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 Three lesbians who won an anti-vilification case against a former shire councillor will donate most of their compensation to the gay community.
Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Tribunal ordered Gympie gun lobbyist and former Cooloola Shire councilor Ron Owen (pictured) to pay the women $12,500 in compensation.
“Most of the money will go back into the gay and lesbian community of the Sunshine Coast by way of a donation to the Queensland Association for Healthy Communities’ resource centre at Maroochydore,” complainant Richelle Menzies told Queensland Pride.
“It was never about the money. For us, this case was about raising awareness that you can’t go around vilifying people. There are legal process that people can utilise, and though they take some time, these laws are there to protect and they do work."
Tribunal member Darryl Rangiah also ordered Owen to publish a statement in the Gympie Times acknowledging he broke the law when he vilified homosexuals.
The case against Owen was launched after he drove a car on public roads in 2005 with a bumper sticker which read: “Gay rights? The only rights gays have is the right to die”.
Though Owen has claimed he was driving someone else’s car, Queensland Pride can reveal he was selling the same stickers at gun rallies and in his now-defunct right-wing militia magazine, Lock, Stock and Barrel, as early as 1995.
The ADT also ruled Owen had vilified homosexuals when he told Cooloola Shire Council “I probably don’t class gays as humans” and when he tabled a report to council that stated: “Sodomite’s (sic) cannot reproduce, their only means of recruitment to their way of life is by preying on the children of normal human beings ...”.
Owen also wrote and published on the lockstockandbarrel website a letter titled “No Human Rights For Non-Humans” which the ADT found included a number of statements vilifying homosexuals, including “Any person who commits acts that no ignorant animal would commit declares war on his community, and therefore may be destroyed by any or all of that community ...”.
Owen must pay $5,000 each to two of the women, Menzies and Tina Coutts, and a further $2,500 to Suzanne Turner.
However, the ADT ruled that one of the women, Rhonda Bruce, did not have standing in the case because she identified as bisexual and Owen had only vilified “homosexuals”.
Menzies told Queensland Pride she was “extremely happy” with the decision, and said that regardless of sexuality, many people in the Gympie area had been outraged by Owen’s statements.
“The Gympie community got right behind us, and it shows people weren’t happy. There were a lot of people who were very upset,” she said.
Owen said he would appeal the decision: “I will keep appealing til the cows come home,” he told the Courier-Mail.
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