1980. Scaremongering over sex education in Victoria’s schools
The current moral panic surrounding Australia’s ‘Safe Schools’ programme is the latest iteration of a ‘gay agenda’ conspiracy theory that goes back a long way.
In 1980, for example, the government of the Australian state of Victoria decided to include homosexuality as part of the new Health and Human Relationships (H&HR) schools curriculum. This had followed the establishment of an advisory committee to consider Victoria’s response to the 1977 Final Report of the Commonwealth Government’s Royal Commission on Human Relationships.
Unsurprisingly, the move was opposed by Right-wing groups like Fred Nile’s Festival of Light, Citizens Against Social Evil and the Concerned Parents Association. Their arguments were based around the usual fallacies – the homosexual ‘recruitment’ conspiracy and the conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia.
For example, the Concerned Parents Association had made much of the fact that Delys Sargent, a member of the governmental advisory committee, had attended the Fifth National Homosexual Conference and spoken on ‘the rationale and tactics for educating about homosexuality in schools’. And one CPA member – Paul McLeod – had told a meeting that ‘teachers were introducing ideas on homosexuality, incest, bestiality and pedophilia’.
Sadly, it appears that the scare-mongering had some effect on the Victorian government. They had previously declared that they would not single out H&HR from other ‘potentially controversial areas of the schools curriculum.’ But, in December 1980, they announced that parents would be required to ‘sign-in’ their children to any part of the H&HR curriculum that was determined to be controversial by a parent-dominated H&HR oversight committee in each school.
The move was opposed by the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association. It also failed to placate the Concerned Parents Association who claimed in 1981 that “pushers” of sex education were using ‘brain-washing techniques’ to impose ‘un-Australian’ and ‘anti-Christian’ doctrines on children.
Attacks like this were often effective in the 1980s. Not even universities were above the fray. Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum launched a campaign against the women’s studies program and women’s center at Long Beach State University in California in 1982. They claimed the program and center were “pro-lesbian.” They managed to force the closing of the women’s center and the firing of the center’s director and two faculty members. Thirteen faculty members and the ACLU filed suit and eventually won but of course it had a chilling effect on academic freedom.
Wow. Did they seriously think a WOMEN’S STUDIES program could be expected to be anti-lesbian?
The lavender menace was her stock in trade response to just about any assertion of autonomous female personhood…the irrepressibly repressive Ms Schlafly was also responsible for getting her Reagan Administration buddies to slash funding to battered wives’ shelters for being ‘anti-family/ pro-lesbian’.
It reminds me of reading a submission to a Government consultation about sensitivity training for police officers which was opposed on the grounds that it is “too inclusive of homosexual relationships”. Um, missing the point?
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