'Safe Schools' scandal: open letter to the education minister

Yes, the Australian Education Union's 2006 gender identity policy declares that: "Homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism and intersex need to be normalised." (Section 3.3.3). But two questions arise: first, why is the Coalition implementing AEU policy? Second, and more profound: if same-sex attraction is correctly understood as a complex irregularity of sexual development that causes deep grief to many of those affected, is "normalising" that irregularity only going to cause more grief?

The American College of Pediatricians, a conservative medical group represented across 47 states, makes the following observations "on the promotion of homosexuality in the schools":

• Declaring and validating a student's same-sex attraction during the adolescent years is premature and may be harmful.
• Many youth with homosexual attractions have experienced a troubled upbringing, including sexual abuse, and are in need of therapy.
• The homosexual lifestyle carries grave health risks.
• Sexual reorientation therapy can be effective. Students and parents should be aware of all therapeutic options.
• There is no evidence that pro-homosexual programs, such as on-campus student clubs, ease the health disorders of homosexual youth.

Consider: confusion over sexual feelings is quite common among teens but it is usually a passing phase. The extensive National Health and Social Life Survey across the USA in 1994 found that some 8% of sixteen year olds identified as gay – but, significantly, the number halved within two years to just over 4%, and halved again by age twenty-five so that only 2.8% still thought they were gay. What that means is that most sexual confusion in adolescence – a full three-quarters in this study - clears away if left to itself.

The American College of Paediatricians comments on some more recent large studies that also show some two thirds to three quarters of young people who thought they might be 'gay' subsequently change and go 'straight':

During adolescence homosexual attractions are more fluid than fixed.

Adolescence is well recognized for its sexual fluidity and instability of homosexual attractions. In 2007, Savin-Williams and Ream conducted a large longitudinal study that documented changes in attraction so great between the ages of 16 and 17 that they questioned whether the concept of sexual orientation had any meaning for adolescents with homosexual attractions. Seventy-five percent of adolescents who had some initial homosexual attraction between the ages of 17-21 changed to experience heterosexual attraction only. This is in stark contrast to the stability they found among adolescents experiencing heterosexual attractions. Among these adolescents, fully 98% retained their heterosexual-only attractions into adulthood. Another study demonstrating significant change away from homosexual attractions in adolescence involved 13,840 youth. Of those initially "unsure" of their sexual orientation, 66% became exclusively heterosexual.

Initiatives to "celebrate gay identity" among confused adolescents would, in my view, be likely to encourage some young men to "come out" at school when, left alone, they might have got over their confusion and avoided the harm of a homosexual lifestyle.

Even using the simplest, most objective measure of harm - the burden of venereal disease (and in Australia it remains the case now, as for the last 25 years, that around 85% of new cases of HIV/AIDS are in "men who have sex with men") – it is obviously harmful to lock a young man into a lifestyle that he might have avoided, were it not for the assertion of homosexual normalcy, by programmes such as 'Safe Schools'.

I ask you to reconsider the sincerely held but erroneous premises that are justifying a Coalition government using public funds to further the agenda of normalising homosexual behaviour to our children. On behalf of many parents and grandparents, I express my dismay and strongest objection.

Yours sincerely,
David van Gend
Toowoomba