Hitler hated homosexuals too
Homophobia is alive and well in Australia's governments. It was flushed out by the January 31 ruling by the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Tribunal that a lesbian who had been refused a sperm donor by a Queensland fertility clinic had been "treated as less than equal" to a heterosexual woman.
The responses to the ruling by deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, Queensland's health minister Mike Horan and federal minister for health Michael Wooldridge verged on hysterical.
Lesbians' use of fertility clinics is comparable to Adolf Hitler's desire to create a super-race, says Horan. "The whole thing has got off the rails", says Fischer, "society should not have to subsidise their [lesbians] child-bearing whim". Medicare benefits for lesbians seeking access to donor sperm may have to be withdrawn on "moral" grounds, says Wooldridge.
Backing the Queensland government's moves to close a "lifestyle loop-hole" by banning access to fertility clinics for all but "traditional families", the Australian Family Association claimed the tribunal's ruling would threaten the child's well-being by placing it in an "abnormal set-up".
These thoroughly irrational and reactionary ideas — that "real" women have a "healthy" desire to bear children, but lesbians just have whims, and that "real" women provide "normal" and healthy environments for bringing up children, but lesbians can't be loving mothers — are being trotted out today as part of a bigger agenda.
The vilification of lesbians fits hand in glove with recent moves to limit all women's reproductive rights. Last year, the federal government cut funding to the Family Planning Association and parliament passed legislation to restrict the availability of the contraceptive RU486. Attempts are now under way to withdraw the Medicare rebate for abortion and to generalise the South Australian abortion laws — the most restrictive in the country — to all states.
While heterosexual women are being more actively encouraged (by the new family tax package and funding cuts to community child-care centres and the Family Court) to get married, stay married, bear children and stay at home, lesbians are being denied the right to be mothers.
Both sides of the coin are part of the right wing's economic and social agenda of rolling back the gains of the women's liberation movement. In particular, it is a campaign to regain the moral and legal high ground for the traditional family form in which lesbians don't exist and women are defined as wives and mothers — that is, as unpaid providers of child-care, aged care, nursing, cleaning and a myriad of other social services.
Even the Catholic Church has gone on the offensive — in a major reversal of church policy, the Vatican announced last week that it is now OK for women to interfere with the "natural" reproductive process — no, not to prevent a pregnancy, but to undergo an operation to unblock fallopian tubes so that they can fall pregnant.
Women's right to control their bodies is the most fundamental of rights. Without it, the right to equal opportunities for education, employment, good health and a decent standard of living do not amount to much.
Every undermining of a woman's right to choose whether or not and when to bear children is an attack on all women — whether lesbian, heterosexual or bisexual. Lesbians' rights — to bear children (or not), to access public health services and benefits, and to make free and informed choices about how they live — are fundamental women's rights and must be uncompromisingly defended.
To use an old slogan which is as timely as ever: Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate.
By Lisa Macdonald