In America, you probably know her as Portia de Rossi, but in my town, Geelong, she’s also known as Amanda Lee Rogers, born January 31, 1973. “Married” to talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, the Generation X star and vegan lesbian, however, seems more Hollywood than regional Australian.
Of late, the celebrity has attacked our prime minister, Julia Gillard, for defending time-honored traditional marriages, but has also received criticism for refusing to be interviewed by men. Perhaps, though, Portia was never about tolerance. And it invites the question: What gives her the right to preach about civil rights while treating some males like lepers?
Still, my fellow Australians aren’t all marching to Portia’s beat — outside of Hollywood, I mean.
Restaurateur John Spellman, one of the pioneers of gay rights in Darwin, Australia, opposes the Northern Territory branch of the Labor Party’s attempts to push the Federal Parliament to legalize gay marriage. In his view, “marriage is not the right word. It’s religious. It’s for a man and a woman to produce children. And I think you’d offend a lot of people by using the word marriage.”
Christopher Pearson, who works as a tutor and happens to be gay, submits that radical environmentalists are using the sacred institution for their bizarre agendas. “Among the reasons the Greens are so keen on same-sex marriage is that they want to reduce the population and drive down national fertility. Their refusal to discriminate positively in favour of heterosexuality and uphold the distinctive value of normal marriage shows their political project yet again for what it is: a dead end.”
In Portia’s home state of Victoria, Australia’s most-read columnist Andrew Bolt shares a position made by his gay friend “Wilde Oscar.” And it’s a view many marginalized voices would secretly agree with too: “I know the Gay agenda only too well. Through organizations like GLAAD (Gay and Lesbians Against Discrimination) in the U.S. they are exercising censorship of free speech with threats and blackmail.” And he rails against activists’ fascist-like attacks on business and churches.
Likewise, Tom McFeely, the Melbourne-based hotelier and political figure named among the 25 most influential gays and lesbians in Australia, has said, ”It’s easy to say: I’m all for gay marriage. But in practical terms, what does that mean?” It’s a question males can’t put to Portia de Rossi, however.
Forbidden questions
I’d love to serve Portia de Rossi some politically forbidden questions. After apologizing for being a male, I’d ask: Don’t you think there are enough fatherless families around?
Critical thinkers have a right to question the many ways in which Hollywood stars and numerous celebrities are sheltered from the very social engineering projects they’ve supported over the years. In truth, many working-class Christian families with small businesses and their supporters are awake to the consequences associated with father-hungry gangs; awake to our daddy-searching teenage girls looking for love in all the wrong places and awake to our jail culture, a system dependent on fatherless men.
Somehow gay marriage activists have perfected the art of denial. However, high-society’s moderns can afford to forget the consequences of the expressive divorce revolution they supported, because the media refuses to hold them to account. Very few have worked as or with policemen, teachers in socially-disadvantaged areas, or in other frontline jobs. To activists like Portia, fatherless families deserve the blessing of the state, and critical-thinking individuals are simply pests, bothered by history.
And, again, Portia is bothered by males, even the left-leaning Australian television presenter, David Koch. He wrote, “Last week, for the first time in my eight years on Sunrise, I was specifically excluded by a guest from interviewing them because of my gender. Not that Hollywood star Portia De [sic] Rossi didn’t like me personally (which I could probably understand) but simply because I was a male.”
But why did Seven Network’s Sunrise morning program accept the gay marriage activist’s conditions? To me this shows up the role of the supporter and enabler. But more than that, lesbian-only marriages are built around the idea of excluding males. Koch admits that “the issue with restricting interviews to female-female is that it reinforces the ‘girls only club’ feeling” but doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion.
Armed with fake studies, not even decades old, gay marriage activists sniff at the very Judeo-Christian values their respective countries were founded on, despite acres of primary sources available to them. In the gay marriage activist’s mind, lesbian mothers can only be equal to married heterosexual unions, or better. To argue otherwise means you’re a fundamentalist, but for some reason, celebrating, say, pagan-inspired rainbow family theories, is glorious.
Portia: Was it a big coincidence that Euro-socialists embraced the state-sponsored fatherless family unit first?
Ben-Peter Terpstra is a freelance writer based in regional Victoria, Australia. He has lived and worked in the Northern Territory, Melbourne, Kyoto and London (England).