NZ Skeptics Articles

Family First: The Consummate Crybully

Tim Atkin - 2 October 2023

Crybully: “A person who engages in intimidation, harassment, or other abusive behaviour while claiming to be a victim” - Wiktionary

Generally speaking, New Zealand is very accepting of gender and sexual diversity. Legal rights for gender and sexual minorities broadly are very progressive and, for some time now, government guidelines and policy have recommended acceptance in their approach, especially for health and education.

It is very common these days for people to have queer family members, friends or colleagues. Coming out of the closet, and the normalising of other kinds of gender expression and sexuality, shifted peoples’ attitudes in a way that conservative and religious bigots could not easily counter. When people have direct personal experience of queer people, it makes it harder to portray them as predatory, scary and degenerate.

That said, there is currently a fresh attempt to demonise the queer community, using trans people as the wedge issue to divide support among those who are otherwise accepting of gay and lesbian people. The specific framing of these issues comes from the religious right in the United States, but it has been repackaged by organisations such as Family First for a New Zealand audience.

This renewed campaign against queer acceptance might be having some effect, as the Gender Attitudes survey, undertaken by Research NZ and the National Council of Women of New Zealand from 2017 to 2021, indicates that people are less comfortable with gender and sexual diversity in 2021 than back in 2019. Below are two examples, using data from the survey where people were asked how comfortable they were with gender and sexual minorities as part of their family or becoming parents:

Although they are clearly a Christian lobby group, and their concerns line up completely with the issue set of Christian fundamentalists, Family First have built a formidable political machine which scrupulously avoids identifying itself as a Christian organisation. They know that New Zealanders generally aren’t moved by zealous arguments about God and sin. Instead, they tend to produce slick materials which claim to be making evidence or “common sense” based arguments, and they rarely use quotes from the bible.

Completely Indifferent to Facts and Evidence

Despite how Family First present themselves, it’s obvious they have a religiously-motivated agenda, and consequently have a complete indifference to the veracity of the facts and evidence they use to support their claims. Instead, they appear to throw out any argument they think might be convincing, in the hopes of scaring parents.

For example, when Family First opposed the HPV vaccine, they deployed the following arguments against it:

Family First don’t care about the truth of any of those claims, because under this veneer it is not really about the evidence. In their religious worldview, sex outside of marriage is sinful, so the government facilitating sin in any way by providing vaccination against HPV is also evil. They think the solution is simple; everyone should remain a virgin until they find another virgin to marry, and only ever have sex with that person. Family First’s motivation is not about preventing harm or dealing with the real world. Instead it is about following God’s rules and, if you don’t, it’s all your fault. In their view, women getting cancer is better than helping them avoid the consequences of their sin.

This is the same approach the group takes with gender and sexuality issues. The issue is framed as a parental rights issue, the right to free expression (in the case of same-sex wedding cakes), or a free speech question. Family First tends to obfuscate and lie about any of the inconvenient details, while simultaneously trying to push their view into the public consciousness.

Teacher Loses Registration Over Student’s Pronouns – A Case Study in Family First’s Deceptive Propaganda

Family First are currently fixated on the education curriculum, and in particular modules about sexuality and gender. Recently they have repeatedly used loaded language like “sexualising our children” and “compelled to use gender neutral pronouns”, which casts themselves as victims of a sinister plot by an evil government.

A recent example, emblematic of their wider approach, was the de-registering of a teacher after the teacher refused to use a student’s new name and pronouns. Family First represented the case as follows:

“A high school math teacher had his teaching registration cancelled after he refused to use the preferred pronouns and name for a 14-year-old student who was in the process of ‘transitioning’ from a biological girl to a boy.”

They also conducted a poll on the question:

“Should a teacher lose their teaching licence for misgendering a trans student (refusing to use their preferred pronoun or recognise their gender identity)?”

With the result:

However, Family First couldn’t resist lying about their own poll, and falsely claimed that:

“A new nationwide poll has found significant opposition to a decision which resulted in a teacher losing his teaching licence for refusing to recognise a student’s gender ‘identity’ and using the students preferred pronouns.”

“Two in three Kiwis (65%) said the teacher shouldn’t lose their licence…”

“Support for the teacher was strong amongst National (69%), ACT (76%) Labour (61%) and NZ First (70%) voters…”

The issue here is that their poll was not about this specific teacher and their case. It was a hypothetical question about an imagined teacher. By phrasing their results this way they have explicitly linked the poll’s results to the Teacher’s Council decision, when the poll question didn’t include any of that information.

The Facts of the Case

The proceedings of the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal case are public, and only 19 pages long.

The facts, which both parties agreed on, are as follows:

The teacher’s submission was quoted in its entirety, and gives a clearer idea of the kind of person he is. In his submission he argued that it would be serious misconduct and child abuse to use the student’s preferred pronouns and name. However the largest section of his submission (over 1000 words) was titled “Homosexuality”, and was peppered with bible quotes about the devil, “shameful acts” and which acts God considers an “abomination”.

The Decision

The tribunal had to decide whether the teacher’s conduct amounted to “serious misconduct” under Section 9 of the Teaching Council Rules 2016. In this case, the criteria the tribunal considered were:

The legislation also states that the conduct may be:

The tribunal decided that it was serious misconduct because:

The Consequences

Once serious misconduct was substantiated, the tribunal needed to decide whether the teacher should have their registration cancelled, or instead have some kind of mediation and training on how to better deal with the situation in the future.

The tribunal has stated that they are not moving to punish the teacher for his response or views, but that they must consider “whether he has insight and rehabilitative prospects” that they could address. They conclude that “the only answer to that is no.”

To anyone reading the teacher’s submission, it is obvious he has no interest in finding some way to quietly let the student exist as they are, without him intervening. The teacher’s self-righteous zeal, equating the name change and pronouns to child abuse, and persistent refusal to follow school instructions, mean the only sensible option remaining is to cancel his teacher registration.

Conclusion

As Family First ramp up their campaign around election time, they appear to be hoping that, unlike with gay and lesbian people during the same-sex marriage debate, there aren’t enough trans people or drag queens to counteract their hateful messaging. Empathy and evidence are not on their side, so instead they adopt crybully tactics and perpetually play the victim in order to marginalise and demonise queer people. They misrepresent facts and warn of a future where your children are taken from you to be “sexualised” and turned against you by the state.

The teacher registration case is a perfect example of their tactics. The case was clearly unprofessional behaviour by a teacher who refused to listen to the student, the school or the tribunal, and was determined to be imposing their religious morality onto the student. In his belligerent screed to the tribunal, he said that he would never stop, so there was no other option except revoking registration. Plenty of other conservative Christian teachers manage to do their job without such issues. However, this teacher had multiple opportunities to avoid this result but rejected them all. Family First, by misrepresenting their poll, have portrayed the decision as an injustice that most New Zealanders disagree with.

Family First craft their message to persuade low-information voters in a way that can also sway some non-religious people into thinking that something sinister is afoot. I believe that most New Zealanders, given the full context of the case, would agree with the tribunal’s decision. However, the data about how comfortable people are with diversity indicates there has been a recent decrease in acceptance. It’s not enough to simply point out their facts and evidence are wrong, because Family First don’t care, and aren’t trying to convince people of their facts. Their end goal is to undermine acceptance of queer people, and make the public think they are morally evil. As a result we should not only expose the misinformation of groups like Family First, but also be advocates for empathy and acceptance, because that’s what will ultimately render their propaganda ineffective.