IT is quite evident given the recent discourse around (Gannawara) council’s proposal to fly the Rainbow Flag that there is a dangerous amount of illogical and spuriously motivated positions being bandied around without challenge.
This is harmful not only to those in our community who are LGBTQ+ but, more broadly, to building a more inclusive society.
Firstly, council is a political organisation by its very nature. It wields an executive authority endowed to it in line with the broader political system, and therefore it cannot separate itself from the influence of state, national or international politics.
The flags it currently flies and the national holidays it observes are political acts by their very nature.
Any group seeking to raise awareness or make structural change must engage in politics because they are bound by (and often oppressed by) the political, economic and social forces that influence the world around us, and politics is the fulcrum on which all power rests.
LGBTQ+ people are not their sexuality or gender identity. They are human beings who desire inclusion and acceptance, just like the rest of us.
The organisations trying to push for the Rainbow Flag do indeed have an agenda, and that is to eliminate discrimination. That’s it. Any other notion that they have a grander plot in mind is preposterous.
LGBTQ+ people don’t get to choose their sexual orientation, nor do they get to choose how society defines the narrow socially constructed concepts of gender.
The “unjabbed” absolutely did have a choice, and while they get the choice not to get vaccinated, they don’t get the choice to enjoy the privileges that the rest of us have because of our choices.
Claiming that there have been landmark legal cases against human rights abuses for vaccines is disingenuous.
The rulings lay in the process of mandating, not in mandates themselves.
Yes, people have been injured from vaccines; they are medical procedures that carry some form of risk and people should be entitled to compensation.
But using the UN Human Rights Charter (which was created post – WWII in light of Nazi and Japanese human rights violations) to claim victimhood of “medical experimentation” completely denigrates the true suffering experienced by millions of people at the hands of these barbarous regimes.
Using the discrimination of one group of people to further your own is contemptible, and decrying one group as using political agendas to achieve their aims while obfuscating your own is where the real hypocrisy lies in all of this.
Hypocrisy is blaming one group for having political aims while hiding your own. Hypocrisy is claiming one’s human rights are political while another’s is not. Hypocrisy is using the oppression of others to play the victim.
I stand with all members of the LGBTQ+ community who see this for what it is. Bigotry and discrimination.
Luke Holdstock
Kerang
