Yesterday, as reported in various media outlets, a member of the Marriage Alliance gave a School bus driver ‘gifts’ for each of the children who boarded his bus. The bus driver handed the wrapped gifts to each child who boarded the bus, as he was asked to do.

When the children got home and showed their parents the gifts, they were anti-safe school propaganda.

Regardless of what you think about the necessity of Safe Schools, or whether it’s appropriate, the behaviour of the Marriage Alliance is not acceptable.

Take a moment to reverse this. Change the scenario. If the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby were responsible for providing Christmas wrapped Pro Safe School pamphlets to young children, all hell would be currently breaking loose.

Groups like the Marriage Alliance feel it is their God-given right to have their voices heard. And that’s fine. It is their right, under Australian law, to be free to make their voices and opinions heard. It is not acceptable – nor their right – to approach a school bus and distribute propaganda any more than it is the right of the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby to do they same thing.

The Anti-Safe Schools, Anti-LGBT Rights groups bare no responsibility for the damage they are causing. They act with impunity in Australia, poisoning the conversations around LGBT rights, around creating safe schools where students who are LGBT are not the victims of daily torture and torment from their peers. They inflame the hatred through their deliberate muddying of the conversation, invoking hate as a national discourse.

While children who are questioning their sexualities  are being bullied into their graves in this country, people like the Marriage Alliance are free to peddle their propaganda to school children, while invoking the “won’t somebody think of the children” mantra of the truly uneducated.

The school that was targeted is one that caters to students throughout their education career. From Kindergarten to Year 12. Students on the bus that was targeted range in age and could well be like the most recent victim of homophobic bullying, Tyrone Unsworth, who took his life less than a month ago, after years of constant bullying.

To organisations like The Marriage Alliance, children like Tyrone are collateral damage in a war. They don’t count. Their deaths do not matter. Tyrone was 13 when he committed suicide. At the time of his death there was much written about the abuse and bullying he suffered. After his death his parents and friends are still being trolled on a social media page set up in remembrance of a boy who died too young.

Yesterday, on the school ride home, there was a Tyrone. Statistically, there had to be. A teenager, being bullied, questioning himself and fearful of tomorrow who was handed a piece of propaganda about the gay agenda. A young person who got home, opened the package, and realised they had brought the bullying in the front door with them.

If those who disagree with the Safe Schools program were serious about doing something, they would sit down with those in favour of it and create a mutually beneficial program. One that took all into consideration and taught acceptance and support. But that doesn’t play into their agenda.

I hear a lot, we all do, about the Gay Agenda. About the need to convert kids to the ‘gay lifestyle.’ Both of those sentiments make me sick to my stomach. Trust me when I tell you the LGBT community don’t need to ‘convert’ your kids. We are not made by external forces. We are not weak-willed individuals who are easily manipulated to go against the ‘normal’.

LGBT people are some of the strongest people I know. We’ve fought our way out of hell. We were raised in a world that told us were freaks, that told us we were wrong, weak. We have fought more battles in our own minds than people like The Marriage Alliance can even contemplate.

For some of us; we lost everything. Families, friends, self esteem and confidence. For others, we look at the acceptance of our families and friends and we hear how ‘lucky’ we are not to have been thrown away by those who gave us life.

There is no ‘Gay Lifestyle’ to choose, because choice has nothing to do with it.

What always makes me wonder about the people who believe the LGBT community chooses to be gay is when did those who are heterosexual weigh up the pros and cons and choose to be ‘straight.’

Was it really a choice for you? Was it something you went to bed and cried yourself to sleep over? Was it something you fought against, prayed for death, begged to change only to realise you couldn’t chance a thing? Was choosing to be heterosexual something you ever gave a thought to or was it just the way you were?

The miseducation of the fearful, that sexuality can be ‘converted’ is ridiculous. You can not convert anyone into being Gay, or Lesbian, or Bisexual, or Transgender any more than you can convince someone to change the colour of their eyes, or the colour of their skin.

But working together, for equality, isn’t in the remit of groups that invoke ‘God’ as a mask for hate. Groups that use words like ‘traditional’ to prevent equality. Groups like The Marriage Alliance do not want equality, they want the war. They want the ‘they’re coming to steal your children in the night’, because without the war, they have no purpose, no meaning.

Whether you’re pro safe school or against it, that’s fine. It’s your right as an adult to make the choices you make in the raising of your children. If you don’t agree with teaching your child that everyone is important, that everyone has the right to be equal, that no one should be judged because of their sexuality, their religion or the colour of their skin, then that is your right.

But we should all be able to agree that children coming home from school on a bus should not have propaganda of any sort given to them by a stranger.

Going into a school, handing out christmas-wrapped propaganda is unacceptable. If you can’t argue your message clearly without resorting to these sort of tactics you’re already losing. Leave the kids, and the holidays, alone.