Asides

CHARMLESS MAN: The Age’s Lawrence Money thinks gay people need "conversion"

Now sacked from his main gig slopping out gossip on The Age’s back page, Lawrence Money is really letting it all hang out. In his most recent  online column he’s taken a decidedly non-Fairfax position on the “conversion” of gay people to straight.

One twitterer describes his effort as “poisonous”.

Turns out to be a very weird tale about a thirty year old woman wanting Dirty Larry to “adopt” her because her father is gay and she wanted a new one.

Aside from whatever issues that might have presented to Mrs Dirty Larry (we suspect the prospective ‘daughter’ might have craved a good spanking on the retired columnist’s desk), the whole concept sounds like one of the most hateful, horrible things imaginable. We ought not be in the business of replacing family members because of their sexuality. That seems a reasonably uncontroversial proposition. Families need to “stick” and should love and respect each other as much as humanly possible, short of some abominable crime or atrocity.

That point seems to be lost on Money, who is clearly a lot more freaky and bigoted conservative than he’d previously been able to let on when still in The Age mainstream.

He also seems to think you have to be straight or bisexual to be a father, a proposition that is simply not factually correct, whatever one’s social conservatism might be.

Money then takes his big stick to gay activists who don’t like “conversion” programmes which do seem to us rather creepy. We can’t imagine them being run in reverse, except possibly within the nauseatingly alternative Greens party.

One of their activists Stephen Luntz once – in all seriousness – told a group at the University of Melbourne that he wanted to be gay to feel their pain but he just couldn’t rise to the occasion. A shame for him perhaps, I think the right term for a hirsute gay bloke is a “bear” and he’d quite possibly have been the hairiest bear ever known and would have been quite the hit on Commercial Road, for those of that persuasion. A party animal indeed. As a caged beast, he could have made a fortune.

Anyway, enough of patronising posers like Luntz, Money seems to have a real bee in his bonnet about gay people being offended about groups wanting to treat them like they have an illness or have made a choice. While for some people, they struggle and grapple as they deal with a very complex subject, it doesn’t seem to us like it’s a choice in the traditional way we understand it. Not like choosing Sprite Zero and ginger beer. Anyway, we’re not experts on such things but we do know how to identify judgmental bigots when we see them. It’s hardly surprising that gay groups would react adversely to “conversion” programmes and they seem well within their rights to object to the whole patronising and insulting thing.

But Money’s position boils down to this:

If a peaceful church organisation wants to help them open the door (to turning straight), it’s none of the gays’ damn business.

With views like that, it’s a miracle he survived at The Age for as long as he did.

Has the real Dirty Larry just begun to bite?

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