As it dawns on our anti-Safe Schools crusaders that Marxism isn't exactly a powerful totem of evil in 2016, their language will shift in a less specific direction. But their fear will be no less, writes Michael Bradley.

"We need to look at other methods that aren't originating in an ideology of queer gender theory and, let's be honest, Marxism."

That's George Christensen, the Liberal National Party backbencher, explaining the underpinning ideological evil of the Safe Schools Coalition program which has since, at the urging of a vocal minority of Coalition MPs, been "gutted" as Christensen happily reported.

Christensen has had a lot to say about Safe Schools, including that one of its authors is a paedophilia advocate, but the focus of his attacks has been on ideology. He is backed up by Senator Cory Bernardi, who told the Liberal party room last week that Safe Schools was being used to "indoctrinate children into a Marxist agenda of cultural relativism".

To round out the triumvirate which has appointed itself to protect Australian children from ideological heresy, Lyle Shelton of the Australian Christian Lobby says that Safe Schools is part of a "political ideology" to "promote queer sexuality".

To refer to heresy is not a reach. When people claim that an ideology, which is antithetical to the orthodoxy which they prefer, is infiltrating society by underhand means, then they are speaking the language of heresy.

Plenty has been written about Christensen's and Bernardi's strange obsession with Marxism or neo-Marxism. Karl Marx said nothing publicly about homosexuality, but his fellow Communist philosopher Friedrich Engels was openly hostile to homosexuals. Stalin recriminalised homosexuality, labelling it a disease.

It's impossible actually to identify any consistency on the subject among Communist leaders or countries. If you suspected that Marxism and Safe Schools have no connection real or imagined, you'd be right. Neo-Marxism isn't actually a thing, but neo-anything is a very modern form of insult.

As for "cultural relativism", it's a principle that says that a person's beliefs and actions should be understood in terms of their own culture; that is, it's all relative, there are no absolutes when it comes to judging human behaviour. It does kind of make sense in Bernardi's mouth, because his judgments of others' behaviour do seem to be quite absolute. However, it has nothing to do with Marxism.

Interestingly, our fearless local cultural warriors are not the first politicians to gain notoriety by linking Communism with homosexuality.

Senator Joe McCarthy is famous in US political history for his anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s, which began with his assertion that he knew of 205 Communists working in the US State Department and turned into a full scale witch hunt of enormously destructive proportions.

Senator Joe McCarthy is famous in US political history for his anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s.

Lesser known is the so-called "Lavender Scare", which McCarthy instigated in parallel with the Red Scare, charmingly proclaiming at one point that "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker".

His tactic was to conflate Communism with homosexuality, identifying them as equivalent "threats to the American way of life". Homosexuals were seen as deviant and, consequently, a security threat. In 1953, the US formally barred homosexuals from working in the federal government. This remained the law until 1995.

In today's Australia, it is mostly accepted that gay people are people too. There is rather less agreement that they should have equal rights with straight people, but nobody's calling for them to be locked up, although they are still a threatening presence to a material minority of the community.

So the McCarthyist precedent wouldn't be of much obvious relevance if not for the recent resurrection of Marxism as a bogeyman. It certainly isn't coincidental. Linking homosexuality with paedophilia is as unsubtle as conflating halal food with terrorism. Attaching a personal characteristic to an ideology widely seen as evil is rather more insidious. The fact that they've chosen the now-irrelevant ideology of Marxism simply tells us that these men, like their fallen leader Tony Abbott (no, that's not gratuitous, he joined the anti-Safe Schools campaign too), are firmly stuck in the 1950s and still feeling the existential fears of that time.

But really, the weird quasi-intellectual references are a mask. These guys are defending orthodoxy; by which they mean the notion that "normality" is a white, Christian, patriarchal and heterosexual one. Anything which suggests otherwise is a heresy.

Do they really care about Safe Schools? Yes and no. Christensen didn't bother reading all of the program before condemning it, but that was never the point of the exercise. I'm sure both Christensen and Bernardi genuinely believe it to be a very bad thing, a battlefront in the war being waged against their blinkered understanding of the world.

Imagine that you felt you were fighting the forces of darkness for mankind's soul, but those forces were ever indistinct in shape and form. The Inquisition and historical witch hunts arose from exactly that sense - that the world was under attack by Satan, who was never seen but whose presence was very much felt in a superstitious world. Fighting him was like playing an eternal game of whack-a-mole. The price of security was, indeed, eternal vigilance.

This concept translated easily into the Cold War period of world-ending dread, the spectre of nuclear annihilation being held in the cold hands of Godless Communists. It's hardly surprising in that context that McCarthyism took such rapid and deep hold on the American consciousness.

The world today is a similarly uncertain place, but in much less black and white tones. For those of an instinctively conservative mindset, it's a terrifying place. Not a single pillar of orthodox belief - Christianity, white supremacy, heterosexual normality, male dominance, the "traditional family", democracy, capitalism - is not under attack. Everything that was thought to be permanently fixed is no longer so secure.

Christensen, Bernardi and their like find this more than unsettling. Their fear is real and febrile. It drives the ferocity of their attacks on what they see as heretical. They are playing whack-a-mole, not as a game but as a fight to the death. Safe Schools is just the first victim of their terror. There will be others. Terror, it's worth remembering, cuts both ways.

We can expect, as it dawns on our heroes that Marxism is as powerful a totem of evil in 2016 as Satanism, that is to say not at all, that their language will shift in a less specific direction. Cultural relativism, political correctness, ideological warfare, demonisation of traditional values; these are the true imagined nemeses of the modern arch-conservative. The gauntlet is down.

Michael Bradley is the managing partner of Sydney law firm Marque Lawyers, and he writes a weekly column for The Drum. He tweets at @marquelawyers.