Same-sex marriage campaign update: who’s doing worse in the dire postal non-plebiscite?
Week three, and this farce has been substantially overshadowed by the Section 44 farce, which may yet find that the entire parliament is ineligible to sit in the first place. In the meantime we’ve had several entrants. The rainbow crossings are back, with a crossing in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda to be painted up by order of Port Phillip Council. Doubtless the Yes vote will be huge there — most of the No vote there will be an anti-marriage vote from the left/queer direction — but the politics of rainbow crossings are still complex. Do you really want to make crossing the road an act of forced solidarity with something someone may be mildly opposed to? Does it really make any sort of argument for the Yes case? Or does it assist the No case outlined by Tony Abbott, a vote against “political correctness”? Quite possibly.
Bizarrely, Abbott’s argument appears to have been confirmed from the left by an op-ed by Gay Alcorn in the Grauniad. The logic is peculiar — and telling. According to Alcorn, a Yes vote would send a message of resistance by youth to the political establishment. You what? This is a staged plebiscite of no legal status, in which the leaders of both parties have said they will vote Yes, said parties having been through years of cynical contortions around the issue. Alcorn even believes that a Yes vote will send a message about housing affordability. This is clueless boomerism at its worst — the idea that left economic and social issues are a natural fit. There will be plenty of negative-gearing, property-owning Coalition-voting folks voting Yes. How could it possibly be conceived as sending a radical message on matters economic? For those suffering from cut penalty rates, precarious contracts, the rental squeeze, and out-of-reach home ownership, the Yes case will appear as another political phony war. The challenge for the Yes case will be to get them to vote at all — saying it’s a radical gesture is adding insult to injury. Alcorn is an acute news analyst; but this is boomer narcissism at its worst.
Readers may note that I give the Yes case a hard time — largely because I suspect that few readers regard the No case as even rational — but a couple of contributions from the negative side stand out. Kevin Donnelly leaned in with a largely irrelevant piece about parental gender complementarity, which same-sex marriage legalisation would barely affect, and which relies on a series of historical fictions to argue. (Interesting to see Donnelly back in Fairfax, after years publishing in the Oz; unrelated presumably to Fairfax’s freelance op-ed rates going through the floor, and taking those who will accept them.)
But the ultimate own-goal has come from champions past, present and future, the Catholic Church, with Archbishop Dennis Hart threatening to sack any of the 180,000 who work in Catholic schools and hospitals who enter into a same-sex marriage if it’s legalised. Well, whatever rules the church may have the right to impose on direct employees, its schools and hospitals are semi-public entities, funded by state grants and Medicare fees. The church has never demanded such workers be professing Catholics, and they couldn’t — they would be unable to staff their institutions if they did. This is pure bullying on a political issue. The church’s timing is typically impeccable: it comes at the same time as revelations of a sexual-abusing priest who confessed 1500 times to 30 different priests over his actions, before being arrested in 2002. What would Jesus do? Probably get a better PR rep. The church’s leaders appears to have no idea of the contempt in which it is held by millions of Australians — and the lack of public support they will have for any expansive claims of religious exemption.
So, to the vote — unless the High Court knocks it down, and there is no quorum in parliament to vote on it. Onwards!
That the church was out of touch is hardly a revelation, but the degree that is out of touch certainly was. Did they have the first clue just how dark that threat was to end the employment of those followed their legal right, should the yes vote get up?
The No side has to try to drag in extraneous issues. The only legitimate argument they have is that SSM is not traditional. That is not enough so they have to expand the so-called debate.
Oh wow, the church does NOT want to open that can of worms, I agree with your reasoning there. A movement to threaten the for profit public/private partnerships administered by the church would have a tough task ahead of them, but no shortage of support from the public.
Honestly, it is about time someone gave them a good kicking. The amount of things churches and charities run within the public service is staggering. Health/aged/disability care, the job network and education especially. I have seen dodgy practices in some of the workplaces within the aged and disability care industries. Things like charging clients for unnecessary services, which would be paid for by public funding.
They seem to have struck gold in the past decade or so, as more and more functions are contracted out.
Interesting the illegality of the threat to the employment of people doing something the law may allow – would this be the same Archbishop Denis J Hart DD, successor to Pell as Melbourne’s top man in a dress, who told Blot last on Sky TV that he would not obey a law that required a priest to notify the police if, during confession, a paedophile admitted to abuse?
He also claimed that in 50 years of issuing absolutions he had never heard of such a thing.
None so blind as the religious deluded.
I have been assuming that as he is some sort of regular now, Donnelly is paid whatever pittance Fairfax can afford these days. (Unsolicited pieces go unpaid, I understand.) However, on further reflection, Donnelly’s may be case of vanity publishing- he pays them!