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The irony of attacking feminists by invoking a piece of legislation whose existence is largely down to the energy and commitment of feminist campaigners scarcely needs pointing out.

That's life. People use Freedom of Speech to attack Freedom of Speech.

You just have to put up with it.

Saying that telling someone they are privileged ‘isn’t an insult’ is a bare-faced lie.

I have seen so many feminists, gay and queer and trans activists use the single word ‘privilege’ to dismiss an individual and their arguments I have lost count.

Take trans politics for example. I am continually labelled as ‘privileged’ as a ‘cis’ woman. And this enables trans people to always be the victim in discussions, the victim of my privileged viewpoint. But I don’t think I have any ‘privilege’ in terms of gender identity. I fail at being a ‘woman’. My sexuality is closest to that of homos, with no access to the physical experiences of homo-men. I have no gender ‘advantages’ I can think of at all, except that I am not going through the pain of transition. Just the pain of a lifetime of ‘not fitting’ to my supposed gender identity.But in conversation with trans people, they can always claim the ‘privileged’ position of the powerless.

I think privilege is used as a weapon in identity politics.

"Our unofficial Facebook policy is not to automatically delete comments that disagree with us, but when the comments come into untruths or uncharitable, then we have to delete them," Poust said. "And when it really becomes abusive we have to ban them."

According to the group, one Facebook post stated: "Eventually your kind of 'religion' will be extinguished from the memory of mankind forever, because this sort of interference in the lives of people you only wish to harm. You have NO MORAL AUTHORITY any longer because of your evil pedophilia."

Another said the Catholic church only approves of marriages "that produce altar boys to be molested."

The group deleted both.

He is not demanding that Pink Dot should be different, at least not in so many words. As he has written, “I don’t deny or dismiss how meaningful [Pink Dot] might be to some people. It’s just that it has a different meaning for me,” and that was why he chose not to attend this year. Nor was he stopping others from attending either.

Nuanced differently is another criticism of his — that Pink Dot “comes across as anxious to colonise and co-opt all the streams that exist out there.”

A social movement ultimately hinges on one key issue. The supporters it attracts subscribe to the core idea, but beyond that, may not agree on anything else. Nor is participation usually made conditional upon subscription to additional beliefs. There is no test for eligibility outside of the movement’s key aim, and people self-select when they join.

It should hardly be surprising therefore that on other issues, participants bring with them their (differing) biases. Or that they tend to come from certain social strata. To expect a gay-affirmative movement to meet purity standards by other yardsticks — racial views, religious representativeness, age profile, etc — is plain unrealistic.

"Adshel earlier responded to a series of complaints by removing the campaign from its media panels yesterday," the company said in a statement on its website this afternoon.

"None of the complaints indicated any liaison with the ACL, so Adshel was made to believe that they originated from individual members of the public."

Adshel chief executive Steve McCarthy said it was now clear that Adshel had been the target of a co-ordinated ACL campaign against the "Rip and Roll" advertisements designed by the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities.

The reduction of gay equality to a matter of economic benefit troubled me. Even worse were references to the Pink Dollar, with the unstated characterisation of gay people as better off than average (Where’s the evidence? I asked) and mindlessly consumerist.

I am uncomfortable with too much focus on the health benefits of repeal. Firstly, the benefits can be limited because there are plenty of other factors that impact on the effectiveness of health services, and secondly, it misses the point. People who favour anti-gay legislation do so not because they primarily want to damage the health of gay people. There are a whole host of other reasons that still need addressing.

However difficult, we cannot shirk from the most fundamental reason for repeal of Section 377A and gay equality in general: Equality is a human right, and to impair equality for one group today would undermine the claim to equality for all other groups tomorrow.

it’s almost impossible to imagine such a marketing campaign being possible or even legal in Western countries like the US or Australia with their myriad equality opportunity laws.

These days it’s politically unfashionable for travellers of either sex to admit they like a little “eye candy” in their flight attendants – even though looks are a primary qualification. Instead, the popular conversation in Australia is more likely to be about whether women can qualify as front-line combat troops in the army.

That, though, is not how some readers of the UK’s gay web sites see it. The two guys concerned have been variously described as militant, as yobs, and it’s been suggested that they were being aggressive, were practically having sex with each other, and even in one repellent comment on So So Gay that their actions were “almost inviting the couple to be queer bashed.”

One can only imagine what sage advice these people might have offered Rosa Parks…