Same Sex Marriage Australian Christian Lobby

ACL managing director Lyle Shelton

One of the grubbiest attack lines from marriage equality opponents is the regularly debunked claim that same-sex parenting harms children — which is still argued by the groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby despite the colossal pile of peer-reviewed evidence that no such harm can be identified. 

Some religious activists go further. In 2010, Wendy Francis, who these days is a director of the Australian Christian Lobby, said same-sex marriage was “legalising child abuse” and that the children of same-sex couples were akin to the stolen generations. In 2013, Lyle Shelton of the ACL repeated the stolen generations smear.

In contrast, however, the ACL and other fundamentalist groups stay virtually silent about genuine harm to children. References to child sexual abuse by churches and priests by the ACL are virtually non-existent. To his credit, the then-head of the ACL, the controversial Jim Wallace, welcomed Julia Gillard’s announcement of a royal commission into institutional child abuse in 2012. “It is to our shame as Christians that much abuse has been in the church,” Wallace said. “Jesus, who founded the church, warned that any adult who caused a child to stumble was worthy of severe punishment.”

But since then, under Lyle Shelton, the ACL has shown little interest in the ongoing revelations from the commission. For example, in relation to the Catholic Church alone, the commission has revealed that more than 4400 children were abused since 1980, and that 7% of all priests were rapists, with up to 20% of members of some holy orders having engaged in abuse. Indeed, instead of condemning the revelations of the commission, Shelton has publicly supported Cardinal George Pell, who covered up child abuse cases (and subsequently blamed underlings for the cover-up) and approved an aggressive legal strategy in response to litigation by victims. Pell, Shelton claimed, was a “scapegoat”. 

It’s not merely hypocrisy that the ACL and its ilk alleges child abuse by same-sex parents while ignoring the real thing committed by clergy. If an organisation such as the ACL had spoken out on child sex abuse by churches, and done so earlier — if it had condemned the Catholic Church’s refusal to engage with victims, if it had demanded an end to the cover-ups, if it had called for proper compensation and a willingness to work closely with law enforcement agencies to send predators to jail, if it had urged remorse on the part of the church for the many victims who have taken their own lives, it may well have done some good. No one could ever accuse an organisation like the ACL of engaging in some left-wing plot to smear the Church; it could have spoken with authority on a long-running crime in which thousands of kids were raped and abused by people they were supposed to trust, and then disbelieved when they tried to reveal what had happened to them.

But that assumes the ACL is consistent and genuinely cares about children, rather than a front for the rankest homophobia.