Christians threatened by same-sex hate-preachers
Herald Sun
September 17, 2016 5:52am
The Left claims a debate on gay marriage will unleash the haters. But these hypocrites meant themselves - and now threats by same-sex marriage activists have
forced Christians to cancel a meeting.
A ferocious campaign against Christian groups planning to meet on same-sex marriage has forced them to cancel the event at a major hotel next week, amid claims of physical threats from marriage-equality advocates.
The Accor Hotels group confirmed late yesterday that the function had been abandoned after a social media storm triggered phone calls that “rattled” employees and left the company concerned about the safety of staff and guests.
In the first test of the “civil” debate promised for a plebiscite on gay marriage, advocates for the “yes” case were being blamed last night for the kind of “hate speech” that Bill Shorten and others have claimed would come from the “no” case.
A spokeswoman for the Mercure Sydney Airport Hotel said the campaign by marriage-equality advocates had forced the company to close the hotel’s Facebook page, sparked phone calls that disturbed hotel staff and escalated the problem to the company’s headquarters....
About 100 people were expected to attend from the Sydney Anglicans, Sydney Catholics, the Marriage Alliance and the Australian Christian Lobby.
Gay news website SameSame.com.au alerted readers to the event. Activist Pauline Pantsdown urged followers to stop the “dangerous, predatory” ACL. “Are children safe at Mercure and Accor hotels?” one post said. One follower declared it “utterly horrifying” that Accor would host the Christian groups while another accused the hotel of supporting the “hateful, deceitful and extreme” ACL...
Accor confirmed the campaign led to a number of “negative” calls to the hotel but would not confirm claims these calls included death threats...
A joint statement from the conveners said the hotel staff received “threats of violence” after the details of the private event were published on the internet. “We have chosen to reconsider our arrangements for the event next week due to our concern for the safety of the hotel staff, and our commitment to a reasonable and respectful debate,” ACL managing director Lyle Shelton said...
Marriage-equality advocates hailed the cancellation of the meeting late yesterday. Pantsdown accused ACL of “playing victim” and justified the campaign against the Christian groups “due to danger they pose” to LGBTI children and families.
"Pantsdown", actually
university media lecturer Simon Hunt, is using the classic defence of the totalitarian Left - viciousness of the Left is excused on the grounds that their enemies are (imagined to be) even worse. In other words, it is not the principle that counts but the side. This is the morality of the tribalist - the morality that leads to savagery and a combat that is ultimately decided not by reason but by force. In anyone this calculus is shameful; in a media lecturer it is a disgrace.
That Shelton is among the victims here is no surprise. Same-sex advocates, particularly in the media, have made him a particular target of their hate-speech - demonising and dehumanising him so thoroughly that their fellow-travellers, using the Pantsdown defence, will think him deserving of the most extreme reprisals.
As I wrote this week:
Who exactly is doing the worst of this “hate speech”?...
There’s not just Shorten, denouncing the alleged hate speech of opponents while in the same breath accusing them of persecuting gays to their deaths.
There’s also Greens MP Adam Bandt, who this week warned Christian groups would “spread their hate-speech through a plebiscite”, yet then smeared “bigots like Lyle Shelton from the Australian Christian Lobby”.
Then there’s Bernard Keane of Crikey, likewise wringing his hands and warning that “for Australia’s LGBTI communities, the plebiscite will be a highly personal attack”, only to then vilify the luckless Shelton as a “creep” and “fact-free hypocrite” who was “obsessed with sex” and “a nauseating piece of filth”.
Or take novelist and Fairfax columnist John Birmingham, sanctimoniously warning this week of “the poison certain to be injected into our politics” by the plebiscite.
Having put on his chic halo, Birmingham, too, felt licensed to unleash the poisonous hatred he’d just denounced, attacking opponents of same-sex marriage as “weirdos” — “a sweating pig circus of morons and bigots” wanting to “mangulate their hate boners in the marriage equality plebiscite”.
This savagery of same-sex marriage advocates again raises the question I put this week:
Once we get same-sex marriage will these punishers stop there? Or, convinced their foes are filthy bigots, will they just keep going, not just screaming down the traditionalists but demanding laws to silence them?
Will priests be allowed to refuse to marry gay couples? Will bakers be punished if they refuse to bake the wedding cake? Will defence of traditional marriage be made a crime?
Don’t dismiss these worries as far-fetched. See how same-sex marriage crusaders are acting already. What makes you think victory will make them stop?
