Mike Baird is The Modern Homophobe

By Joseph Earp

Last week, the inevitable happened: I was finally banned from commenting on Mike Baird’s Facebook page. It was only a matter of time till I got the boot – I’ve been using every available opportunity to sling mud #CasinoMike’s way for more than a year now.

So no, I’m not surprised I got banned, though it did take me a while to work out exactly which straw broke the corrupt camel’s back. I’ve called him a gronk, suggested he is a secret S&M fetishist, and generally caused the poor interns manning his social media page grief.

So how did I cross the line?

After some solid thought, the answer finally dawned on me: I had used the ‘f’ word. Not ‘fuck’, but ‘fascist’. I had called Mr. Baird a fascist.

It’s an old rule of the internet that any discussion of politics will eventually involve someone calling someone else a ‘Nazi’. Had I denigrated my argument by calling Baird a fascist? Or was it a case of calling a spade a spade?

Let’s look at the facts. Mike Baird is a ‘moraliser’ – a leader who confuses total control with good leadership. His much maligned lockout laws are only the tip of a Titanic-sinking iceberg. Mike Baird thinks he knows better than you. Mike Baird thinks he has the right to alter the law to suit his morals. And his morals have no room for the LGTBQI community.

Though the internet is littered with quotes from Baird ‘supporting’ the LGBTQI cause, he is the posterboy for modern homophobia and the insidious discrimination that now rules politics as much as it rules the everyday LGBTQI experience. Sure, he’s gone on record to say “discrimination against any individual or group on the basis of race, religion or sexuality has no place in New South Wales” but he’s all bluff and bluster – the drunk uncle who tells the family at Christmas that he “likes those gays” but just doesn’t want them living near him.

“Members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community can continue to have the Government as a great supporter,” Baird says, but make no mistake – he only wants to support subservient members of the community; members who don’t make trouble.

He doesn’t, for example, support members of the LGBTQI community who want to get married – though he says he is open to a conscience vote, his “own conscience” says marriage is between a man and a woman. Nor does he support members of the LGBTQI community who want to adopt children.

Nor does he support younger members of the LGBTQI community who want to be taught how to feel safe with their own sexuality. “How on earth can our children be looking at this?” he wailed in support of the repeal of the Safe Schools program, a program that an independent panel deemed perfectly reasonable.

Nor does he support any film that shows tolerance and understanding of the LGBTQI community’s rights. He was one of the first to publically support the ridiculous Gayby Baby ban, though he admitted he was at ease with the film being shown “out of hours”.

And it’s exactly this kind of half-assed homophobia that makes him such a contemporary bigot. He’s constantly disguising his hatred with claims that he ‘understands’ and ‘accepts’ the LGBTQI community. He really likes us, folks. He promises he does. He just doesn’t want us to get married. Or have children. Or become accepted, understood members of contemporary society.

He’s happy for us to be gay off where he can’t see it happening. He’s happy for it to remain taboo. He’s happy to cause untold amounts of suffering to young members of the LGBTQI community – to tear down their idols and mentors, to paint them as undesirable elements of society, and to make them feel ashamed for being who they are.

Is Mike Baird a fascist? No. He’s much more than that: he’s an insidious fascist, a homophobe in disguise; a handsome family man with a broad smile and an even broader disregard for his constituents. He is the walking definition of the modern bigot; the poster-child for contemporary hatred.