Category: Jeff Kennett
Gay voices: Jason Ball
The AFL has been tentative about moves to help eradicate homophobic attitudes at all levels of the game, but they’ve made big strides in the last year. Yarra Valley footballer Jason Ball was behind the successful push to show anti-homophobia ads at AFL matches, and the long talked about AFL pride round, similar to the AFL’s indigenous round, is looking like it could become a reality in the 2013 season. Jason reflects on his coming out and the reaction from his fellow teammates.
My teammates didn’t understand that the language they used had an effect on me. It chips away at your self-esteem and your confidence and your ability to be yourself. It was that constant reminding that in their minds being gay is being weak or being lesser. As soon as they knew I was gay they actually wanted to make a change in their behaviour because I was one of their teammates, one of their friends. I would hope that sharing that story would have a similar effect on new AFL players.
That Age story reports that beyondblue chairman and former Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett, who copped a lot of criticism for an article appearing to attack gay parents last year, has been personally making representations to AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou to designate a pride game. I was sceptical when Jeff Kennett did that interview with JOY, when he was allowed to dodge a lot of questions, but it’s been very impressive to see that the big turn-around was lasting and sincere.
When Jason Ball began his campaign for greater inclusion of gay players in football, unreconstructed arseclown Jason Akermanis attacked Ball’s decision to come out, passively aggressively Tweeting “who cares?” The peroxide Neanderthal Akermanis has form on this subject, having warned gay players not to come out in a Herald Sun editorial because the AFL isn’t ready for a gay player. That article has been blamed for stalling the AFL’s progress on combating anti-gay abuse in the league, it’s great to see the league itself proving him wrong.
RELATED: Jason Ball has a few strings to his bow: He’s also a spokesman for the Atheist Foundation and was behind the campaign to mark “no religion” on the Census last year. Here’s his speech at the global atheist convention in Melbourne this year, and my interview with him on JOY last year about the Census campaign.
The only family value you’ll ever need: Don’t be a jerk.
I won’t dwell on Jeff Kennett’s appalling attack on gay parents this week (sugar-coated with a load of bollocks about children “needing a mum and dad,” which is a) not actually supported by the facts and; b) see a).
Jeff wouldn’t have the cojones to say it outright, but the essential message he was putting across was that “single parents and gay people are incapable of properly raising children.” Which, fine, if he wants to believe that, then he’s an ignorant jerk and he’s an example for others for how not to conduct oneself. Except he’s not just an ignorant jerk, he’s an ignorant jerk who also happens to be the chairman of BeyondBlue, the national depression initiative, and he seems to get more media exposure than any washed-up premier in the country.
I was a pretty anxious and lonely teenager and never quite felt like I fit in, and homophobic bullying was always a part of that. Attitudes like Jeff’s are what made me disinclined to reach out for help. That, I think, will be the result for many young gay people in Victoria after this very public slagging of gay people.
But this kind of nastiness is not particularly new. We saw it with the Miranda Devine column making the stupid link between the London riots and Penny Wong’s baby news. Remember the Wendy Francis “gay marriage is child abuse!” Tweets?
It got plenty of coverage at the time, but for some reason people seem to forget about it.
Senate candidate for Family First Wendy Francis today stood by comments she made then deleted on social networking website Twitter, on which she compared legitimising gay marriage to “legalising child abuse”.
She went even further in an interview today, comparing children from same-sex families with the stolen generations.
Ms Francis, Family First’s lead Senate candidate in Queensland, said in a Twitter message yesterday: “Children in homosexual relationships are subject to emotional abuse. Legitimising gay marriage is like legalising child abuse.”
Wendy Francis is now the head of the Queensland brand of the Australian Christian Lobby, after failing to win the Senate seat, where she would no doubt carry on the embarrassing legacy of Steve Fielding. I remember she first achieved a kind of notoriety with an appearance on Sunrise with Australian Sex Party president Fiona Patten in which she was so thoroughly rebuked that towards the end she was reduced to giving a meek “well, everyone is entitled to their opinions.” (Why do people feel the need to state something so obvious in a debate? Do they seriously think that having their opinion proved wrong is the same as being told they aren’t entitled to hold it?)
Among Wendy’s greatest achievements since then has been orchestrating a campaign to bring down the Rip’N'Roll safe sex ad. She made a lot of noise about the ad being about the “sexualisation of society” and not the fact the two men involved are gay, but the bigotry and homophobia that motivated the campaign was betrayed by the homophobic nature of the complaints, most making some reference to the unnaturalness and unhealthiness of two blokes going at it.
What I’ve often wondered when people criticise gay parents is whether they would ever think it was okay if their own parenting were put up for public debate. Imagine a gay activist pointing to the ACL and saying “gosh, their kids must be terribly embarrassed of who their parents are, going around telling off gay people. They probably don’t get to watch telly or do anything interesting, they’ll grow up socially retarded or something.”
Or, more pertinently, whether they would think it’s okay to criticise gay parents out in public, to their faces, where the victims of their very personal attacks aren’t just an amorphous group of people they’ll never have to talk to. I don’t think they would defend gay parents and their kids if they were being discriminated against, but I also don’t believe they would be the ones doing the discriminating. What Would You Do? did a really fantastic scenario about this that I seriously recommend to everyone.
But yeah. It frustrates me endlessly how people who aren’t exactly crazy in the traditional sense understand it wouldn’t be okay to tell off a gay parent to their face and before their children, but sit them at a computer, under studio lights or before a studio microphone, and they trip some wire in their head and think it’s okay to make unfair (and fundamentally untrue) criticisms of gay families.
Seriously dumb. And it needs to be challenged.
But oh! Wendy has “the right to stand firmly on principles.” Some principles you’ve got, lady.
