How does threatening parents with jail encourage them to have “open and healthy discussion” with their children on sexuality and gender? Minister Kris Faafoi needs to tell us. Because he keeps repeating it.

Faafoi tells us this is the real aim of the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill. However the slightest amount of rational thought reveals this line for what it is – a vacuous PR slogan designed to avert attention from the actual intent and effect of the bill. That intent has nothing to do with open discussion. In fact it is the opposite. The bill’s real aim is to  enforce rainbow and gender-fluidity ideology and silence any dissent against it – even within the private sphere of family life.

The bill would mean a parent who refuses to allow their 12 year old child to go on hormone blockers so they can “explore their gender identity” is at serious risk of having legal proceedings commenced against them. All it will take is a complaint from some activist ideologue at the child’s school, and the parent is on the road to court – perhaps even jail.

In his interviews on the proposed new law, Faafoi avoids answers to direct questions on whether parents will be criminalised. Is it because he knows they will? Or does he actually believe his own doublespeak about open and healthy discussion? Listening to him it certainly seems like it. One is reminded of the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Writing in 1943 in Germany, Bonhoeffer spoke of the difficulty in trying to communicate with someone blinded by ideology. He stated,

One feels in fact, when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited… he will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. (1)

To be fair, Minister Faafoi is far from alone in his unquestioning commitment to this bill. At its first reading, MPs from nearly every party in Parliament sprung up in support. They proudly told us how they were going to be on the “right side of history”. Another great slogan. But it won’t keep parents out of jail. And it won’t help our increasingly confused and vulnerable young people.

Let’s be clear. The ideology of gender-fluidity has no basis in science. Yet it is being aggressively pushed into our culture by activists. As a result, gender identity confusion among young people has exploded. They are then offered “treatment” which interrupts their natural physiological development – the very development which in most cases will actually resolve their confusion. And it is treatment which has the risk of irreversible life-long impacts. But by law they must now be free to choose it without parental interference. All this for children who can’t vote, drink, get married, drive a car, or in many cases even be legally left alone at home.

The supporters of this bill tell us they want to prevent “serious harm” to young people. But if that was true, they would have the intellectual and moral honesty to face these facts. But they don’t. So they won’t. Instead they will satisfy themselves with meaningless slogans. And they will criminalise parents desperate to protect their children, all the time refusing to see the evil they are perpetrating.

Ewen McQueen
August 2021

(1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, SCM Press, London, 1953, page 9