MY involvement with the World Congress of Families conference in Melbourne started to get weird when its organiser called me at home at 9pm on a Tuesday night to tell me I was the only journalist she could trust.
We’d had email contact before that when I applied for a media pass for the conference, but this was the first time I had actually spoken to Babette Francis, the diminutive but formidable woman organising the whole affair.
She told me the media had turned against the WCF and asked if I had a science background — I don’t — because she wanted to send me something explaining the work of Dr Angela Lanfranchi on the debunked link between abortion and breast cancer. It would apparently convince the Star Observer to publish “a small item” on the subject.
I suggested it probably wasn’t going to be relevant enough to our readers to publish anything, but Francis countered by saying the study was of supreme relevance to lesbians, who have (she claimed) a higher body mass index and are therefore also at greater risk of cancer.
I held my tongue.
Of course, to Francis’ ire, we didn’t run the story.
Although I didn’t have much to do with her again before the conference, the incident left me unsettled. As Australian media continued to damn the WCF, I worried Francis’ misplaced trust in me was evidence I’d become compromised.
It didn’t help when, on the Saturday, I was booed by protesters as I passed through the imposing line of police to enter the conference venue at Catch the Fire Ministries. Keen to correct their assumption that I was a delegate, once I’d registered I came back outside to introduce myself as a journalist.
I mingled a little with the protesters throughout the day, but for the most part I sat up the back of the conference room, tweeting as those paying any attention applauded my apparent bravery for reporting from inside the lion’s den.
Speaker after speaker got up on stage to celebrate the “natural family”, couching anti-gay and anti-women rhetoric in crazy but watertight logic. Almost every speaker addressed the media storm and the protesters outside the building.
Francis’ role on the day was something between guest of honour and crazy uncle. Sitting in the middle of the front row she would interrupt the emcee about once an hour to throw in her two cents on the previous speaker.
In the breaks I spoke to a few conference delegates. One man had travelled to the event from Sydney, and when he learned I was a reporter he grilled me for some explanation of the media’s response to the event. Seeming genuinely exasperated, he didn’t understand why journalists were evidently ignoring “the facts” about, for example, the link between breast cancer and abortion.
A woman from the anti-gay group Salt Shakers smiled as she explained the two protesters who’d staged a demonstration inside the conference had thought they’d got them past security by dressing like stereotypes of conservative Christians.
In spite of the occasional oddity the experience was remarkably banal.
I tried to explain this to people afterwards — these are not the fire and brimstone preachers of the Westboro Baptist Church, they are lobbyists and bureaucrats. Like the protesters outside, like anyone with conviction, a lot of thought goes into their arguments.
I don’t say this to excuse them — clearly their beliefs are both abhorrent and damaging — but I find it hard to believe the storm of outrage surrounding the event will change anything. When we cast these people as somehow fundamentally evil, we write them off.
Babette Francis makes it easy to hate the WCF. She’s eccentric, abrasive and easy to dislike. But for the most part these aren’t monsters, it’s far worse than that: they’re people.
At the end of the day I worried I should have felt worse about the experience. I was exhausted, but on some level reporting on the WCF hadn’t felt much different from reporting on any conference. I wanted to be angry, even disgusted, but I wasn’t.
I’m glad I went. I think the WCF is a vile organisation actively making the world a worse place. They stand against everything I believe in. But I also think it’s important to understand exactly what we’re criticising here: ordinary people fighting for what they believe.
Yes indeed they are people but we weren’t protesting them as people personally, but the ideas that have which have no basis in science, reason or rational thought :-)
sorry……the ideas that they have etc
“But for the most part these aren’t monsters, it’s far worse than that: they’re people.”
And marriage is going to make us equal to them. :(
My elderly neighbour says the Nazis were ordinary people, passionate about some whacky theories. She is Jewish, and the rest of her family was killed by them. She escaped to England. When I had been assaulted by a gay hating thug, she offered help. I was suprised at her rage, but people like her have seen bigotry and the damage it does. Mostly I find the Congress had to many people who lacked insight. Calling on the GLBTI press to publish their whacky theories, is a demonstration of a comple lack if insight. The writings of Indian born Babbette, are chilling. The only thing the Congress was successful at, was isolating themselves from society, and doing political damage to the LNP.
What suprised me is the Victorian Attorney General, Robert Clark, and Federal Minister, Kevin Andrews, gave the support of public office, to people promoting theories that are the puzzle in hate crimes some of us still experience. Theories that even some of the far right media outlets found offensive. It is even more astonishing any political party would keep such cruel people in the cabinet. Kevin Andrews raves about how wonderful marriage is, but then denies it like a bully holding something out of teach to his victim. Robert Clark likened homosexuality to cancer in Parliament. Homophobia cost the community hundreds if million each year. There is the police, the courts the hospitals, the funeral, the coroners, not to mention the devastating impact on families.
The Congress meeting has been successful at demonstrating a major shift in the media, with Kevin Andrews and Robert Clark finding their neck on the political chopping block. It has made me think it is now the homophobes turn to be hounded, to find it difficult at work, to find it hard to have a safe meeting place to meet.
I agree completely. I think the media focus should be — and was, for the most part — squarely on the very senior politicians who were willing to attend. (I’m also aware of the irony of saying that as someone who wrote a piece on the WCF without discussing the politicians, but that’s a whole other article.) There are still unanswered questions from these politicians about why they were willing to go.
I hope each an every one of those WCF members has at least one gay child or gay grand-child, just to make them wake up to the stupidity of their prejudices.