Free Speech Union Bullshit
Bethlehem College makes parents sign a Statement of Belief stating marriage only exists between a woman and a man. A staff member tells a transgender student “god doesn’t make mistakes” while refusing to use their preferred pronouns and threatening them with suspension for wearing a uniform that matches their gender. The teenager attempts suicide. There is outrage, understandably, that a college could so comprehensively fail to care for its student appropriately. Students at the school hold their own silent protest, and were verbally abused and had fruit thrown at them by other students. There was a protest outside the college too, three people stand with a rainbow flag and signs reading #loveislove and #proud.
A library in West Auckland holds a drag story time as part of the Pride Month celebrations. The event is led by Medulla Oblongata, who has been hosting drag story times for three years. At these events, she reads childrens stories to children. Protesters arrive with signs saying “Hands off our children” and enter the library to disrupt the reading of a story to children. They are asked to leave but continue to bang on the window. Police arrive, and the protesters tell them "we've asked them to stop grooming children" and "This is sexualisation of children, you should arrest them." The comments section of media coverage is swarmed by people claiming that anyone supporting drag story time is an abuser, or has been abused, or supports paedophilia.
Both of these incidents involve the deliberate targeting of the LGBTQi community. Both involve protest; one against a school discriminating against its queer pupils and one against children’s stories being read to children by a member of the LGBTQi community. One is based on evidence, proven discrimination which had a severely traumatic outcome for a queer teenager. The other is based on a far right belief that equates LGBTQi people with paedophiles, and attempts to intimidate drag performers and allies into cancelling shows, while propagating disgusting smears about them.
You would have to work pretty hard to look at these two examples and say “ah ha, but actually this is the same thing”. For a start you’d have to ignore that one protest was entirely peaceful and non-disruptive, and the other involved attempting to physically prevent books being read to children while the protesters hurled horrendous smears against the reader. Then you’d have to completely ignore the mis-gendering, threats of suspension and subsequent suicide attempt of a student at the college, and couch it as being about “teaching a traditional view of marriage”. Oh, and you’d have to also mention that the latter group accuse the drag story time of “grooming” children without explaining that it implies that the LGBTQi community are inherently paedophilic, a growing and potentially violent far-right conspiracy.
Fortunately in Aotearoa we have the Free Speech Union’s Jonathan Ayling, who managed to do all of this in a few hundred words and closed that section by claiming it was “Funny how they borrow each other’s lines. Maybe they could share signs…”. Ayling says it’s hard to take a principled stand on free speech, and it certainly is when you have to contort yourself into a logic pretzel to draw an equivalence between an issue where a college failed to support or care for its students, when they are legally required to do so, and a handful of people invading a library and making outrageous far-right conspiratorial smears about someone reading a children’s book to children.
The phrase he uses in reference to free speech is “the door swings both ways”, ignoring that the door in this case is hitting a transgender student at Bethlehem college and a drag performer in an Avondale library. Just saying “If we don’t like libraries allowing drag queen story times, there’s a credible argument to not allow state-integrated schools to teach traditional views on marriage.” does not mean there is actually a credible argument at all. It turns out different things are different. Schools have a duty of care towards their students, and should not “subject students to detrimental treatment on any grounds of discrimination, including sexual orientation and family status.” A library does not have a duty of care towards people who think the LGBTQi community are all paedophiles who groom children and are willing to disrupt a children’s story time and force the library to close.
Unfortunately, it gets worse for Jonathan Ayling. Because the statement of “traditional marriage” reads as follows: “In the beginning God created male and female. Marriage is an institution created by God in which one man and one woman enter into an exclusive relationship intended for life, and that marriage is the only form of partnership approved by God for sexual relations”. It was included on the Statement of Beliefs for the state-integrated Bethlehem College, as point 13. But, as David Farrier discovered, the agreed Statement of Beliefs between the Ministry of Education and the Christian Education Trust which runs Bethlehem college only had 12 points. In 2019, and without the knowledge or agreement of the Ministry of Education, point 13 was added.
What that means is that the protesters who said that the MoE should not fund Bethlehem College while it maintained that view of “traditional marriage” were actually correct. The Ministry of Education requested the college remove point 13, and threatened intervention if it did not happen. It would be fine to retain it if Bethlehem College wished to return to being a private school, but it absolutely was not fine for the Government to fund a school that was advocating for a position that directly contravened the law. Bethlehem College removed point 13, and nobody’s free speech was harmed in the process.
The protesters at Bethlehem College, which included students, were protesting about discrimination against a transgender student and the college breaching its agreed Statement of Beliefs with the Ministry of Education, who fund them. The protesters at Avondale Library were protesting that a drag performer reading a children’s story book to children was “grooming children” and “sexualising them”, which are key features of a far-right conspiracy designed to demonise and threaten the LGBTQi community. To equate these two is sheer nonsense.
Mr Ayling knows this. That’s why he had to include that the Free Speech Union doesn’t believe the anti-LGBTQi protest was free speech because they tried to shut down the story time. But that didn’t stop him from constructing an argument that was purportedly about his principled position on free speech. It would have been more honest if he’d admitted he had already picked a side on the Bethlehem College issue. The Free Speech Union, of which he is Chief Executive, backed Bethlehem College’s “traditional marriage” statement with an open letter of support on June 16th 2022. That was two days after David Farrier revealed the college’s unsanctioned inclusion of point 13 on its Statement of Beliefs. Free speech apparently even beats facts.
Let’s wrap this up. The problems with Mr Ayling’s article are so comprehensive that I am surprised it was even published. It wholly misrepresents the issues at Bethlehem College, to the point of excluding the actual harm done to a student and deliberately, or unknowingly, avoiding the wrongs done by the college. It sanitises the anti-LGBTQi protest at Avondale to the point that the reasons why a drag queen is being called a groomer are simply not explained in any way shape or form. To have carefully constructed this and then gone on to equate the two protests, knowing that Mr Ayling’s union supported Bethlehem College is to use my own free speech, absolute fucking bullshit of the highest order.
It has long been noted that the Free Speech Union seems to reserve its strongest support for issues involving white supremacists, transphobes and the issues beloved by the culture war obsessed right-wing. It should not continue to go unchallenged, especially when it leads to such toxically bad faith pieces like this being presented as fair comment in the mainstream media.
John Palethorpe is an educator and communications professional based in the South Island.