Sydney’s Mardi Gras Neglected Children’s Rights

Weekend Libertarian ^ | 16 April, 2011 | B.P. Terpstra

[AustralianConservative]

“Tatchell heads up Mardi Gras think-tank,” gushed Same Same, a rah-rah “gay marriage” website.

But no amount of glitter can hide the truth: 2011’s Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras ignores children’s rights.

For starters, organizers encouraged potential ticket buyers to, “Join one of the world’s most controversial and influential LGBTI and human rights activists, Peter Tatchell, as he speaks his mind about the campaign for equal marriage rights in this very special [emphasis mine] Mardi Gras event.”

The Talks and seminars page, however, failed to mention Tatchell’s colourful past. Or as Peter Hitchens of the UK’s Mail Online put it: “Question - who said 'not all sex involving children is unwanted and abusive'. Answer - The Pope's biggest British critic.”

As well, Hitchens notes: “For on June 26, 1997, Mr Tatchell wrote a start­ling letter to the Guardian newspaper. In it, he defended an academic book about ‘Boy-Love’ against what he saw as calls for it to be censored.”

Confronted with the facts, though the “human rights” activist says he was just being all free speech-y. You know. Free speech-y: when we write letters to newspapers defending the rights of sympathetic “Boy-Love” publications, as opposed to, say, healthy Catholic families.

But the Mardi Gras-first champion didn’t just adopt a peculiarly seasonal and very selective free speech-y argument. He appeared to be endorsing the said book. Here’s Hitchens again:

Personally, I think he went a bit further than that. He wrote that the book’s arguments were not shocking, but ‘courageous’.

He said the book documented ‘examples of societies where consenting inter-generational sex is considered normal’.

[AustralianConservative]

http://weekendlibertarian.blogspot.com/2011/04/sydneys-mardi-gras-neglects-childrens.html