The hate crime at the family rainbow event by Destiny Church members is yet another dreadful example of the toxic masculinity that is taking over our political and community spaces.
This is an opinion piece.
On a recent trip to London, my family and I went to the Imperial War Museum and for the most part, it was a good place to take a toddler. War is loud, so a monument built to house weapons and tanks and former bombs is an okay place to have a small, chatty child darting about. That was until we got to the Holocaust memorial, which is one of the most silent places you can go.
The exhibition was set up to walk you through the journey of real-life newspaper covers and escalating headlines, featuring the rise of the Nazis and their targeting of minorities, from the early 1930s through until the photos of the concentration camps in the early 1940s. You know the photos. You know where those hate crimes eventually led. It didn’t start off with people being herded into trains, it started off with casual violence and minorities being targeted in public areas. It started with the normalisation of hatred.
We are watching the swift, global degradation of anything joyful, safe and free in place of rising fear and anger. I feel it. You feel it. Things are not good, and this fear and anger has been making its way into our backyards for a while.
Look at the male leaders we have now, globally. Look at who is in charge in our own country. You know these boys weren’t popular. Or you know these weren’t loving households – look at the casual dismissiveness with which some of them treat their own children. The eyes on the prize for these men has always been one thing: power. As Sarah Wilson writes here, The weird outliers from the basement have taken over the joint. The consequences of this kind of male power are going to be felt by generations to come.
As Sarah Lang wrote previously for Capsule, it is a complicated time to be raising young boys when the worst-case scenario of who they can turn into is all we see right now.
What Young Boys Grow Into
One of the things that has surprised me most about becoming a parent is the gift and maybe curse where you start to see all adults as the children or babies they once were.
This is a frame of mind that is equal parts illuminating and devastating. You don’t have to think too hard about what kind of masculinity you were told to value in order to find it appropriate to yell at a bunch of terrified toddlers and parents at a library, protesting a morning event held by a drag king about how rainbows are made.
When I was at university, I had a part-time job working in the front office of the local primary school and so I got to see a lot of parent/child interactions. And look, it was the early 2000s and I’d like to think things have improved since then, but there was a consistent theme of young boys – 5, 6 years old – wanting to hold their dad’s hands as they left school and the dads saying, very firmly, ‘No, boys don’t hold hands.’
What happens to those boys when those soft, loving instincts are rejected – or punished – for being ‘un-masculine.’ I mean, I’ve dated men who grew up in those households – and something inside them hardens forever, and then it starts to break those around them.
In her recent Substack, Emily Writes interviewed a family who attended the Rainbow event and they recounted the terror of being trapped inside a room while an angry and then violent crowd of Destiny Church supporters protested what was happening inside the library.
The bewildered young crowd – kids mostly under six – and their increasingly panicked parents had to keep the room calm, while the presenter, drag king Hugo Grrrl, kept the show going as the voices got louder and louder and the Destiny Church supporters started banging on the door, trying to get in.
I can only imagine what the impact is of having your local library become the scene of a hate crime. My local library was a refuge in the early months of motherhood – I didn’t feel up to attending an antenatal group, so those Wriggle ‘N’ Rhyme classes were the only place where I saw mothers like me, also finding their place in a new, overwhelming world.
To have lost that safe haven to a violent presence would have done a lot of damage – damage that the Te Atatū Peninsula community is now having to live through. Not to mention the damage it does to the Rainbow community, who are living in an increasingly hostile world that is seeking to target them in both petty and systemic ways.
Now, I’m no Bible scholar but I’m pretty sure if you asked Jesus (a sentence I never thought I’d write) which side of the door he’d have rather been on: the family show about science and rainbows and joy and love, or the side where a group of grown adults were trying to bash down a door and terrify a bunch of babies, he’d have picked the former.
How Destiny Church are allowed to maintain such a public presence of violence and hatred with seemingly no repercussions, I just can’t understand. We cannot let this become normal, or an accepted part of attending Rainbow or family events. The stakes are just too high.
Sign the Change.org petition to strip Destiny Church of its charity status here.