Sophie York was the face of the Marriage Alliance, one of the leading groups of opposed to same-sex marriage in Australia, now she’s running for a spot in the federal senate as part of Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives Party.
Last night York appeared on the Sky News program Outsiders. The show which regularly loses hosts for saying offensive things was originally hosted by Rowan Dean, Mark Latham and Ross Cameron, but now only Dean remains.
The program is often an echo-chamber of right wing consensus where panelists discuss their opposition to marriage equality, their dislike of immigration, and share their beliefs that human-made climate change is a hoax.
So Sophie York seemed quite surprised last night when the other guest on the program didn’t back up her views against same sex marriage and opposition to transgender rights.
On the anniversary of Australians voting ‘Yes’ in the postal survey, host Rowan Dean said the changes in the marriage laws had made society switch from “tolerating” same-sex relations to be being “forced to advocate” for them.
York said throughout the campaign she had warned of the unintended consequences of allowing same-sex couples to marry, and we were now seeing a significant change in the way sex education was being delivered.
“Sex education, which is no longer about where babies come from, but it’s going to be about fringe adult sexual techniques and educating children that way, or teaching children about being gender fluid and being confused about whether they are a boy or a girl.” York said.
Appearing alongside York and Dean was former Fox and Friends host Anna Kooiman, who appeared to surprise York when she voiced a different opinion.
“Maybe it will teach them to be accepting of people who are different than them?” Kooiman challenged York.
York said children didn’t need to be “saturated in fringe adult concepts”, but Kooiman responded by saying acceptance of LGBTI people was becoming mainstream, and argued that LGBTI people have been around for all of humankind.
“You think everyone who is gay is that way because they saw some weird movie or something?” Kooiman challenged York.
The Australian Conservatives candidate said children should not know about transgender people or adult’s sexuality, to which Kooiman asked if York thought children of gay parents should have positive examples of families like theirs.
York accused host Rowan Dean of setting her up, before saying that now people were trying to remove the words mother and father out of the English language.
Check out the exchange on the network’s Twitter feed.
.@RealSophieYork on same-sex marriage: We said, ‘Is this going to lead to teaching children to be confused about whether they’re a boy or a girl?’@annakooiman: It would teach them to be accepting of people who are different to them.
MORE: https://t.co/YWnTs3byFG #outsiders pic.twitter.com/eXS1U4z32I
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) November 15, 2018
