This is a condom, not a sin.

The only reason you need not to repress sex: Leia

So if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last 24 hours its that same-sex parents always abuse their kids. At least, that is, according to Wendy Francis, Family First senatorial candidate for Queensland.

So I’m thinking, if all it takes to be a high-profile Senate candidate is a batshit crazy view of human sexuality, I should give it a shot myself.

Why Sexuality needs to be repressed*

*Repressing sexuality will void warranty

1. People who have a healthy sex life find it harder to get worked up over immigrants and muslims
2. Sex is the number one cause of Sexually Transmitted Diseases
3. Regretting sexual encounters is the number one cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
4. If sexual frustration is released in a way that doesn’t involve violence, the Police would be out of a job
5. Catholic priests raping children keeps the focus off evangelical pastors hiring same-sex escorts
6. Seeing the female body as anything but shameful and ugly is just plain fucking distracting.
7. The sexually satisified won’t strap bombs to themselves, therefore ruining all the fun.
8. If we can’t shame our children for exploring their bodies, how will they learn how to feel guilt?
9. Defining marriage any more broadly than ‘between a man and a woman’ is unfairly confusing for Christians.
10. God said so.

I’ll update this as more entirely valid reasons arise.

After being roundly humiliated by, well, everyone on Twitter for her ignorant, unfounded and regressive ranting, Wendy Francis has deleted her blog post on the topic.

Whether or not this was at the behest of Family First or if it was her own initiative is irrelevant. As Wendy will soon discover, the Internet never forgets. Thanks to Google’s caching, the post is back and can be viewed in this post, or in its original shame here.

Keep in mind that I do not, in any way, endorse the content of this post. This posted here in the interest of political communication.

Let’s end the gay marriage debate and protect children from abuse

By Wendy Francis or some unfortunate lackey in her charge.

Politicians have been learning, albeit slowly, that debating points of policy on Twitter is a mistake. The latest in a growing pile of gaff-destroyed political carnage is Wendy Francis, Queensland senatorial candidate for the Family First Party.

*updated below

Late this afternoon Wendy tweeted about a statement she’d released calling for the major parties to end the gay marriage debate.

Released statement today calling on Labor & Coalition to end gay marriage debate. The debate is destructive to Australia’s future – @wendy4senate

I’ve screencap’ed the entire series of her tweets, though unless you’re psychopathic, sociopathic or Christian, her comments may induce such bile that an alien Glenn Beck is likely to burst forth from your chest.

The local twitterati unleashed their feral goldfish within moments, slamming Wendy as a bigoted homophobe and fundamentalist regressive.  So far at least two parody accounts have been created, my favourite being @windy4senate, sporting slightly modified but hilarious versions of Wendy’s tweets; and @wendy2thesenate, which by comparison lacks the wit of the previous account but still tries.

A search for @wendy4Senate results in a large number of rebuttals, denunciations and outcries, but honestly, taking someone like Wendy seriously should be best left to us of the ‘lock jaw blogger’ variety. For the rest of you, just point and laugh while we make her feel stupid for being such a stain on our political history.

*Update

Cameron Reilly has pointed out that Wendy Francis is on the board of a Charity that, while embroiled in controversy for the conflicting interests of its board members, would only give aid to the needy after the El Salvador earthquakes if they first attended a half hour prayer meeting.

The Australian Christian Lobby has just released an article claiming that the Coalition’s rejection of the filter is ‘incomprehensible’.

I have commented on the article at the site, though I have no trust in a Christian organisation’s desire to be fair and publish my comment, so I’ve copied it here.

*******

This isn’t incomprehensible at all.

Firstly, the filter trial failed to genuinely ‘trial’ the filter in any real world context, and when the results were analysed, it showed that in order to produce a positive result for the filter, almost every useful feature needed to be disabled, including screening high traffic sites like Youtube and Facebook. Your reasoning here is wrong.

Secondly, it would be illogical to *filter* Australian content but not filter foreign content. It is illogical to say the government should enforce domestic laws domestically but not enforce domestic laws overseas. Your reasoning here is wrong.

Finally, the only possible benefit this filter may have had (if it had been established with competence) would be preventing *illiterate* children from accessing porn. This function is better served by parents because it allows for education and the development of stronger family relationships as the child learns from their parents what their parents believe is right and wrong. To simply block it, for everyone, at a choke point that was never designed for the purpose, helps nobody. A child cannot simply use a proxy (dead simple to use) to get around their parents. Your reasoning here is wrong.

