DEAR MARGARET COURT

Dear Margaret Court,

I've refrained from commenting at length on your comments about the LGBTIQ community and the subject of marriage equality. This is because I see no point in debating faith-based fanatics because they are detached from reason and choose to ignore proven fact. They too easily embrace fantasy and folk tales, even in the face of contemporary experience. This allows them to entertain fantastic claims, absurd ideas and ridiculous conspiracies.

Also I've noticed my queer peers have unleashed on you with a frightening fortitude, an almost obsessive outrage. You see, I only speak publicly when I have something exceptional or different to say. Like you, I'm enamoured with my own opinion and I will not tolerate it being lost in a chorus of complaint, like the one that has greeted your intention to boycott businesses that support marriage equality. But since then you've doubled down and blamed the LGBTIQ community for everything from terrorising CEOs to brainwashing children with Nazi mind control. I mean, bitch, really?

Margaret, your asinine attacks have demonstrated the true nature of your absurd opinions and the scope of your spiteful world view. You are so busy attacking other people who are different to you that you now live in a parallel universe, and have become remote from real lived experience.

Allow me to take the opportunity to reacquaint you with reality.

1. The Holy Bible is not a marriage manual. There is little in the Bible on the subject of marriage that in any way resembles our current laws or customs. Certainly, the Bible advocates marriage between a man and woman, but it also advocates polygamy, pedophilia, slavery, rape and incest under the auspices of the same institution. In fact if you married in the ways permitted by the Bible, you would almost certainly end up in jail.

Why do you insist on promoting a book that goes against the laws of our land? (It's almost like your advocating religious law over legislation, like it's Sharia Law or something.) For instance Adam and Eve, who you blindly put forward as the quintessential couple, spawned the most incestuous family on record. Let's face it, they were the only family in the world so who else did they fuck but each other? Think about it, take all the time you need.

2. The LGBTIQ community is not a movement. Sure we're a political force and powerful enemy as you have no doubt experienced in recent times. But we do not mobilise the way you think we do, or even the way we once did, and certainly not the way you conservative Christians do.

The conservative Christian movements are among the most effective lobbyists at large, and are incredibly effective despite their diminishing numbers. You should be acknowledged and congratulated for this. You fight hard and long. You have to. You are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of popular opinion; you are on the losing side.

You had a good run, but in our secular country, your ideas no longer have supremacy and given your opinions are extreme for even the Christian community, you are a minority within a minority who think they represent a majority.

No doubt the extraordinary rise in acceptance of LGBTIQ community in recent decades must be confusing and shocking to you. We must be funded by some superpac, we must have an army of tireless activists, skewing the opinions of politicians and business leaders, corrupting children and indoctrinating youth with some kind of voodoo. The truth is in fact much more boring, because we have become ourselves, much more boring. Which leads me to my final point ....

3. The LGBTIQ community is not that interesting. You think we're rabid revolutionaries with a strident agenda. We must be bullies (no we just have a better argument). Certainly when we burst out of the shadows and onto the streets, we rioted in response to violence, we lobbied to change laws, we once fought as long as hard as you do now.

But in the end we each did the most revolutionary act in our lives: we came out. That was it. That was the thing that altered the arc of our lives and changed our place in history. Quite simply put, in the last 50 years, scores of people attracted to the same sex, or who wanted control of their own gender, have come out. And the more people who came out, the more normal we became, the more familiar we became.

And the more familiar we became, the less we had to fight. We may get sassy on social media, we occasionally march if the weather's good and there's yum cha nearby, we may even have the odd activist out there stirring shit.

But for the most part the LGBTIQ movement no longer exists, at least not in the way it once did. We in Australia are simply waiting for the tide of history and popular opinion to tip in our favour, which it has in every likeminded constituency in the world. We are not fighting for our rights, we are simply biding our time.

If you are looking for the LGBTIQ movement, you will find it currently curled on the couch with their partner and two and a half fur babies, eating Thai takeaway, with their feet up on the coffee table watching Netflix. We have not revolted, if nothing else, we have assimilated. Why else would we be asking for something as bourgeoise and anachronistic as marriage?

So Margaret, enjoy your moment it won't last long. Christian Conservatism may currently have an unrepresentative hold on the Australian government but that won't continue. You and your kind will fade while my kind gain strength by the day. And just think all we had to do was come out, be authentic, be ourselves.

I understand that as a champion sportsperson, you are not accustomed to losing, especially when your opponents aren't playing as hard as you are, but the game is already over. We are the inevitable champions and you will now have to get used to losing because that is all you have left.

Yours in queerness,

Kerry Bashford