Day: September 4, 2010

There is no getting around reality.

Someone decides it is insulting to call people whose intellectual development has been retarded ‘retarded.’ So we are told to call them ‘intellectually handicapped.’

Soon ‘intellectually handicapped’ becomes a form of insult. So we are told to call them ‘slow learners.’

A couple of years later, every time you want  to insult your mates you say ‘Looking like a slow learner there Joe!’

So that term naturally becomes unacceptable, and anyone who has ever used it is obviously insensitive and uncaring.

Let’s call them ‘special children’ instead. Let’s have ‘special schools’ for ‘special children.’

Scene in schoolyard: ‘You’re a special child!’ ‘I am not. I’m telling.’

There is no getting around reality.

So when you are no longer supposed to call homosexuals homosexuals because that might be insulting, and instead you are supposed to call them ‘gay,’ what is going to happen to that word?

Any school teacher can tell you that the worst possible insult in the playground is beng called gay. You can say someone is lame, you can insult his mother, or her father. But but if one child calls another child gay, be prepared for trouble.

Whether being gay really is gay, I don’t know. Most homosexuals of my acquaintance don’t demonstrate a a high level of satisfaction with their lives, so I suspect it might be.

But they really are gay, the ones who objected to principal Garry Martin’s replacing the word ‘gay’ in the Kookaburra song with the word ‘fun.’

Firstly, when the song was written ‘gay’ pretty much meant fun. Remember The Gay Divorcee? OK, there aren’t many of them either. Or the Gay Nineties? Not the recent nineties, the ones before?

No? Well, you know what I mean.

Before the word gay, a good word, was hijacked, it meant happy, light-hearted, fun.

Now it just means gay.

Marion Sinclair meant that a kookaburra’s life was carefree, fun. So Principal Garry was being true to the original text. And Kookaburra, fun to sing though it is, is not Shakespeare.

Secondly, this was about children singing. Children singing. Children, at school, singing together.

The word gay is an extreme insult in the playground. So naturally the kids were rolling around the floor laughing when asked to sing about a gay kookaburra.

So why not do the sensible thing and replace the word ‘gay’ with the word ‘fun?’

Garry describes what he was thinking:

“I wasn’t trying to incite or insult gay people, or trying to violate the copyright of Larrikin Music; it was just a decision at the time that I thought would minimise a disruptive atmosphere with grades one and and two.”

But after a controversy in which it has been suggested he is trying to make gay people invisible:

In an interview on the Nine Network, Mr Martin was backtracking on his decision, saying that perhaps he should have discussed the true meaning of the word with the children.

So Garry now thinks he would have been doing the right thing if he discussed homosexuality with year ones and twos?

Well, that’s what the brownshorts wanted.

No, Garry no. You were right the first time.