Perhaps if this filter DOES come in, maybe we’ll see Christian forums and pages blocked for vilifying homosexuals or even see online versions of the bible blocked for the graphic violence, murder and genocide depicted within it.

********

Before I go on, the QUTE magazine website is now open for business!

It’d be be mighty hypocritical of me to rant and rave against censorship only to censor articles in my own publication.
So I won’t.

So far the only article censored in QUTE mag by the Student Guild Executive Board was an article about not letting chivalry die in the face of feminism. I can understand that, despite the article being written by a woman and allowed for publication by the Guild President, also a woman, the article is the kind of regressive sentiment that I loathe and helps nobody. Pitting politeness against feminism is one of the more intellectually lazy ways of making a point, but it was submitted and was well written enough to be published.

I haven’t published everything that I’ve been sent, but that’s slightly different. If I haven’t published something it’s because it’s either too long, poorly written beyond my ability to edit, or flat-out incomplete.

Now, if the Student Guild owned the qutemag.org domain, I’d be bound by their wishes and be unable to publish anything the board had censored. Fortunately the owner of the domain will remain a secret.

Kat Henderson has been extremely supportive of the magazine and she’s really stuck to her guns in allowing our own little corner of the fourth estate to flourish. She can’t, however, control the entire Guild, so the democratic process won’t always result in particularly democratic outcomes. This is the nature of democracy; sometimes the people will choose to hamstring themselves, and we must respect that as a democratic decision.

I can’t speak for Kat but she’s given every indication that she is anti-censorship and should be given all credit for never trying to censor my magazine.

A part of that respect, however, is to constantly challenge it when the result is unjust, unfair or obfuscating. That is why I will post censored articles on the site, to challenge those who would censor the magazine into siding with all censorship or no censorship. There is no line. The families of Australia do not ‘just know’ where the line is and nobody working with a human mind can be trusted to draw one.

Stephen Conroy has been polishing shit in the hopes it will shine. Indeed, he will be remembered as the go-to guy for that kind of task.

Today the DBCDE released its suite of measures to keep their website censorship policy transparent. Of the nine measures proposed only four have any real meat to them, and any sense of Lundy-esque democracy is still conspicuously absent. The greatest disappointment here is that these measures, held up by Conroy as being so far ‘above and beyond’ what we should expect as citizens, are what the current system should look like without the filter.

There’s a rather baffling report going out there that Conroy is putting the filter on the back-burner. The concensus amongst the feral goldfish is that this is a stalling tactic to put the filter off the election radar. That the report came within a few hours of the transparency release supports this (at least in my mind) as it’s the scenario you’d expect if Gillard had told Conroy to ‘clear the decks’.

As far as the measures are concerned:

Measure 1: All internet content complaints to the ACMA that are assessed as being potentially RC will be classified by the Classification Board

This is a big improvement on the current system but only in the same way that food poisoning beats being set on fire. The ACMA was never constructed as a body capable of classifying content, and its stewardship of the web content blacklist gave it control over online content that it didn’t have over any other media. The EFA supports this measure, as do I, because it’s really a repair to a previously broken system. This one’s especially funny given the distrust Labor showed as opposition for the Liberal lackies being stacked into the ACMA and Classification Board.

Measure 2: ACMA notification process

When you need a fiat of government policy before you can tell people you’ve censored their website, you know you’re cocking things up. This is meant to prevent the situation that occurred after the blacklist was leaked last year where a dentist discovered his site had been blacklisted. He wasn’t notified. The caveat to this measure is that they don’t have to tell you if you’re being investigated by the Federal Police because of the content.

Do if the blacklist is only child porn and snuff films, dear Senator, why the hell would you need this provision? Wouldn’t everyone who could be notified be under investigation? This is the first public admission that not everything on the blacklist is illegal of which I am aware.

Measure 3: Blocking notification page and appeal mechanism

I hesitate before calling this one completely innocuous. It’s far better than the government’s original plan to let the filter just drop your website request and have it look like the site doesn’t exist (and then send an unmarked van to blackbag you soon after, or so goes the joke), but I can’t help but think there’s some clever bastard out there who could script something up to use this page as a way of plucking the blacklist out of thin air. I’m not the paranoid, however, I think this one’s more or less harmless.

Measure 4: Access to information regarding the list

… is not nearly as useful as it sounds. You can find out why a site is blocked but you’ll still be taking the ACMA’s word for it. The only person outside the ACMA, classification board and initial complainant who can judge whether the reasoning is sound is the Independent Expert from measure 7. They’ll also be publishing a categorical run-down of how many sites are banned and for what reason. The measure includes a staff position at the Ministry of Truth to create the numbers, publish them and ultimately be jailed for thought crimes.

