While eating turkey sandwiches and Cheetos, former justice of the High Court of Australia Michael Kirby discussed religion and the history of IU with students and faculty Thursday afternoon.
Just a handful of guests populated the library of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Student Support Services office for the intimate luncheon.
In town to give a talk titled “The Joys and Nightmare of a UN Human Rights Mandate Holder” at the School of Global and International Studies about later in the afternoon, Kirby came to the office to meet students.
He said it was important to note that, as a gay man and a high statesman, his sexual orientation was well-known, but it wasn’t all of him.
“It wasn’t even most of me,” Kirby said. “It was just an aspect of my life.”
However, his presence as a gay man was valuable to his colleagues and the whole of the legal profession, in part because acquaintance and truth are the best antidotes for hostility against LGBT people, he said.
“Fundamentally, that is what Alfred Kinsey taught at this University and what Herman Wells protected at this University against a lot of opposition at the time, and it’s a great American story,” Kirby said.
It was in the IU commencement address Kirby delivered in 2009 that he first conveyed to the Hoosier student body his earliest connection with the University.
As Kirby moved through his Australian high school in the 1950s, he said Kinsey was the most famous professor in the world for the books he had written about human sexuality.
The work presented by Kinsey’s research provided a scientific opposition to what Kirby’s Christian faith taught him — that LGBT people were a tiny group of willful people who were defying the order of nature and were a wicked abomination.
“I didn’t know Indiana or Bloomington or this University, but I knew Alfred Kinsey,” he said. “And his message was great strength to me because I knew that in the end scientific truth was going to trump the superstitious hobgoblins, which was what existed in the world at that time.”
Kirby said he kept in mind most religious people made their very best effort to be kind, though, which resonated with GLBT office graduate assistant Danielle Hernandez, who said people tend not to accept that she is both Catholic and a lesbian.
“I really like how you spoke about religion, about how all religious people, you believe, are essentially trying to be kind,” she said to Kirby. “I think that’s an important perspective to bring out, especially in the LGBTQ community, because so often they’re separated.”
Yet not everyone was kind when Kirby addressed IU graduates in 2009. Kirby said one graduate wrote him a letter asking how he dared to intrude on “our day” with Kirby’s personal life.
Kirby wrote back and attempt to explain the necessity of acceptance, but he said he made no headway.
“We shouldn’t deceive ourselves that everybody in the world sees the world through our eyes,” Kirby said. “They haven’t had the experience. They haven’t had the necessity. But I believe it is the reason why a center like this and people like this, straight allies, are absolutely essential to changing the attitude of those who have never had any need to change.”
