The pro-family movement should take a leaf out of the Green-Left playbook and step up its parliamentary representation. My speech at the World Congress of Families in Chisinau, Moldova.

It is a privilege to be here in Chisinau (pronounced Kishenov). I want to thank Brian Brown and the World Congress of Families team for the opportunity.

I want to thank them for their leadership of the global pro-family movement.

This movement provides such hope in times where political and cultural elites grow ever more hostile to the idea that the natural family is indispensable to civil society and the common good.

Two days ago my colleague and I took a guided tour of Chisinau. Our guide was a 56-year-old man who well remembers the Soviet era.

He said anyone who spoke up for property rights as the Soviets confiscated property and sent people to the gulags, including our guide’s father-in-law, were demonised as crazy and insane.

Seeing this, most Moldavans decided just to get along with the Communists - nodding their heads but in their hearts nursing their desire for freedom and truth.

Our guide said there was no resistance movement – no Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa-type figures.

Fast forward to today and the Marxists, now re-badged as cultural Marxists (because people didn’t much like gulags), are still with us.

In my country if you think there are two genders – male and female – and that marriage is a man-woman project you are demonised as crazy and insane.

We are not shipped to a gulag but a human rights commission will use the force of anti-discrimination law to supress our thought and speech.

The question for us in the West is are we going to build a resistance movement to cultural lies or are we going to go along to get along?

I am from Australia, a nation of 25 million people inhabiting a continent with the same land mass as continental USA.

It took me 30 hours to get here.

I am now living in the beautiful sub-tropical city of Brisbane in my home State of Queensland.

But for 10 years until the start of this year, I lived in our nation’s capital city, Canberra, where I worked for an advocacy organisation for Christian and family values called the Australian Christian Lobby.

After years of sustained political and media pressure, our conservative government last year caved in to LGBTIQA+ political movement.

As a circuit breaker to the relentless calls for “marriage equality” the government of then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull allowed a national plebiscite or people’s vote to resolve the issue once and for all.

Malcolm Turnbull and the overwhelming majority of his government MPs supported redefining marriage. Fifty-two percent of them even voted against freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of parental rights provisions in the legislation which ultimately enacted same-sex marriage.

They were conservatives in name only like the scourge of RINO’s (Republicans in Name Only) in the US Congress.

Our Coalition for Marriage fought a valiant rear-guard action but in the end we lost the vote by 62 per cent to 38 per cent. 7.8 million people voted Yes, 4.9 million voted No.

We were the last domino in the Anglosphere to fall to the rainbow political juggernaut that has all but overwhelmed western nations.

Thank God for Eastern Europe which is resisting & proactively fighting back.

There is no doubt that the capitulation of western nations to same-sex marriage had a big influence on the decision Australians made.

But one of the most significant reasons we lost was because we simply did not have enough advocates both inside and outside of the parliament to sustain a pro-marriage public discourse.

There is an old saying in Australian politics that goes like this: “you can’t fatten the pig on market day”.

This means that to win elections, you must be drawing hearts and minds to your cause in the years leading up to election day.

Despite running a disciplined and unified campaign with the truth on our side, we could not do in three months what the other side had been doing for 30 years.

By the time the plebiscite campaign was launched, almost every pro-marriage politician on the Left of politics had switched sides.

The capitulation (or to use Obama’s term - evolution) of socially conservative politicians on the Left was breath-taking in its speed.

A similar thing was happening on the Right and what resistance remained was largely silent when it mattered.

Silence was the easier option, including for Scott Morrison, our latest Prime Minister (our revolving door Prime Ministership is another story).

As a senior government minister and a Christian Morrison last year declared his opposition to same-sex marriage but then also declared he would take no part in the three-month campaign.

Meanwhile his pro-same-sex marriage colleagues daily joined the fight for their side, leaving us to languish without heavy political fire-power backing us up.

The Rainbow Left won in large part because they captured our parliament and at least frightened into silence what little resistance remained.

Everyone wants to be with the cool kids. The price for membership of the club is your silence on the things that matter.

Obviously the pro-family movement must fight on many cultural fronts but politics is one of the most important strategic battlegrounds.

Until we have politicians that will use the influential platform that Parliament gives to advocate in a sustained way, we will not succeed.

This will take a new infusion of courage. Courage that will sacrifice career advancement for a higher good.

The Green Left constantly and proactively uses the tools of Parliamentary democracy.

Imagine if we had clusters of pro-family parliamentarians who did the same.

Sadly we don’t have enough and the ones we do have are intimidated & demonised.

This realisation prompted me to resign from Australian Christian Lobby, an organisation I love and believe is indispensable to the pro-family movement, and to seek election to the Senate at next year’s election.

We must break the cycle of silence & lack of political organisation in our parliaments. We must have a resistance movement on the inside which will embolden the people who know deep in their hearts that political elites are being told lies.

We are not insane, we just lack the courage to resist and the imagination to paint a better picture.

Building parliamentary capacity must become a priority for the pro-family movement if we are to make the switch from back-foot reactionaries to front-foot reformers.

Thankyou.