I notice you failed to defend all those failed policies in your rebuttal, which means I suppose you concede failure and are now just stuck with disgruntlement. I’m not sorry the whole “whip up racist sentiment to win elections” thing failed – it gives most of us back our faith that Australians might grumble about immigration, but they place little value on it compared to economic stability, workplace justice and Howard personality cults.

I concede nothing, although I cherish my disgruntlement. Lord spare me from gruntlement, like a pig in a poke.

David Rubie’s riposte came accross as a semi-literate spoof of an undergraduate newspaper c 1979. Just another litany of “point and splutter” political corrections that seem to have been programmed on macro into the computers of the post-Whitlam professional indignatariat.

The one factual area that David Rubie inadvertently strayed onto was the matter of Aboriginal child abuse.

Smack abbos for a bunch of made up stuff that nobody can seem to find medical evidence for.

In fact the Australian Medical Journal found that child abuse was rampant in Top End indigenous communities:

Dr Heazlewood was co-author of an audit of Cape York children who visited a health outreach service between June 2001 and February last year, which found shocking rates of abuse and neglect.

The audit of 3262 children, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, found middle-ear effusion, suspected child abuse and neglect notifications, and failure to thrive were the three most common reasons for referral to the doctors.

“An estimated 12.8 per cent of all children in the Aboriginal communities visited by the service were subjects of alleged abuse and neglect,” it said.

Perhaps the MJA is just a bunch of charlatans and Left-liberal die-hards are right that everything is just hunky-dory in remote indigenous families. That line would go down well in the script of the Farrago spoof.

MOre likely David Rubie is just indulging in the usual Left-liberal stonewalling in order to divert or deflect attention from criticism of the bankruptcy of his odious ideology. The Decline of the Wets is now an established fact. Georgiou has just resigned from Parliament. A good personality, but a bad policy maker.

Whether this ideological shift is the result of “racist sentiment whipped up to win elections” is of little interest to me. The term “racism” has long since lost any cognitive utility, let alone moral validity, and now simply refers to people who have the acuity to notice differences and the temerity publicly remark on them.

I suggest that the Right-”corporal” political shift is the consequence of Howard’s success, which has been embraced in substantive areas by his successor. David Rubie’s assertion that Howard’s cultural identity and national security policies have “failed” is as fantastic as the rest of his ideology:

– The Indons are now happy to let the ADF run ETIMOR.

– The Intervention continues for the duration of the Culture War.

– Multiculturalism is finished as an operational civics policy. Migrants are selected on economic not ethnic basis;

– Mandatory detention is still in place and will be used if people smuggling gets out of control again.

Voters place greater value on good cultural policy because people are worth more now, both intellectually and residentially. And the greatest beneficiaries of the accumulation or rennovation of social capital are those in dilapidated conditions: the minorities themselves. Just ask the Black in Harlem who have benefitted from Buchanan-Guliani “zero tolerance” policies.

In short, with “enemies” like John Howard colored people have no need for “friends” like David Rubie.

“The California Supreme Court has asked state Attorney General Jerry Brown to reply by Monday to lawsuits challenging the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage – a sign that the justices are taking the cases seriously and will not dispose of them quickly.”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/14/BAMU1449RR.DTL&type=politics

I can understand & except arguments on both sides of the gay-marriage debate but I don’t see it as a rights issue in the sense being discussed here. The problem lies with the fact the government shouldn’t be a licensor. How consenting adult wish to define or their union should be up to them. The state should get out of the marriage game period save and except the registration of domestic partnerships for the purposes of establishing beneficial ownership rights for example isn’t a bad idea.

If you’re going to answer my “quotes” at least copy and paste the quote, so that one can see that you’re actually answering what I said and not something you’ve badly paraphrased.

With regard to what “good” marriage provides to society I said:
“I think primarily it [marriage] is to provide a safe environment where children’s needs are fulfilled and their rights protected.”

I went on to say that Gay so called marriage is intrinsically flawed because the gay couple, if they choose to conceive any children within such a relationship (ie. using donor gametes), do so with the deliberate intention to deny such children their right to a proper relationship with at least one of their natural parents. Importantly, this deliberate action to deny such children a proper relationship with at least one of their natural parents is done not for the welfare of the children involved, as might legitimately happen when abused children are removed from abusive parents, but is done only to fulfill the desires the married couple have to possess a child. Such an action is not done out of love for the child, and infringes on a basic right of every child not to be deliberately denied a proper relationship with their natural parents. The key word here is DELIBERATE. Gay so called marriage fails the most basic test of goodness because it inherently works against the rights of those children conceived within such a marriage. As such Gay marriage is not inherently good and should be rejected.

Jenny says:
“…you haven’t made the argument that society or child suffers from a child having no relationship with at least one of its parents.”

People can be unfairly deprived of many things and still live happy and productive lives. But that doesn’t mean it is proper to deliberately deprive such people of things to which they otherwise have a right. Either way, I thought the discussion was about inalienable rights. So Jenny, you think a child has no inalienable right to be protected from those practices and persons who for their own selfish desires would deliberately deny such a child a normal relationship with both their natural parents? Come on Jenny this isn’t rocket science. You need to step out of your feminist mindset, at least for a while, and learn that all that is good is not determined by a “woman’s right to choose”.

You raise a valid point about gay couples who may want to marry but choose to remain childless. But if marriage is primarily about providing an environment where children’s needs and rights can be protected why bother getting married if you have no intention of having children? It’s interesting to note that the Catholic Church would refuse (I think?) to marry a man and woman if they expressed a desire not to have children.

As far as gay couples marrying and adopting children who cannot be raised by their natural parents, I don’t think gay couples have a right to this either. Generally I think the role of adopting parents is to reproduce, as much as possible, a natural family environment (ie. mum and dad) for the children in their care. I would have thought that adoption should be primarily about the rights of children not the rights of adults (gay or straight) to form a family on their terms.

In the end marriage laws should be primarily concerned about children and their rights, not about the perceived rights of adults (gay or straight) to form and structure a family around their own egos.

And to Helen at comment 138. If you meditate on the meaning of the word DELIBERATE for a while you might come to appreciate just how silly and unwitty your comment is. Although, re your suggestion that heterosexuals couples be banned from divorce. I wouldn’t go that far, you know with all that domestic violence stuff that goes on. But maybe divorced parents should be stopped from shacking up with another person at least until their youngest child reaches 18 years.

You see it’s simple really. It’s all about the kids!

Couldn’t agree more! but why stop there? Here’s just a couple of suggestions:

-With recent advances in DNA profiling, people with genetic predispositions to various cancers, or god forbid an existing condition that’s likely to kill them before a hypothetical kid grows to maturity, can be forcibly sterilised. But you can let them marry.
-Divorce for heterosexual couples will be banned until their youngest child is, say, 26.

You won’t be able to escape the occasional rotter who is selfish enough to die in a road accident or otherwise become incapacitated, but that’ll go a long way to the outcome Colin is looking for.

I see you’ve given in to the “demands” of “modern” “spelling”, and changed your penultimate ‘Hyffpheen’ to the excessively vulgar and very undistinguished ‘Hyphen’. So, sad to say, old Hughie Faaartingtons was right, when he predicted that you would abandon your ancestral name before he did.

I cannot condemn you, old chummeries, but I have shed a silent tear and dear Lady Agatha has been informed.

Carry on we must and therefore shall, but it will be Sysiphean.