Over recent months, attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) rights and inclusion have begun to look like an anti-gay crusade.

The campaign against Safe Schools has attempted to associate that program – and by proxy the people who implement it and it is meant to help – with Marxism and paedophilia.

We have seen takedowns of a range of LGBTI community leaders, no matter their contribution to Australia (Ian Thorpe) or their political convictions (Tim Wilson).

Publications that make wild claims about the damage same-sex partners do to their children have been widely distributed.

Cartoonish stereotypes of LGBTI people have been deployed in mainstream media.

There have been calls to roll back the laws that provide a modicum of protection for LGBTI people from discrimination.

Worst of all is a callous disregard that those driving these campaigns have for the vulnerable people adversely affected by their ill-informed words and deeds.

Taken together, this has amounted to a direct assault, not just on a particular program or public figure, but on the place of LGBTI people in Australian society.

It had degraded, humiliated and excluded all of us.

They’re not my words. They are the words of LGBTI people and our family members who have written to me expressing their alarm and despair at recent events.

I understand there is a political context to the events I’ve described. The government’s right wing may well be trying to wedge the prime minister. And opponents of marriage equality seem to setting up negative narratives to win over wavering voters during a plebiscite.

But there’s something more going on.

The anti-gay crusade I have described has many of the hallmarks of campaigns to cower entire ethnic, social, religious and political groups in centuries passed.

It seeks to stigmatise an entire group by associating it with political subversion, sexual perversion and a threat to children.

It seeks to silence the group’s leaders, remove its protections and make it hard for moderates to defend.

I’m not saying we are anywhere near the level of a witch hunt, an anti-Semitic pogrom or ethnic cleansing. There has been no physical violence (yet), and most Australians are either disengaged from the far right’s moral panic or disdainful of it.

But what we have seen raises serious questions about how easy it is for anti-gay forces to undermine even the most modest gains of the LGBTI community, and how weak some of our national leaders and institutions are in resisting this.

The late Robert Hughes, writing in The Fatal Shore, had a succinct reason for the vulnerable place of LGBTI people in Australian politics and culture.

Australian democracy, indeed our national identity, was born in the 19th century movement against convict transportation. To achieve its aims, that movement sought to discredit the convict system by associating it with homosexuality.

The anti-transportationists shouted into the ears of a colonial middle class already insecure about its place in the world, that without the immediate cessation of transportation the Australian colonies would forever be estranged from the civilised world by the stain of unnatural vice.

They stirred up such fear and loathing of homosexuality in Australian society that, at its climax in the late 1840s, disdain towards homosexuality ran deeper than in any other comparable 19th century society.

Hughes believed Australia was born in homophobia.

But I believe there were countervailing trends in colonial Australia that should give us more hope than Hughes had.

From the earliest times there has been a deeply ingrained pragmatism among Australians that immunises us to the diseases of ideology and demagoguery. There is a propensity to cheer the underdog and jeer the blustering moralist.

These national traits were born in the colonial prison yards that anti-transportationists hated so much, and which pre-existed their puritanical talking points.

Thanks to this history, I am convinced Australia is more than its homophobic past and has the capacity for great openness, tolerance and inclusion.

Indeed, I am convinced the anti-gay crusade we are seeing is but a shrill and self-defeating reaction to a far more powerful trend in Australian society towards greater acceptance of diversity.

These convictions influence my reply to all those LGBTI Australians and their families who contact me asking how to respond to the apparent upsurge in prejudice.

Anger and disillusionment are understandable, I tell them, but do nothing but drive potential supporters away.

Feeling alienated from Australian society, or rejecting Australian identity, simply gives the anti-gay brigade free rein to define what it means to be Australian.

Responding to exclusion in ways that only exacerbate that exclusion betrays the next generation of LGBTI Australians.

The only way forward is to build bridges where others have dug ditches, to reach out our hands however often they are slapped down, to match provocation with patience, to make it clearer than ever that we aspire to belong.

In particular, LGBTI Australians and our loved ones must redouble our efforts to persuade those around us that every Australian benefits when we are all treated with equal respect.

Our stories may be about why schools need to be safer places, why marriage should be a choice for all couples, or simply why families are stronger when they’re accepting and communities when they’re inclusive.

But whatever stories we have to tell, there has never been a better time to tell them.

Prejudice has had its say. Now the nation is primed, as it rarely has been before, to hear the voices of LGBTI people and our families.

An opportunity like this comes only once in a generation. Don’t waste it. Talk.