Conservatives who rail against ‘Marxist cultural relativism’ need to watch Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich. This unabashedly queer film follows the Baader-Meinhof gang, a far-left terrorist group, in its mission to kidnap the son of a wealthy industrialist. After a series of mishaps and bombastic speeches by its fanatical leader the group eventually disbands, but not before all of its members are forced to have several bouts of gay sex with each other. Heterosexual gang members become homosexuals in pornographic detail, while agitprop slogans such as ‘heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses’ strobe across the screen. Such an unholy alliance of sexually explicit imagery and communist propaganda is probably close to what right-wingers imagine is the end point of something like Safe Schools.

Has an educational resource intended to combat bullying in schools ever gained this much ire? A long-time bugbear of Senator Cory Bernardi, Safe Schools garnered more controversy early in 2016 when certain opinions of one of its co-founders, Roz Ward, were revealed. She claimed the Australian flag was racist and expressed her hope that one day a red communist flag would fly above Parliament House. Those comments, made on a private social media account and leaked to the media, were a gift to Bernardi and certain journalists looking for confirmation of the program’s ‘real’ purpose: left-wing indoctrination. Ward was suspended from her job at La Trobe University, and later reinstated after significant backlash. But not before a barrage of criticism and comment whirled about print, online and social media. The common refrain, at least in the right-wing media, was that teaching children about gender fluidity and some basic tenets of queer theory was a sign of a Marxist conspiracy. If you know a bit about Marxism and a bit about queer theory, this accusation might seem utterly bizarre. Well, it is.