Just one day after writing a blog post likening the rise of Nazi Germany to Safe Schools and the fight for equal marriage, the Australian Christian Lobby’s director Lyle Shelton told The Project he didn’t think his comments were offensive.
After being pressed on the statements made in his post by hosts Waleed Aly and Carrie Bickmore the conservative campaigner said, “Well … I … Can’t understand why people would be offended, Carrie.”
“I wasn’t in any way saying that same-sex marriage or anything … Safe Schools was like the Holocaust. What I’m saying is at the moment we’ve got some bad ideas being put forward in public policy, telling young people, children as young as four in our schools, that no one can tell you what gender you are, through this Gender Fairy public relations from the Safe Schools coalition.
“That is what happened in the 1930s in Germany. The parallel is between speaking up or not speaking up when bad ideas are put forward in public policy. It is no offence to anyone at all.”
In his controversial post Mr Shelton appeared to call the promotion of LGBT awareness and acceptance in Safe Schools – a voluntary program intended to assist school-age children in better understanding sexuality and gender issues – as “unthinkable”. And went on to make the tenuous comparison that that progressive way of thinking was akin to the dangerous propaganda occurring in Germany during the Nazi regime.
“That Labor leader Bill Shorten can promise during an election to fund the so-called ‘Safe Schools’ program which teaches children as young as four that ‘only you can know if you are a boy or a girl — no one can tell you’ and there be so little push back is a failure of those of us who know better,” Shelton wrote.
“Changing the definition of marriage to entrench motherless and fatherlessness in public policy and teaching our kids their gender is fluid should be opposed.
“The cowardice and weakness of Australia’s ‘gatekeepers’ is causing unthinkable things to happen, just as unthinkable things happened in Germany in the 1930s.”
While on The Project Mr Shelton was asked to explain the links the blog drew between The Gender Fairy book – a book aimed at helping kids deal with gender dysmorphia – to the Safe Schools program, a claim co-host Waleed Aly told him is was “inaccurate”.
“We have heard from the woman who wrote it… she says it has nothing to do with Safe Schools,” Aly said.
Mr Shelton refuted that and said the book “is promoted by Safe Schools through their resources and it encourages schools to stock this in their library. It is a resource for four-year-olds and it says only you know whether you are a boy or a girl.”
But Aly later showed a statement from the Australian Safe Schools Coalition verifying that the book was not included in their reading lists.
