The Australian newspaper has printed more than 17,000 words about the Safe Schools Coalition since notorious right-wing bigot Cory Bernardi launched an attack on the program just over a month ago.

The coverage has been overwhelmingly negative, and has singled out for special attack its Victorian manager and Red Flag contributor Roz Ward, describing her as an “outspoken hard-left warrior” and the program she runs as “a Marxist social change strategy”.

But it is the deranged hard-right politics that pervade those employed at the country’s only national broadsheet that have been exposed through this episode, and which provide real cause for alarm.

Symptomatic of this is Angela Shanahan, one of two Australian opinion writers who have led the charge against the program. Shanahan writes in the style of a concerned parent, but is in fact an outspoken hard-right warrior intent on pursuing an extreme political agenda.

Programs like Safe Schools strike a small blow against the conservative status quo.

Firmly in her crosshairs (figuratively, at least for now) are the achievements of the women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Writing in the Spectator in 2012, she described these movements as “destructive social revolutions” requiring in response “a counter revolution of family life” to restore “strong parental authority, particularly paternal authority”.

Shanahan hopes to lead this counter-revolution one opinion piece at a time. By sharing with the world her strident opposition to abortion, single parenthood and euthanasia, her firm belief that “motherhood is what [most women] are born for”, her scorn at concern about the domestic violence “beat-up” that emasculates men, and her deep hatred for schoolies week – aka “permission to orgiastic riot” – she believes she can take society back to a time when men were men, women were women and investing in a set of satin sheets constituted risqué sexual experimentation.

Her immediate motivation, we are led to believe, is concern over children being exposed to harmful material through the Safe Schools program. And yet when Shanahan visited the Vatican in October 2013 – staying with no less than the pope himself – she apparently felt no compulsion to mention the terrible crimes committed against children by the Catholic Church, despite the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse being well into its ninth month of hearings at the time of her visit. Child abuse can be overlooked, it seems, in the much more important battle against the scourge of gender-neutral toilets.

The other Australian columnist who has attacked the Safe Schools program is Jennifer Oriel, known to moonlight also as a writer for the notoriously right wing Institute of Public Affairs. She has described the program as a “Marxist social change strategy” based – somewhat confusingly – on “Queer politics”. Queer politics, by Oriel’s account, involves “recognition [of] sexual libertarian practices commonly considered harmful and exploitative” as well as “defence of child sexualisation and sex abuse”, which would come as something of a surprise to most Queer theorists.

Oriel has a long-standing animosity to the eclectic mix of ideas that she lumps under the heading of “neo-Marxism”. The source of this rot, she identifies, is universities. Last year she lamented that “across the Western world, students training to become teachers are commonly taught critical theory or postcolonialism … Both subjects inculcate in students deep hostility to the Western world, its culture, creed and citizens”.

She sees hers as a valiant battle to reinstate respect and total obedience to the Western canon: “Until our educational and legal systems are reformed to promote the values that sustain the free world, budding teachers will continue to be taught the values of neo-Marxism … its corrosive effect on public life must be understood and confronted if we are to bequeath the bountiful legacy of Western civilisation to future generations”. For Oriel, Muslims are the main threat to this bountiful legacy, but LGBTI inclusivity programs also should not be ignored.

In reality there is an ideological conflict at the heart of the debates about the Safe Schools Coalition. One side, represented in a dogged if slightly unhinged manner by the Australian, advocates the promotion of gender stereotypes and the nuclear family as “normal”, regardless of the consequences for those who fail or refuse to conform. They want to enforce greater respect for the church and deference towards other powerful institutions of Western society, and in so doing push back against the economic and social gains made historically by the left.

The other argues that gendered assumptions and stereotypes are socially constructed and should be questioned, and an acceptance promoted of those who defy them or who otherwise express themselves contrary to conservative standards. And that to do this effectively, it will not be enough just to change the dynamics in the schoolyard, but also the inequalities and structures outside it as well.

Programs like Safe Schools strike a small blow against the conservative status quo. They provide some counterweight to the legal, social and political structures that uphold and enforce the stultifying family values championed by the right. For this reason, along with many others, they must be defended, whatever the rabid ideologues operating under the guise of respectable journalism at the Australian throw their way.