The Fundamental List 13/5/2009
A busy week for me, but a quiet week for the god squad it would seem. Only one thing is on the Christian Right’s agenda this week and if you guessed it was to do with a Charter of Rights – you’d be right.
DYI Gender testing
A new product on the market allows for gender testing from eight weeks, they’re worried about gender selection occurring as a result of this. This would be fair enough if it wasn’t already illegal to select the sex of your baby by aborting a foetus just because it was of the ‘wrong’ (i.e. female) gender. Their solution to this is to call for more restrictive laws around abortion even though they don’t specifically say what these should be and how you’d prove someone was having an abortion because they wanted a boy and were having a girl. Their ‘solution’ does nothing to deal with what one would hope would be a very isolated problem and only serves their anti-choice authoritarian agenda; no call for action is made though.
Culture of group sex in rugby league
They’re concerned about the culture in NRL and how rugby league players treat women. Whilst there certainly are problems in rugby league’s culture, it would be unfair to tar all NRL players with the same brush, after all there a few devout Christians who are players and surely not all players are sexists.
Nevertheless, rather than offer their ideas as to how this culture can be changed they instead have a blast at one of the NRL's advisors in the area, Catherine Lumby who is an Associate Professor in Media and Communications at Sydney University. The reason for this tirade? Well apart from claiming she has links to the porn industry (probably because she wrote a book with Kath Albury and Alan McKee called “The Porn Report” looking at pornography – the models, the production companies and the users) she has said she doesn’t have a problem with group sex if the participants are all consenting adults (adults having consensual sex with other adults? The horror! One wonders if they’ll call for a ban!). They deliberately try to confuse consensual and non-consensual sex saying “what does consensual mean anyway?” I would have thought it was the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In any sort of of selective reading of a person’s opinions, it’s best to let them speak for themselves. Clearly she draws a very firm line between consensual and non-consensual sex and there is nuance in what she says about consensual sex but we don’t that getting the way of a spray do we?
They conclude by churlishly saying they hope the NRL sacks Catherine Lumby as an advisor but again there’s no call for action.
Autonomy for the ACT
A couple of days ago, Jon Stanhope used a ceremonial sitting of the ACT’s assembly to call for greater autonomy from the Commonwealth Parliament down the road and across the bridge.
As the most educated place in Australia, it’s also one of, probably the most progressive. It was the only state or territory to deliver a majority ‘yes’ vote (and a rather substantial one at that) on the republic referendum in 1999. It also lead the charge for civil unions only to be thwarted by the Commonwealth – twice under the previous government and once under the current one before it was forced to water down its legislation somewhat last year.
Given this you wouldn’t expect the ACL to be fans of the ACT and they’re not. They’re concerned that the ACT is calling for more autonomy. They think the Commonwealth’s power to override ACT legislation is a check/balance because the ACT has a unicameral parliament – so does Queensland but they’re not calling for the Commonwealth to have a plenary power over Queensland, or any other state.
If the ACT had more autonomy civil unions couldn’t have been overridden (memo to Jim Wallace: it’s called democracy when Parliaments pass laws the people the want). Somewhat bizarrely they claim civil unions contravened the federal Marriage Act because of the ceremony involved – a rather novel legal interpretation. They’re worried about a progressive ACT Assembly modelling progressive stuff for the rest of the country like same-sex couples adopting (even though WA had legislation to this effect long before the ACT). Nothing like the ‘radical social engineering’ coming out of Canberra to get other Australians to support crazy ideas like equality – you can practically hear the Maude Flanders’ “won’t someone please think of the children!” scream.
If the Commonwealth was interfering in more mundane matters that’d be different but it’s perfectly ok with them to override a policy that the government took to the electorate twice and which won majority government for the first time in the ACT’s history, but to hell with their mandate they say. Why? Because it suits their quixotic view of how things should be. They don’t think anything will come of it and aren’t calling on people to do anything – rather a motif this week!
Charter of Rights
Christian schools are having their exemptions under the discriminations acts reviewed in Victoria. (Hurrah, about time too I say!) They go on about how great these exemptions are and say the review was set up within weeks of the Victorian Charter of Rights coming in therefore Charters of Rights are baaaaaaaad. Ergo we don’t need a Charter of Rights federally and they go through (yet again) why they don’t like Charters of Rights canvassing all the usual talking points about things in Canada.
A new campaign has been set up called ‘charter rights no wrongs’ on their camapign website where supporters can sign a petition to the federal government. They also want people to make more submissions to the human rights enquiry.
The Budget
They go through the budget leaks and are pleased that stay-at-home mums will continue to get the baby bonus when paid maternity leave is introduced. They want our overseas aid funding maintained and ultimately increased to meet the Millennium Development Goals – at least there’s one thing we can agree on.
