Christian conservatives have cornered the market on family values. That wonderful, unobjectionable word “family” conveniently covers the religious axe they grind against homosexuals and other gender minorities.
One scary site, Gender matters launched recently by a collective of Christian conservative groups, calls homosexuality a sickness, and complains that boys are not manly enough and should attend special re-masculinising camps.
They take a swing at modern heterosexual families too, blaming divorce rates on men being too girly, and by inference, women being too manly. Gender matters says children need a mum and a dad (sorry single parents) and they must be traditional parents, mothers being the “soft” parent who “gives kisses and support”, and fathers being firm disciplinarians.
I personally thought these opinions died out in the 1950s. On perusing some of the contributing group’s websites, I found the notions alive and well, with one group, NARTH, even offering psychological treatment for homosexuality.
I also found a phrase almost as popular as family: “Being salt.” It refers to a bible passage where Jesus calls a group of workmen “the salt of the earth”. While I thought that phrase meant being a down-to-earth person, many bible groups say that “being salt” is about cleansing the world, as salt was used in biblical times to disinfect and to stop meat from spoiling. That is, a Christian’s job is to make sure society doesn’t “spoil” by allowing homosexuals and other gender minorities to enjoy human rights. It might just be me, but when one group start talking about “cleansing” society of another group, I get nervous.
Gender matters claims to have the best interests of these “gender confused” people at heart. They quote high depression rates associated with young homosexuals and transgender identifiers as evidence that allowing people to identify with their sexuality or gender of choice is damaging for the individual and society. Did they ever stop to think that maybe these people are depressed because outspoken Christian conservative groups keep encouraging society to believe they are sick, immoral and unnatural?
The reality is that one in ten people are homosexual and there may well be a natural, genetic component that determines homosexuality. Genetics certainly show that there are more than two sexes. Intersexuals are children who are born with sexual organs that resemble both sexes, and genetics that make them neither male nor female. Gender matters refers to these people as a minority too small to be evidence of other sexes, but the Australian Human Rights Commission says that one in every 100 births has an intersex condition. Add homosexuals and intersex together, and these “family values” groups are discriminating against 11 percent of Australia’s children.
While “sexes” are biological definitions, “genders” refers to psychological definitions. The Australian Human Rights Commission recognises seven genders: female, male, intersexual, neuter (those who don’t identify with any gender) shifting androgenous (those who sometimes identify as female, sometimes as male) transgender (those who identify with a sex they weren’t born with) transsexual (those who undergo procedures to become another gender) and transsexual gay (those who undergo procedures to become another gender and then pursue homosexual lifestyles). This might seem like overkill to Gender matters, but even the Australian Bureau of Statistics is including an “Other” box beside “Male” and “Female” in the next Australian Census. And whether or not these gender distinctions seem important to Gender matters, they are very important to the people who identify with them, and are as much a human right as the right of a woman to wear trousers and be a company executive.
But Gender matters doesn’t appear to support this right for women either. They’re fine with women having jobs, they say, but when Australia’s very male-oriented education system was restructured in the 1970s to be fairer for girls, they got upset. Especially since before this change, boys generally performed better than girls academically, and now, girls are on average out-performing the boys. Apparently this is further proof of rampant feminists who ran about feminising society and raised girly boys who are today’s bad fathers. Gender matters blames the 1970s feminists for raising the “feminised men” who skip out on their fathering responsibilities and leave single mothers holding the bag. Does it really make sense that, if these men were brainwashed by militant feminists, that those feminists would have encouraged men to dump women with family burdens and run?
If you’re armed with a brain and some medical, psychological, or social studies, you know the claims made by Gender matters are not founded. A person’s human right to a gender identity that they are comfortable with, be that a girl who wants to join the military, a boy who wears eyeliner, or a boy who feels he should have been born a girl, is in no way damaging to society. It might be damaging however, to old-school Christian conservative beliefs.
So it would be nice if the Christian conservatives stopped pretending they are interested in promoting “family values”. Their values are not those of the mainstream family, they are the values of an archaic Christian conservative minority. Even worse, their values discriminate against families - families where roles are not traditional, families with homosexual members, or families with kids who don’t identify with the two largest genders. Not to mention that these Christian conservative websites only show images of white, Anglo-Saxon families. Groups like “Family First”, “Ausfamily”, and “Focus on the Family” would be more honest if they replaced the word “family” in their name with “prejudice”.
How do I know this?
Australian Human Rights Commission website, ‘Sex and gender identities at the bottom of the social pile’ www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/inquiry/submissions/ 017.doc , viewed Nov 17, 2008.
Australian Human Rights Commission website, ‘Second submission to the to the HREOC’ www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/inquiry/submissions
/017a.doc, viewed Nov 17, 2008.
United Nations Office of Human Rights website, gender issues scholarly articles, http://search.ohchr.org/search?q=gender
+transgender&btnG=Search&entqr=0&output=xml_no_dtd
&sort=date3AD3AL3Ad1&client=en_frontend&ud=1&oe=UTF
8&ie=UTF8&proxystylesheet=en_frontend&site=default
_collection , viewed Nov 17, 2008.
World Health Organisation website, ‘Genetic components of sex and gender’www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html, viewed Nov 14, 2008.
Journal of the American Academy of Paediatrics, ‘Intersex Issues: A Series of Continuing Conundrums’ http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/110/3/616, viewed Nov 14, 2008.
AIS support group Australia website, “Intersex conditions” http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aissg/Intersex%20General%20Brochure.pdftersex, viewed Nov 14, 2008.
Gender Matters website, http://gendermatters.org.au/Home.html , viewed Nov 17, 2008.
National Association of Research and Therapy for Homosexuality website, www.narth.com, viewed Nov 17, 2008.
The Australian Federation for the Family website, www.ausfamily.org, viewed Nov 17, 2008.
Focus on the Family Australia website, www.families.org.au/Default.aspx?cat=0, viewed Nov 17, 2008.
Important information for teens and adults website, www.educativ.info/teen/homo_sexual.html, viewed Nov 17, 2008.
Believers are salt and light website, www.bereanbiblechurch.org/transcripts/som/5_13-16.htm, viewed Nov 17, 2008.
