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The battle is not over yet

Comment Cas Carter

OPINION: Imagine just for a moment the world is turned upside down on us and one day you wake to discover all couples are of the same gender.

And imagine, if you’re heterosexual, you find that having a relationship with your partner is against the law.

In this new world, the existing ‘normal’ becomes the opposite where everyone else thinks your desire to have a relationship with the opposite sex is deviant. As a consequence, you’re forced to hide your feelings and your relationships.

Imagine then if a terrible disease ripped through the world, seeming to kill only heterosexuals, but the world is slow to respond because of a popular belief that this disease punishes the wicked.

Sounds far-fetched, but it is exactly how the world treated homosexuality – not that long ago.

It’s 35 years this month since the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed into law.

It amended the Crimes Act of 1961 which said consensual homosexual conduct between males was a crime.

What happened in the early sixties that prompted a call for legislation against sexual preference? Was it fear?

Even 25 years later it was an enormous battle to get the law changed with the conscience vote only just making it across the line 49-44.

Incredibly, not far short of a third of the population were motivated enough to sign a petition to stop the bill which was heavily promoted by the Salvation Army and partially organised by Keith Hay of the first prefab home company of the same name.

Those against the bill were

quoted as claiming the law change could lead to gay bars, gay massage parlours, gay churches, gay marriages and gay people adopting children as if this was a bad thing.

MP John Banks claimed ‘‘legalising sodomy’’ would destabilise the family unit and destroy the nation and democracy.

And how on earth did MP Norman Jones get away with his now famous quote ‘‘… gaze upon them, you’re looking into Hades. Don’t look too long – you might catch AIDS’’.

It seems hard to believe that in my lifetime anyone’s sexuality was actually illegal.

My children’s generation are incredulous that we could have ever entertained such laws and thoughts. And looking back, so am I.

Legislative change is nowhere near enough to forgive the ignorance, lack of respect and bigotry that the law reinforced.

Only four years ago the government apologised to those men who were convicted for being homosexual. But there is much more we should be apologising for.

For 25 years this law and the society that supported it did so much more damage than the criminal convictions.

It reinforced uneducated bigotry in New Zealand, tore families apart, legitimised parents disowning their children and ruined lives.

If you admitted being homosexual you were considered to have mental health issues and told they could be ‘cured’ through conversion therapy.

Outrageously that therapy is still legal and in use.

As a nation we were arrogant enough to think we had the right to decide who should be considered ‘normal’ and who was not.

We’ve changed for the better, but we still see and experience discrimination in big and small ways every day.

We’re still quick to discriminate against people who are different from us instead of learning more about them.

So just think if you woke up one morning to find you were the person who was outlawed and scorned for doing what you considered totally normal.

We’ve come a long way but as Fran Wilde, the MP who introduced the Homosexual Law Reform Bill to Parliament, said this month, ‘‘there will never be nothing to do.’’

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2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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