DYI Gender testing
A new product on the market allows for gender testing from eight weeks, they’re worried about gender selection occurring as a result of this. This would be fair enough if it wasn’t already illegal to select the sex of your baby by aborting a foetus just because it was of the ‘wrong’ (i.e. female) gender. Their solution to this is to call for more restrictive laws around abortion even though they don’t specifically say what these should be and how you’d prove someone was having an abortion because they wanted a boy and were having a girl. Their ‘solution’ does nothing to deal with what one would hope would be a very isolated problem and only serves their anti-choice authoritarian agenda; no call for action is made though.
Culture of group sex in rugby league
They’re concerned about the culture in NRL and how rugby league players treat women. Whilst there certainly are problems in rugby league’s culture, it would be unfair to tar all NRL players with the same brush, after all there a few devout Christians who are players and surely not all players are sexists.
Nevertheless, rather than offer their ideas as to how this culture can be changed they instead have a blast at one of the NRL's advisors in the area, Catherine Lumby who is an Associate Professor in Media and Communications at Sydney University. The reason for this tirade? Well apart from claiming she has links to the porn industry (probably because she wrote a book with Kath Albury and Alan McKee called “The Porn Report” looking at pornography – the models, the production companies and the users) she has said she doesn’t have a problem with group sex if the participants are all consenting adults (adults having consensual sex with other adults? The horror! One wonders if they’ll call for a ban!). They deliberately try to confuse consensual and non-consensual sex saying “what does consensual mean anyway?” I would have thought it was the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In any sort of of selective reading of a person’s opinions, it’s best to let them speak for themselves. Clearly she draws a very firm line between consensual and non-consensual sex and there is nuance in what she says about consensual sex but we don’t that getting the way of a spray do we?
They conclude by churlishly saying they hope the NRL sacks Catherine Lumby as an advisor but again there’s no call for action.
Autonomy for the ACT
A couple of days ago, Jon Stanhope used a ceremonial sitting of the ACT’s assembly to call for greater autonomy from the Commonwealth Parliament down the road and across the bridge.
As the most educated place in Australia, it’s also one of, probably the most progressive. It was the only state or territory to deliver a majority ‘yes’ vote (and a rather substantial one at that) on the republic referendum in 1999. It also lead the charge for civil unions only to be thwarted by the Commonwealth – twice under the previous government and once under the current one before it was forced to water down its legislation somewhat last year.
Given this you wouldn’t expect the ACL to be fans of the ACT and they’re not. They’re concerned that the ACT is calling for more autonomy. They think the Commonwealth’s power to override ACT legislation is a check/balance because the ACT has a unicameral parliament – so does Queensland but they’re not calling for the Commonwealth to have a plenary power over Queensland, or any other state.
If the ACT had more autonomy civil unions couldn’t have been overridden (memo to Jim Wallace: it’s called democracy when Parliaments pass laws the people the want). Somewhat bizarrely they claim civil unions contravened the federal Marriage Act because of the ceremony involved – a rather novel legal interpretation. They’re worried about a progressive ACT Assembly modelling progressive stuff for the rest of the country like same-sex couples adopting (even though WA had legislation to this effect long before the ACT). Nothing like the ‘radical social engineering’ coming out of Canberra to get other Australians to support crazy ideas like equality – you can practically hear the Maude Flanders’ “won’t someone please think of the children!” scream.
If the Commonwealth was interfering in more mundane matters that’d be different but it’s perfectly ok with them to override a policy that the government took to the electorate twice and which won majority government for the first time in the ACT’s history, but to hell with their mandate they say. Why? Because it suits their quixotic view of how things should be. They don’t think anything will come of it and aren’t calling on people to do anything – rather a motif this week!
Charter of Rights
Christian schools are having their exemptions under the discriminations acts reviewed in Victoria. (Hurrah, about time too I say!) They go on about how great these exemptions are and say the review was set up within weeks of the Victorian Charter of Rights coming in therefore Charters of Rights are baaaaaaaad. Ergo we don’t need a Charter of Rights federally and they go through (yet again) why they don’t like Charters of Rights canvassing all the usual talking points about things in Canada.
A new campaign has been set up called ‘charter rights no wrongs’ on their camapign website where supporters can sign a petition to the federal government. They also want people to make more submissions to the human rights enquiry.
The Budget
They go through the budget leaks and are pleased that stay-at-home mums will continue to get the baby bonus when paid maternity leave is introduced. They want our overseas aid funding maintained and ultimately increased to meet the Millennium Development Goals – at least there’s one thing we can agree on.