Talking Straightly

I’m coming out. I admit and declare that I am a heterosexual male. I love my wife and 3 kids, and my wife is female.

Looking back, perhaps we could have been better parents while our kids were growing up, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. We still haven’t stopped trying.

Probably Penny Wong will do much better. I think she probably has smarter genes than me to start with.

I’m glad I had the chance to give it a go in post-war Australia nevertheless. I never discriminated against anyone on the grounds of their sexuality. Or any other grounds for that matter. I didn’t even know we had a law against sodomy.

I think I’m prepared to cop the range of negatives often experienced by disenfranchised people – abuse, loss of opportunity, apathy, indifference, derision, whatever – which might arise from this coming-out.

We can all be grateful for the selfless contributions which have been made for the greater good by people who found themselves against prevailing social norms – think Ghandi, Epstein, Brown, Gershwin, Satchmo etc – a big list actually. Their achievements have been recognised, perhaps the more so if they are seen in hindsight as having prevailed against unfair discrimination along the way, because of how they were born, or what they believed in.

It is a pity to now see such achievements by great people with homosexual preferences being degraded by open displays of those types of human behavior that deviate from that which is understood to be orthodox or normal; being promulgated by electronic media in particular.

I have a passion for sustainability, including protection of the natural environment to which we contribute tangibly. Another test of a sustainable activity is that it does not degrade a community.

I can never bring myself to think of the Greens in the way that Senator Abetz purports to.

But I can’t vote Green without supporting gay marriage as a likely outcome.

There CAN be a future for a heterosexual community in Australia, fraught with traditional difficulties and pitfalls though it may be. I think that it is necessary for the proper synergies to develop between Mars and Venus.

If our kids want that, they will have to fight for it, and wind back the results of mass popularism and media frenzy which seems to be influencing unscrupulous politicians now. I feel that we are depriving them of a freedom in a way which those who fought in WW2 would never have condoned. Those people were prepared to die so that their kids could experience the great Australian life. And we have.

Somehow I neglected to mention in all of these matters that I am also Tasmanian. Born on a bank of the Huon River. It seems that the better head may have been excised immediately after birth but that’s not my fault, and nor do I blame the medical team of the day. We all do our best, and play the cards that are dealt to us.

I am also lucky to have a forum such as TT in which to express these views publicly. To place a marker in time that I or others might refer to later. I don’t seek to impose my selfish will on others and in fact I only know of a dozen people who agree with me. Thirteen votes won’t change election outcomes or stop the frenzy, will they?