Gay bashing is wrong. Straight bashing is also wrong.

For decades, gay bashing was rampant. Homosexuality was criminalised. The state followed grown people into their homes to inspect their private behaviour. Whether we like it or not, it’s nobody’s business what consenting adults do in private when there are no victims. That was wrong.

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.”
— Thomas Jefferson

The Brief Peace of the 1990s

Then it mostly stopped. Somewhere around the 1990s, society approached a centre point. People realised you have to be civil and respect difference. Live and let live. Don’t attack people for being different. Mind your own business.

For a brief moment, we had peace.

The peace didn’t last.

When the Pendulum Kept Swinging

Shortly afterwards, the counterattack started. Gay marriage. Gay adoption. Surrogacy. Forcing people to accept all of this. And now, forcing people to pretend they agree that a bearded man with chest hair is a lady.

It’s like two sides in a war. The attack from one side stopped—that was good. But the moment it stopped, the counterattack began. We’ve been in it for decades.

Now, people around the world are being persecuted merely for stating simple truths. The pendulum swung from persecution to protection, then kept swinging into compulsion.

The Law Has No Special Powers

“The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose!”
— Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (1850)

Frederick Bastiat wrote something in 1850 that most people still don’t understand: the law is merely the collective power of individuals to protect themselves. Nothing more.

What the Law Can Do

The law only has the powers that any single person has. A person can stop someone from attacking them. They can defend themselves. They can stop someone from stealing their property.

The courts can catch a thief or attacker on behalf of the state. They can lock someone up as punishment. But they can’t go out and attack someone else or take something from someone else—any more than an individual person can.

No Special Rights

One person doesn’t have more rights than another person. One country doesn’t have more rights than another country. And the law does not have more powers than any individual people.

Bastiat’s framework is simple: you have the right to life, liberty, and property. The law exists only to protect those rights. The moment it goes beyond that, it becomes perverted.

Three Cases, One Principle

Case One: The Baker and Compelled Labour

Consider the baker who refused to design a wedding cake celebrating a same-sex marriage.

He wasn’t refusing to sell them bread or everyday commerce. He wasn’t punishing them for their behaviour. They were trying to force him to perform a specialised service—to help them celebrate their relationship, to partake in an activity he didn’t agree with.

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
— George Washington

The law can’t force someone to do something. It’s only there to stop people from attacking other people or taking their property. That’s it.

It’s like paying an pacifist artist to paint you a picture of a bloody battle. The artist says, “I don’t want to draw that picture.” You respond, “No, you have to, or I’ll make the courts force you to pay me money.”

That’s the same as saying, “If you don’t do something for me that you don’t like, I’m going to punch you in the face.”

Violence by Any Other Name

Whether it’s you physically attacking someone or having the law attack them, the outcome is the same. At the end of the day, the law is always enforced by violence. Refuse the court order? You’ll be dragged off to jail.

If you’re trying to have laws violently applied to someone who hasn’t infringed on your right to life, liberty or property, you’re not the victim. You’re the aggressor.

The United States Supreme Court recognised this distinction. Refusing to design a special cake with celebratory words is different from refusing to sell any cake at all.

Case Two: Surrogacy and the Enslaved Child

Now consider surrogacy.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the sale of children observes that commercial surrogacy as currently practised usually constitutes sale of children under international human rights law.

This triggers legitimate use of law under Bastiat’s framework. A third party is being harmed: the child.

When Harm Justifies Intervention

The child has been kidnapped—purchased as a slave for personal gratification. Even if they’re not abusing the child, the mere fact of taking the child from its mother is kidnapping. The fact that they’ve paid a poor person in desperate circumstances makes no difference.

“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”
— Abraham Lincoln

Surrogacy is kidnapping and slavery. It doesn’t matter who does it. Everything must be applied consistently. There is no such thing as special rights for special groups.

The Child’s Right to Know

A child has the right to grow up knowing who its people are. Its mum and dad, or adopted parents who should tell the child where it comes from from the very beginning—to avoid a culture of shame.

They should be open and let the child have the freedom to get to know who they want as they grow up. Everyone has that right.

The Surrogacy Deception

In surrogacy, people act selfishly, using others to get what they want.

If surrogacy was such a great thing, the people who say it’s good would encourage their twenty-year-old daughters to do it. Tell your eighteen-year-old to take two years off school and be a surrogate mother.

But they wouldn’t. Because they know it’s bad.

