Scott Morrison was roundly mocked on Wednesday for talking about the hate speech he faces as a conservative, Christian white male.
The jeers were well-deserved, but we shouldn’t imagine that this is the last time we’ll hear this particular line of argument. In the event of a plebiscite, similar narratives of right-wing victimhood will be front and centre, just as it has been over the course of the debate over marriage equality in the US.
In isolation, Morrison’s claim is merely risible. To recap: on ABC radio, he was asked to respond to comments made the previous evening by Senator Penny Wong. She argued that an adversarial and combative plebiscite process would “license” homophobic commentary, and that straight politicians didn’t understand what that meant.
Morrison responded:
I understand the concerns Penny is raising, I know it from personal experience having been exposed to that sort of hatred and bigotry for the views I’ve taken from others who have a different view to me.
This claim has been rubbished as a product of his own unreflexive privilege. Rebecca Shaw showed how there is no comparison between the structural discrimination faced by LGBT Australians in ordinary life, and the mere disagreement that Morrison might encounter in his work as a professional politician.
But it’s important not to see this as just another campaign gaffe. It’s better read as a preview of the rhetoric that the right wing of the Liberal party, and others opposed to marriage equality, will use in the event of a drawn-out plebiscite on the issue.
If you’re sceptical about that, you should check out Senator Cory Bernardi’s blog post, also written on Wednesday, where he accuses the left of employing an “Orwellian” conception of tolerance. He wrote:
The demand for tolerance by leftists is nothing more than a thinly veiled insistence that you surrender your views, your values and your beliefs in favour of theirs. If you don’t, the name calling starts. You instantly become a ‘phobe’, a ‘bigot’ or worse. These slurs are designed to shut down any sensible dialogue or meaningful discussion about the subject matter at hand.
Just as in Morrison’s interview, Bernardi insists that he is oppressed – that his free speech is at risk – notwithstanding him being a senator, a factional powerbroker, and someone who’s seemingly able to summon up media attention on demand.
Again, he draws on the idea that white, Christian men are somehow the truly marginalised members of secular societies.
This Bizarro world hypothesis – where government ministers are silenced and vulnerable, and the people demanding the basic rights they lack are their oppressors – comes straight out of the playbook of the theocratic right in the US.
Before, during and since the US supreme court’s decision that allowed same-sex couples to marry, members of the Christian right have turned accusations of homophobic bigotry around by claiming that their free speech is under attack, and that they are the oppressed victims of secular culture.
In the case of groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which Tony Abbott addressed back in January, culture-war rhetoric talking up the dangers equal rights for LGBT people pose to “religious liberty” has evolved into a legal strategy where Christian-owned businesses try to chip away at hard-won rights with “religious exemptions”.
They may have lost the big case conferring same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, but they have also had wins, like the Hobby Lobby ruling, which granted corporations a kind of religious personhood under the First Amendment.
Australia’s constitution, for better or worse, does not allow cases like this to be measured against a Bill of Rights. But Australian conservatives appear to have learned a lot from their US counterparts about how to poison the well of electoral politics.
Frederick Clarkson, a fellow at Political Research Associates who is an expert on the Christian right, counsels that while the supreme court eventually settled the issue, conservatives fought hard and successfully to defeat plebiscitary ballot measures.
There were some states in which same-sex marriage won, but there were relatively few of those.
Part of their success was generalising the kind of resentment articulated by Morrison and Bernardi, so that it was not just the religiously committed who partook in it, but many others who were alienated by changing mores.
These people were invited to identify with allegedly persecuted Christians, and enough did so in select states to shoot down ballot measures permitting same-sex marriage.
Clarkson explains:
They do it by flipping the narrative. Gay people have been marginalised all over the world for a long time. When Christian conservatives say, ‘we’re subject to anti-Christian bigotry and hate speech all the time’, it’s a false equivalence.
Even if some people say hateful things to conservatives, “they are not being victimised in the way that gay people are. It’s a clever rhetorical device, but it’s deeply dishonest.” It depends on the idea that “disagreement is by its very nature an attack on Christianity.”
Penny Wong’s fears are well-founded. In the event of a plebiscite, progressives need to be ready for this tactic to be used time and time again, especially as a way of shutting down discussions of homophobic bigotry.
If a conservative claims that they’re oppressed in the same way that gays are, Clarkson recommends asking for specifics.
Anyone can make sweeping generalisations about anything. If you’re left with an abstract argument, nobody wins. Ask, how are you being victimised? Have I done that to you? The more the conversation can be brought to a concrete and real level, the better the conversation will be.
If it’s not possible to head off the plebiscite altogether, there are still ways to interrogate the inevitable cries of rightwing victimhood.
