Progress toward equal rights for the GLBT community in law are seeing a redneck backlash, and we'd better be prepared to stand up and take it, says Labour MP Georgina Beyer. “I've said it myself, it's coming on the horizon, we'd better have an intelligent response to it if we're going to have any response at all,” she told GayNZ.com. “Yes, there's going to be nasty speak out there. Wake up gay New Zealand, you've got to take it. And when you give it back, make sure you engage brain before you engage your mouth.” Beyer was responding to comments made to GayNZ.com by author Alan Duff, who told us to “piss off” when asked for an explanation as to why he signed a letter to MPs last year suggesting gays were more likely to abuse and murder their children. “You lot have overstepped the mark, like the feminists did, and have lost the plot and become hysterical but worse than that, bullies,” he said. “Some of us hate bullies because we can see where it leads to next - dictating to us that your beliefs and morals are superior.” Duff's comments come hard on the heels of similar vicious anti-gay rants by Labour MP John Tamihere to a fundamentalist Christian journalist. Beyer says she can't see how the current climate can get much worse, “except when verbal abuse turns to violence, and that's what bothers me. With some of the anti-queer stuff that's going on out there, it's giving a lot of redneck people permission to abuse us in the street and go back to that sort of stuff.”
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Thursday, 21st April 2005 - 12:00pm