This rainbow stairs issue is beyond 'ridiculous'
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THE apparently vexed issue of the Rainbow Beach rainbow stairs proves something ridiculous about human nature.
It shows that people who want to be outraged can always manage it somehow.
You may know the stairs. They look nice. They are rainbow coloured because of the community efforts of people who wanted to commemorate a gay sanctuary at the Gold Coast during the Olympic Games.
Then another gay person painted the apparently innocuous words "How Good is Living” on one of the stairs - and most people, including visiting Hollywood A-lister Chris Hemsworth, thought that was nice too, especially in a nation beset by suicide.
Then the first group accused the word painter of being anti-gay for defacing their work with graffiti, even though their paint job was unauthorised by the council and was therefore itself also graffiti. The council has now even made a policy on it, accepting the first graffiti and banning the second.
Apparently this is important, so important I will no doubt be accused of being anti-gay for calling it ridiculous, even though my public defence of gay rights has led to me (and this newspaper) being roundly abused in some quarters.
If this, the painting of some stairs and then some uplifting words, is the most outrageous thing in a precarious world, then we are all a lot better off than I thought.
