them was Claire McKay’s “Mini-Bike Hero.” This was a story about 11-year-old Stephen (Steve) Macpherson, the middle son of John and Laura, who lives in a town in Saskatchewan. Steve develops a passion for mini-bikes, and his father is vehemently against it for the reason that his brother, Bill, when he was a teenager, got involved with a gang of guys who rode motorcycles and one night, he was speeding along on a motorbike, hit an abutment and was killed instantly and he never got over it.

Steve, nevertheless, without his parents’ knowledge, buys a mini-bike for just over $100 (this was in 1974) and he and the man he purchases it from, Peter (Pete) Sikorsky, develop a friendship. Pete Sikorsky was a former motorcycle racer who emigrated to Canada, and we learn that he has daughters, but had a son who died in an accident in Eastern Europe. It takes a fateful weekend, when Steve takes the mini-bike to the deserted fairground and is surrounded by a gang of bullies and evades the police, and Pete Sikorsky takes him on a ride and for a picnic and disaster strikes when John Macpherson sees that Steve is the antithesis of his younger brother and gets onboard with his interest. In Steve’s case, Pete was not a groomer, but was someone Steve could talk to about his interest. Parents who object to their kids being involved with LGBTIQA people and drag queens need to ask themselves a question. Why? Most likely, they are not approachable to their kids.

If they are frightened of their kids being LGBTIQA because their uncle or aunty is or was LGBTIQA and died by their own hand, what they need to do is think, if it was because the child’s grandparents were unaccepting, they should aim to be more understanding and accepting people than they were. Perhaps, in hindsight, their parents carry some guilt. The questions they should be asking are not, “Was Mum too overbearing?” or, “Did Dad not play enough sport?” but “Can we learn more to make ourselves more understanding of our kids to be more supportive?” The answer is, “Yes. There’s always room for improvement.”

Nobody is shoving it into your face. People can give you information, but they can’t make you absorb it. And with LGBTIQA rights under threat in a country that considers itself the beacon of freedom but is quickly becoming a Christo-Fascist State, we need IDAHOBIT Day more than ever!