So they go to poor countries and call it a “free commercial arrangement.” They’re using economic power to get poor people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Packaging Doesn’t Change the Crime

It doesn’t matter where the child comes from or how the transaction is structured. No one has the right to deny someone knowledge of their background and origins. To do that is kidnapping.

If you kidnap someone as a slave, no money changes hands. You might say it’s not a commercial transaction. But it’s all the same whether you kidnap the person yourself or buy them from someone else who kidnapped them.

If someone shoots someone, painting the bullet pink and drawing a flower on it doesn’t make them any less dead. No matter what you call it—calling it surrogacy, calling it anything else—if you’ve intentionally taken a child away from its kin, that’s harm.

When Legitimate Adoption Occurs

Sometimes young parents or those facing difficulties freely choose to give a child up for adoption. They don’t believe they can raise the child, and they refuse that responsibility.

In that case, when someone else—a loving mother and father—steps in to take that responsibility, that’s a good thing.

Every child has the right to a mother and father. In some cases they don’t get one, but that should be the pinnacle of all laws related to adoption. That is what children should have, and what they must get in any adoption arrangement.

The Truth Sets Everyone Free

But regardless of the scenario, when a child is adopted, the child has the right to know the truth. Everyone has the right to know the truth about their background.

“Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.”
— George Washington

Smart adoptive parents tell the child the truth from the outset. They may even take the child to see the birth mother when possible, letting the child know their relatives and the true story.

There’s no hidden horror lurking in the background. By using the truth to inoculate against fear, they recognise the child ultimately has the right to choose their own destiny. They’re not parents by force—they’re parents whilst honouring that child’s autonomy.

Most Western states and countries increasingly recognise the right of the child to know who the birth parents are. But that’s not enough. The child must be told the truth.

Surrogacy: The Opposite of Legitimate Adoption

Surrogacy is the opposite. People custom-create a scenario that never had to happen—for their own gain. They want a child who’s not theirs. The mother agrees because she needs the money.

That’s a crime. Whether or not the law recognises it as a crime, they’ve infringed on someone else’s rights. In any situation where someone infringes on someone else’s rights, it doesn’t matter what the law says—crime has occurred. Nothing any fake law says can change that.

These days we’re seeing two men “adopting” a child from a surrogate mother. That’s an obvious and open crime where a child is being denied the right to its true parents.

If the child were told the truth—”we bought you from your parents, we paid them to have you and then took you away”—would the child not hate the fake so-called parents who did that?

We’ve even seen cases reported in Australian media where three men in a “throuple” relationship fought for all three to have parental rights to their children. In California, three dudes “adopted” a child, and are now “fighting for their regional government to recognise the parental rights of all three men.”

It doesn’t matter what gets allowed by the law. There’s always someone else claiming to be a victim, that the system isn’t fair to them. For these people, it’s all about them. They don’t really care about the child.

Anyone who really cares about children would say: children belong with their mothers and fathers. Anyone who wants to intentionally create a situation other than that is an abuser and a criminal, regardless of what the law says.

Case Three: Compelled Speech and Gender

Nobody has the right to force someone else to tell a lie. Full stop.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
— George Orwell

It doesn’t matter whether it’s legal penalties or social consequences. People have the right to free association. You can’t force people to hang out with people they don’t want to hang out with.

The Politeness Trap

People are constructing scenarios where they’re forcing others to agree with things that are not true. Disagree? You’ll be penalised because someone was offended, or a “protected class” was offended.

But there is no such thing as special rights for special people.

You might choose to use someone’s preferred pronouns out of politeness. In business, someone says they’re a lady but you don’t think they look like one. For polite reasons, you might assume they are what they say they are.

But if you don’t, and if they take offence, they don’t have to deal with you either. They can refuse. You are both free. You can’t force association. People must choose for themselves.

When the Mask Slips

These days, we know it’s a piss-take. We see men in dresses with beards and chest hair demanding that someone else say they’re a woman.

You cannot force someone else to lie.

There are no special rights for special groups. Everyone has exactly the same rights.

The Uncomfortable Middle

This position is one of non-aggression.

It’s not aggressive conservatism—it doesn’t want the state criminalising private behaviour between consenting adults.

It’s not aggressive progressivism—it won’t pretend that compelling speech or celebrating every lifestyle choice is somehow liberation.

“The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.”
— Thomas Sowell

One Consistent Principle

You cannot attack someone who hasn’t attacked you first. You cannot take someone’s property. You cannot force someone’s labour or speech.

