Safe Schools advocates shriek ‘Homophobia!’ at the suggestion their crusade to introduce young minds to cross-dressing and the like is anything other the ‘anti-bullying campaign’ they claim it to be. Let us hope there are still some politicians prepared to wear such abuse as a badge of honour.
As expected, the so-called independent review of the Safe Schools Coalition program has proved to be a whitewash that opens the way for the compulsory application of the program in schools around Australia. The academic chosen to conduct the two-week review, University of Western Australia Emeritus Professor Bill Louden, has confirmed that only schools in moderate Melbourne suburbs were reviewed, leaving unexplored the mass of highly controversial material both contained in, and associated with, the program that drew widespread criticism in the first place. The only ray of hope, it seems, is that a remnant of the conservative and responsible wing of the Coalition will intervene at the last moment to defund the program before any further damage is done.
Meanwhile, it has been alleged in federal Parliament that Gary Dowsett, the deputy director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at LaTrobe University, where the Safe Schools program originated, advocated a favourable view of paedophilia in an article published in 1982, when Dowsett was a school teacher (“Irate MPs plan Safe Schools rumble”, The Australian, 17/3). The article, published in Gay Information, identified three principal political objectives for paedophiles: winning custody rights over children for gay men and lesbians; ensuring the legal “rights” of paedophiles and their young lovers; and establishing the sexual rights of children. It sought to draw a comparison between the “sexual responses” of parents for their children and “the love of a paedophile and his/her [young] lover”. The article declared that
the current paedophilia debate then is crucial to the political processes of the gay movement; paedophiles need our support, and we need to construct the child/adult sex issue on our terms.
It appears to be little doubt that the Safe Schools program has succeeded in doing just that, presenting a radical LGBTI propaganda campaign as an innocuous ‘anti-bullying’ initiative. In doing so, they have achieved an objective first articulated nearly 40 years ago.
In the mid-1970s, the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was established (provoking Anita Bryant’s 1977 ‘Save Our Children’ campaign). At its height it attracted many supporters in Australia, especially on the far-left. NAMBLA denounced “the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships” and its chief objective was to abolish age-of-consent laws that criminalized adult sexual involvement with minors. It sought to align itself with the gay and lesbian movement and waged a vigorous propaganda campaign to associate paedophilia with leftist notions of liberation.
NAMBLA’s co-founder was David Thorstad, a self-described bisexual pederast and atheist. An historian and far-left American political activist, Thorstad was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance. He played a major role in convincing the far-left that advocacy for homosexuality and paedophilia was a legitimate area of political activism. He was the author or translator of many works promoting gay rights and revolutionary politics. These include Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement; Gay Liberation and Socialism; Pederasty and Homosexuality; Homosexuality and the American Left; The Early Homosexual Rights Movement; and The Leninist Theory of Organization.
Thorstad saw himself as a member of an oppressed minority and compared his experience as a pederast in America to being “a Jew in Nazi Germany”. He also denounced “child-
