In the latest edition of Your Say, Crikey readers hit back over Guy Rundle’s controversial conversion therapy piece, and share their frustrations about the government’s climate failures.
On conversion therapy:
Loki Carbis writes: Rarely have I seen an article so wrong-headed in Crikey as Guy Rundle’s “Love, sex and the paradoxes of progressivism”.
There’s one key word entirely missing from the article: consent.
The objection to conversion therapy isn’t that we don’t really believe in gender fluidity, as Rundle claims. It’s that we believe no one else has the right to make that decision for you, and conversion therapy, almost without exception, violates consent in that fashion.
Rundle’s attempt to bundle in voluntary conversion choices — a tiny fraction of the conversion therapy racket — and then argue as if they are the whole of it is either disingenuous or indicative that he is less well-informed than he believes himself to be.
The true paradox of this article is not the one that Rundle has invented out of thin air, but rather the fact that anyone thought it was a good idea to publish it.
If Rundle wants to claim that progressives haven’t thought this one through, well, you first mate.
On climate change policy:
Louise Katz writes: The idea of trying to force Australia to be sane about climate change is a pointy point indeed, thank you Bernard Keane.
But it’s not crazy. It’s deeply sane.
I wonder if certain members of the Australian government might actually be relieved to have the hard decisions taken out of their hands by other angry nations corralling us into sane actions, if not actual sanity. When governments are hamstrung by their donors it’s a way out of a bind.
Sanity has to trump sovereignty — as a wry placard mentioned at one of last year’s climate rallies: “There is No Planet B.”
Wanting to maintain life on Earth is not crazy. The fact that I have felt the need to mention this is crazy. Ignoring the science in favour of an imagined reality is crazy. (You know the old saw: neurotics build castles in the air. Psychotics live in them.)
I sometimes wonder if our federal leader’s inaction has to do with a belief that the ultimate reality is in the hereafter when we leave the old vale of tears? Or could it be a kind of prosperity theology gone to its craziest limits?
Speculation is pointless — and we need points. We need actions to be undertaken by those who are capable of recognising the reality we inhabit.
Then we can get on with developing renewable industries, retraining the people who need it to work in these industries, starting to undo the monstrous damage we’ve done to the environment and the animal population, and generally acting sane.
On Bernard Collaery/Witness K:
Jim Feehely writes: Bravo for Luke Gosling raising the scandalous prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Colleary in the parliament.
These cases, along with the persecutions of David McBride and Richard Boyle, are the stark examples of the LNP government’s commitment to trashing our democracy in its own political interests.
And that is the crux. There is no “public interest” in pursuing these political persecutions, although I would personally love to hear Christian Porter explain his version of “public interest”.
On any measure this government is the most incompetent and corrupt in my lifetime. So incompetent and corrupt that financing social, economic and environmental cancers like News Corpse and the fossil-fuel industry to the obvious detriment of citizens does not embarrass it in the least. It increases its popularity, Trump-style.
Marian Arnold writes: This ongoing shameful saga has no point that is perceivable. It totally fails any pub test and the “good local bloke” aka PM Scott Morrison is missing an opportunity to play that card by overruling his highly esteemed attorney-general (ABC’s Four Corners) and dropping these nonsensical, embarrassing and reputationally damaging charges.
Has something in Crikey got you fired up? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication.
“Rundle’s attempt to bundle in voluntary conversion choices — a tiny fraction of the conversion therapy racket — and then argue as if they are the whole of it is either disingenuous or indicative that he is less well-informed than he believes himself to be.”
Rundle did no such thing. The article talked about reasons to ban the practice outright vs regulating it. If the objection you offer here, that people have been forced into it against their will, were the only one then you’d need only ban non-consensual conversion therapy.
So which is it? Do you believe that it can’t be undertaken in any circumstance without being harmful, like quack cancer treatments, or that consent is the issue?
Loki
If consent were the issue around conversion therapy, proposed legislation would focus on that. The legislation proposes to ban offering the service at all.
A move which, as i said, i support. But the idea that it is inevitably harmful relies on ideas that run contrary to dominant progressive ideas on sexuality