Marriage Equality Opponents Are Comparing Gay Parenthood To The Stolen Generations In The Australian Today

Parliament resumes sitting today, which means a long-awaited multiparty bill aimed at legalising marriage equality is due to be introduced sometime in the next fortnight. In anticipation, supporters of marriage equality have stepped up their efforts to sway undecided MPs and pressure the government to grant its members a conscience vote — rallies around the country attracted thousands of people over the weekend, and Canberra Airport was lit up in rainbow colours as MPs flew in.

Australia’s thirty or so remaining opponents to marriage equality have cobbled together some efforts of their own — last week saw the launch of the Marriage Alliance and its accompanying bizarre, iceberg metaphor-laden campaign, as well as a TV ad which channels Seven and Ten have refused to run.

That campaign is so bad on so many levels it almost inspires affection for the clearly inept people who decided to make their case via a stock-photo schlubby dude confusedly holding a tiny iceberg. But another anti-marriage equality campaign that’s come to light today is reaching new lows of dirtbaggery by comparing gay parenthood to the Stolen Generations and the thousands of children historically sent into forced adoption.

In a full-page ad in The Australian today, the Australian Marriage Forum claim that allowing gay people to raise children is “discrimination against the child” and will “destroy the primal love between mother and baby,” saying: “We know how much we have hurt children through past Government policies” and asking: “Which Prime Minister will have to apologise to the Motherless Generation?”

“In 2013 our leaders apologised for the policy that forcibly adopted babies away from their teenage mothers, breaking ‘the primal and sacred bond between a mother and her baby,'” the ad says. “Now we are being asked to break that primal bond again, by a law instituting ‘marriage’ without a woman, which means families without a mother.”

“Will we never learn?”

Ignoring the fact that same-sex couples can and do raise kids already, and that it’s been definitively proven time and again that the children of same-sex couples fare no differently to the children of opposite-sex parents, comparing a loving and stable familial unit to a legacy of government-sanctioned kidnapping and child abuse has to be some kind of new low, even for a “movement” as deranged as this one.

For added Hateful Crazy Points, the ad also has a bit of a moment at the idea that kids in school might learn about sex education, the existence of sexualities other than heterosexuality, and the passage of laws. It’s all part of the “homosexual revolution,” which is on track to make every Australian child an understudy to Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz by the year 2025.

That marriage equality bill is due to be introduced on August 11, so hopefully we only have to put up with vile garbage like this for a couple more weeks before it sinks into the bin of history where it belongs.