And when a genuinely vulnerable third party is being harmed—like a child denied knowledge of their origins—that’s when legitimate intervention begins.

Where We Are Now

The pendulum swung from persecution to protection. Then it kept swinging.

We’re now at a point where stating obvious truths can get you dragged before courts or human resources departments. Where refusing to participate in celebrations you disagree with makes you a bigot. Where economic power coerces poor women into bearing children for wealthy couples.

Rights are simpler than some would want you to believe. People don’t have the right to make other people do things. Only the right not to have things done to them.

The Control of Information

The Victorian government, for example, was happy for kids to watch all manner of social media when it was under heavy ideological censorship—Twitter and Facebook controlled by Biden Administration censorship directives, constantly pushing the woke agenda and the Gender Crap.

But now that X broke free of that control, and Facebook loosened its grip, suddenly there are simple memes floating around everywhere. Memes that show the truth in a simple way that can’t be denied, mocking the fakeness and lies.

That resonates with kids who know they’re being sold complex lies—lies that can be revealed by a simple meme. In 2024, papers were complaining that kids are becoming more “right-wing”—which really means they’re not extreme left. If you’re not extreme left, you’re extreme right in their minds.

The government wants schools to be the sole purveyors of information to children. They’re hoping kids watch all the woke content on Netflix and don’t hear too much from their parents.

But kids are mercilessly mocking the woke ideology and the Gender Crap that some teachers are trying to push.

The School Library Battle

They’re very happy to fill school libraries with books promoting their ideology. But when regular families stand up and say they don’t want their kids taught Gender Crap, suddenly the media claims schools are being “taken over by religious people.”

It’s not a religious takeover. It’s just regular people who’ve always been against this stuff. Most people are happy to respect the rights of others—they’re the ones who supported “live and let live” in the 1990s. They just don’t want their children indoctrinated with ideology that tells them to cut off body parts.

Being “Groomed in Ideology”

The Australian federal government’s Step Together website warns about “right-wing extremism” online, asking: “At what point do you think a young person starts to show the difference between being an avid gamer versus getting pulled down a rabbit hole of being groomed in ideology?”

They call it “being groomed in ideology” when kids question what they’re being taught in school.

But they didn’t call it grooming when schools were telling young kids to take hormones and have irreversible hormone treatment. They didn’t call it grooming when every school in Victoria had documents stating the school could facilitate a child’s gender transition without the parents’ knowledge.

They’re lying to these kids. Making them think it’s a solution that will actually work—when doctors can hardly reattach a severed finger successfully, let alone create complex body parts from nothing. Body parts that naturally have systems to maintain cleanliness and prevent infection. The fake man-made constructions don’t have any of that, leading to serious infection problems that are indeed documented.

The government thinks that’s completely acceptable.

But the moment children start to read information questioning unlimited immigration, or banks creating money out of nothing, or foreign countries—especially strategic threats—buying up all our land? Suddenly they imagine kids marching around wearing swastikas.

The Real Reason for the Social Media Ban

In 2024, papers were complaining that kids are becoming more “right-wing.” In 2025, as the government’s own Step Together website shows, they’re scared that young people are being “groomed” by ideology—meaning anything that questions their narrative.

And now, in 2025, Australia passed the world’s strictest social media ban—prohibiting anyone under 16 from accessing platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Snapchat and Reddit.

For all this time, the government didn’t care about kids on social media. They were very happy for kids to be on it when they thought it was going their way—when they thought kids were being swamped with woke content and Gender Crap.

But then the censorship dropped. What they thought was a good tool to push their ideology started allowing kids to get a free flow of truth. That wasn’t convenient for them.

So now they want to ban it.

But it’s not really about protecting children. They don’t like anyone being able to talk freely on social media. The ban requires connecting every account to government ID. That’s the real goal—so they can use force to stop people expressing themselves freely.

They can’t do that if they don’t know who’s talking online.

Rights Are Simple

Rights are simpler than some would have you believe.

“The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”
— John F. Kennedy

What Rights Really Mean

To have a right to do something means that when you do it, you are not in the wrong. You’re not harming anyone else. Therefore it is not wrong to do it, therefore you have the right to do it.

It’s not right to take a child away from its parents needlessly. If you do something that’s not right, then you’re in the wrong. Nobody has the right to do something that is wrong.

People don’t have the right to make other people do things. Only the right not to have things done to them.