New Zealand MP Maurice Williamson on the "Gay Onslaught" We Can Expect When Marriage Equality Arrives

After I posted the YouTube clip yesterday of the New Zealand parliament breaking into song as a marriage equality bill was approved, a number of kind readers (Ursula L. and Chris Morley) shared with me other resources from the New Zealand parliamentary discussion of marriage equality. The clip at the head of this posting, in which the Hon. Maurice Williamson addresses people's fears of a "gay onslaught" some folks supposed would roll forth if the bill passed, is one of those resources.

Williamson addresses the gay onslaught theory as follows:

The gay onslaught will start the day after this bill is passed. And sir, we're really struggling to know what the gay onslaught will look like. We don't know if it will come down the Pakuranga highway as a series of troops, or whether it will be a gas that flows in over the electorate and blocks us all in.

Williamson also notes that he himself (and, one assumes, other New Zealand legislators planning to support marriage equality) encountered "bullying tactics" that he found "really evil." And as I hear him say this, I'm both unhappy that he or anyone else has to put up with these tactics, and happy that someone outside the gay community has the opportunity to learn what we who are gay endure on a constant basis, often from people who proclaim that God energizes and blesses their bullying.

One of the bullying tactics Williamson recounts is a taunt from someone who wrote to tell him that New Zealand had been struck by drought when it dared to entertain the notion of marriage equality. Williamson (who has a degree in physics) turns the taunt (which is a very typical highly selective reading of natural events to slam LGBT people) onto its head and states that in his electorate on the morning when the nation's parliament voted in marriage equality, it poured rain and "an enormous gay rainbow" followed the rain.

The "gay onslaught" bullying tactic mirrors what's happening in France, as fascist thugs beat Wilfred de Bruijn on the streets of Paris, smashing his face to a bloody pulp, and as the outgoing head of the French Catholic bishops' conference Cardinal Vingt-Trois mendaciously predicted that the "violence" of marriage equality would elicit violence of the sort de Bruijn experienced--thus tacitly blessing the fascist blood-shedding rather than challenging it outright.

As I said yesterday, isn't it interesting that the only "gay onslaught" and "violence" in evidence in New Zealand as marriage equality passes is a love song in the New Zealand parliament? For the real onslaught of violence, we have to look, instead, to the "loving" people of faith who refuse to accord human rights to their LGBT brothers and sisters, and the "loving" Christian leaders like Cardinal Vingt-Trois who bless that violence.