We’ve featured a couple of posts here about the upheavals in the Anglican Church over conservative bishops’ hatred of teh gay, and the farce that is the Lambeth Conference, where openly gay American Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson has been prohibited from attending - alone of all the 800 something bishops worldwide. At the earlier conservative meeting in Jerusalem, GAFCON, where Sydney’s own Archbishop Jensen was among the movers and shakers, the pr line was that the conservative African bishops were only concerned with the purity of the biblical faith, standing against all the terrible first world postmodern relativism.
In fact, the story of Nigerian Christian gay rights activist Davis Mac-Iyalla, who has just been granted asylum by the British government, goes a long way towards demonstrating what is actually at stake in the alleged Christianity of the Nigerian church’s hierarchy. As does their attitude towards legislation proposed in Nigeria last year. All this is very far from some genteel doctrinal dispute, or a culture war only violent in its rhetoric.
Just a quick post to update some of the stories we’ve been following around the ecclesiastical traps - Irfan Yusuf, writing in New Matilda, contrasts the treatment doled out to Sheikh Al-Hilaly with the response (or lack thereof) from media and political figures to Bishop Anthony Fisher’s comments about survivors of sexual abuse. In an article on the same theme in Crikey, Yusuf links to a rather damning take at Media Watch on the News Limited coverage and commentary of accusations of church indifference to the victims of sexual abuse day raised during the World Youth Day event they were paid sponsors of.
Meanwhile, at the Lambeth Conference, conservative Anglican bishops are taking every opportunity to interrogate their fellow prelates about their ideological soundness on the loud condemnation of teh gay. Probably heretically, the Archbishop of York has suggested that there might just be more important issues for Christians than the ordination of gay bishops.
It was a very easy contrast to make for the media - while World Youth Day 2008 has been acclaimed as a success by the Catholic Church in Australia, Anglicans were tearing themselves to pieces, with the decennial Lambeth Conference reduced to a farce. A large number of quasi-schismatic conservative bishops boycotted, having earlier set up a quasi-church outside the Anglican Communion’s traditional structures at GAFCON in Jerusalem.
It’s no secret that “the sectarian strand” is one of the less attractive aspects of Australian history, and interestingly, probably not one featured highly either in the so-called “black armband” or triumphalist narratives so beloved of our home grown Antipodean culture warriors. That may be because the deep cleavages - overlapping but not identical to class and ethnicity - around Catholicism and Protestantism needed to be elided and to be buried in order to construct the “Anglo-Celtic” identity which came into its own at the same time that the state aid controversy was settled into its grave and multiculturalism launched on its career. And not coincidentally. “Anglos” and “Celts” were on different sides of the political and cultural coin in the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit for most of its whitefella history. In a way, Gough Whitlam is probably the progenitor of the “mainstream” Anglo-Celtic Australian. But sectarianism typically rears its head as a defensive accusation whenever the Catholic Church is particularly prominent in public debate, and whenever criticism is directed at the Church’s institutional power.
It may well be that a residue of sectarian anti-Catholicism might be in play on the margins of all this, but one of the big ironies is that while Tony Abbott and others speculated that Pope Benedict’s message might not be communicated effectively, the Pope himself has seemingly become a football to be kicked around by the usual suspects in distinctly Australian culture wars which often have only a tenuous connection with his concerns. But are there not genuine issues - of public interest - that can and should be raised at a time when Catholicism is top of the pops in the media stakes?
Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber posts about a paper he co-authored with Eric Lawrence and John Sides - “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation and Polarization in American Politics”. The paper, which is a work in progress, can be downloaded from here [registration required] or here [direct link to pdf].
There is active debate among political scientists and political theorists over the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Internet based blogs provide an important testing ground for these scholars’ theories, especially as political activity on the Internet becomes increasingly important. In this article, we use the first major dataset describing blog readership to examine the relationship between deliberation, polarization and political participation among blog readers. We find that, as existing theories might predict, blog readers tend to read blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Cross-cutting readership of blogs on both the left and right of the spectrum is relatively rare. Furthermore, we find strong evidence of polarization among blogreaders, who tend to be more polarized than both non-blog-readers and consumers of various television news, and roughly as polarized as US Senators
The data on which they rely in order to form their conclusions is American, of course, but I doubt the picture would be very different in Australia. It’s interesting, in passing, to note that those blog readers who do look at blogs outside their ideological comfort zone are more likely to be left-wing than right-wing. As the authors state in the abstract (part of which is reproduced above), the jumping off point for the research is partly the political science debate about the value of deliberation.
To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated before, their sense of authoritarianism compensates for their total ineffectuality in governing just about anything else than public events. (Compare - “public services”.) But the latest bunch of regulations for the Pope Fest really take the cake. It’s more or less private governance. Where’s the public benefit in preventing pilgrims attending World Youth Day in Sydney this month from being annoyed? Will their world really come to an end if someone hands them a condom or wears a t-shirt with an anti-homophobia message? What possible public justification does the NSW government have for denying basic rights to freedom of expression at the instance of the fragile petals in Cardinal Pell’s hierarchy?
Peter Tatchell offers a very persuasive and worthy thesis on Spikedabout the complicated nature of human sexuality and how it problematises claims that homosexuality is all about genetics. Here’s some of the article for your information: Continue reading ‘Gene genie’
I was intrigued yesterday to see Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen writing one of the more substantive pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald’s regular feast of op/eds written by pollies. Bowen argues that social liberals within the Liberal Party are as marginalised now as they were under John Howard, and concludes:
But the move to the right by the Liberal Party means that traditional small l liberals are looking for a home. As a social liberal in the Labor Party, I can tell you that it is a very welcoming home.
I’m not so sure that’s absolutely accurate, but more of that later. First, I wanted to explore why Bowen thought this was an apposite point to make at this time. He refers to the amalgamation talk with the Nationals, and certainly Barnaby Joyce’s recent musings might give some small l liberals something to ponder. But I suspect what’s prompted Bowen’s article is actually some shenanigans going on in the Senate, which aren’t unrelated to the Liberal leadership.
There’s a really fascinating article in the New York Times‘ health section by Tara Parker-Pope - accessed via Feministing:
For insights into healthy marriages, social scientists are looking in an unexpected place.
A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.
The findings offer hope that some of the most vexing problems are not necessarily entrenched in deep-rooted biological differences between men and women. And that, in turn, offers hope that the problems can be solved.
Aggregating a number of studies, the article suggests:
It was recently suggested in comments here by Paulus that progressives should be welcoming Brendan Nelson’s leadership:
But on the other hand, he’s probably the most left-wing leader the Libs have had in living memory, and he’s not playing anything like the role Howard played on culture and symbolic issues. At least for his stance on Kyoto and the Stolen Generation, I’d have thought he’d have got a smidgen of respect from LP people for reversing the Libs’ move to the right. But apparently not.
The points about Kyoto and the Apology were adequately answered on that thread, but Nelson provides evidence every day that he’s very far from having walked away from John Howard’s cultural crusades. Whether or not he’s a captive of his party here, I wouldn’t venture to say, but it’s basically irrelevant because if that were true, what we’d be talking about would be weak leadership.
Over the last twenty-four hours, we’ve seen the Liberals delay the passage of legislation designed to give same sex couples legal equality. Why?
Liberal MP Stuart Robert warned that by replacing references to a “marital relationship” with a “couple relationship” in the super laws, it may “slowly chip away at the institution of marriage”.
Taken to its logical extreme, de factos should have no rights at all on this reasoning. But of course, it’s not straight de factos they’re talking about. And yet we’re assured the Liberal Party is not pandering to extremist religious groups or displaying homophobia?
The Age believes Attorney-General Robert McClelland will announce today that he will introduce amendments to Parliament as early as next month to alter around 100 federal laws.
The changes will not allow gay marriages or same-sex couples to adopt children, and the issue of access to the Family Court for same-sex couples is still being resolved.
Some of the changes would take effect immediately, but many financial laws — such as social security, tax and veterans’ affairs — would be phased in by mid-2009. But first the changes will have to be passed by the Senate, where the Coalition retains its majority until July 1.
Even after then, Labor will need the vote of conservative Christian and Family First senator Steve Fielding and independent senator Nick Xenophon if it cannot clinch Coalition support.
Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson has signalled he backed the principle of removing discrimination against gay couples but has yet to secure formal support from his colleagues.
Shlomo Benizri, an Israeli politician from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, has blamed a recent spate of earthquakes in the Middle East on the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, liberalising laws regarding homosexuality.
Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.
One wonders whether Mr. Benizri’s words have come to the attention of certain political and religious forces in the countries neighbouring Israel, or certain other political and religious forces in Israel’s main supporter, the US. If so, the mind boggles at the possible responses the next time a big one hits either California or Iran.
The old teev during the non-ratings season has been a bit of a write off, which in many ways isn’t a bad thing. But I have enjoyed a lot of what SBS has had on (and I’m also pleased to see that the Rudd government is seeking legal advice on the decision to run in-program ads as promised). I could mention some of the Wong Kar-Wai flicks, and many others, but one doco that turned out to be heaps better than I’d anticipated was the one last week on teen movies, partly because it had a lot of interesting talking heads, and partly because it inspired me to go out and rent movies I hadn’t seen for donkey’s years like The Outsiders and remember with what emotional force it struck me way back when (I was a middle class boy going to a working class school, so I was alternately fantasising about being in a John Hughes world and being a “grease”.) It really is amazing to feel exactly how much I did identify with some of the characters and how much I felt - something that’s really very rarely the case now. Perhaps the 80s was something of a golden age for teen cinema, or maybe it’s about the difference between being in your teens and in your thirties.
For the purposes of this article, let’s optimistically assume the following: Labor wins this year’s federal election; Labor and the Greens and/or Democrats form a Senate majority; and Labor implements its promises within its first term of office.
Fanciful I know, but necessary for the sake of argument, as it was with such assumptions in mind that Labor recently outlined its GLBTI policy in Sydney to a small but passionate assortment of believers and cynics, organised by the Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby and featuring Labor candidates for inner-city seats as well as the party’s would-be Attorney General, Senator Joe Ludwig.
As all speakers went to great lengths to make clear, Labor is a better option than the Howard government where ending legislative discrimination against same-sex couples is concerned. Labor is committed not only to amending the 58 laws identified in HREOC’s Same Sex: Same Entitlements report, but also an even more comprehensive audit of additional laws and departmental policies. Sydney MP Tanya Plibersek and Wentworth candidate George Newhouse articulated a thorough understanding of other key issues concerning GLBTI folk, including domestic violence and the rise of assaults on Oxford Street, with corresponding action plans.
So far, so good. It’s at the next step – formal recognition of same-sex couples – where things get tricky. Continue reading ‘Hard Labor’
It’s an impressive list and fascinating to read about some of the names I’d never heard of, such as Seven’s Head of Creative Drama and Development, Bevan Lee.
As for Missy Higgins … there’s another thread for that discussion.
Any others who aren’t on that list (and who can be publicly named — please be sensitive)?
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated 
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