Measure 5: Avenues for appeal and review

Honestly, this goes right up there with FOI as being something that no self-respecting democracy would actually charge people for. This would be fine, if a little ’stab in the dark’ were it not for the likely massive charges you;d have to pay.

Measure 6: Incorporation of URLs of child sexual abuse imagery from international lists

Given the trouble some of these international organisations have had in not blocking things like wikipedia, I’m not entirely happy with this. What ever happened to politicians having conniptions about sovereignty every time a foreign body makes a decision for us. Somehow a group of net-hating soccer mums in Europe mean more to our government than the United Nations.

Every URL on these lists should be submitted to the classification board. As the measures currently stand, the ACMA will drip feed a few to the Classification board every now and then. Not acceptable. The AFP has been cooperating like this for years to wonderful effect, yet somehow we still need to bring in foreign organisations that aren’t already working with the police? Whatever, we’re getting into the mushy end of things here.

Measure 7: Review by an Independent Expert and report to Parliament

I’m a big fan of this, though as we’ve seen from the Labor party’s use of an independent committee to stop them abusing tax-payer funded policy advertising, it’s probably going to go nowhere. Likewise, Rudd announced an Independent National Security legislation Monitor (to make sure the government didn’t go all American on us with crazy counter-terrorism laws) which the government has failed to recruit two years later but has slated the position to be part-time with two part-time assistants. If that’s how they treat oversight on counter-terrorism laws, I don’t imagine this independent expert will be adequately funded at all.

Measure 8: Industry review of technical aspects of filtering

I’ll just quote straight from the release shall I. “This could be done for example through the establishment of a Departmental email address which would allow ISPs to submit any concerns or queries they have on technical matters.” An email address. Fuck off you demented plebs. Take this seriously, please.

Measure 9: Reporting against service standards and statutory requirements

This means essentially nothing until the NBN is in place, and even that’s me speculating that there may be some legislated minimum performance targets for ISPs in the future.

So until Mark Newton files a complaint to the Australian Federal Police, don’t expect much in the mainstream media about this. The naive will accept this as reasonable and the Government has issued a fiat declaring this ‘uninteresting’ for the election.

I have noticed the collective apoplexy being experienced by Australia’s dubiously educated soccer mums and under-employed social academics over Sandilands’ latest trick. I have noticed the vitriolic and panic-stricken cries of the media as they reach for the low hanging fruit of public angst. I have noticed everyone getting off on the chance to once again take a piss into the wind that is Kyle bloody Sandilands.

So while Hetty and friends sharpen their knives and polish their cheque books, Kyle has been apologising and dodging bullets. I’m sure the Labor party is grateful for his ability to distract the ‘feral goldfish’ and take the pressure off them for a few minutes while they sit down with their mates and work out how to deny next month’s installment of Two and a half Factions.

Mother’s Milk

Kyle didn’t pull the plug in time. That is all. He was not trying to verbally molest the poor girl. That was the mother’s job. This woman has to be one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen.

Listen lady, Kyle’s getting a beating over this, so here’s your turn. You are a bad mother. You have failed your daughter. You sold her out for tickets to a concert. You were too fucking stupid to avoid a very obvious and very dangerous subject on national fucking radio. You were asked by the producers if such information existed and you fucking lied.

I’m inclined to believe that you lied deliberately so this situation would arise. That’s abuse on an appalling level.

Kyle’s career as a shock jock is nothing compared to your lack of upbringing. Your daughter was failed by an older man and failed by your lack of maternal ability. Sixty thousand years of evolution has been fucking lost on you.

Moral Decay?

Meanwhile the term ‘moral decay’ has reared it’s ugly head at least once. Moral decay hey? Well, thank God I’m a writer, I’m relevant regardless of how dystopian we get. There’s a word that means, exactly, the application of moral decay to this whole scenario; practice it with me.

Bullshit

It might take you a while to sound it out, especially given contemporary standards of literacy. Moral decay is not the right term here. Let me explain.

Moral decay is a result of moral stagnation. Put simply, morals will only decay if we let them stand still for too long. The world moves and so must our morals. Keeping them set in stone is a wonderful way of sending society backwards. Even Clive Hamilton writes about the need to establish new moral standards. Unfortunately for Clive, his definition of ‘new’ is ‘what he remembers from watching The Brady Bunch‘. Even worse, he’s not alone. Kevin Rudd’s neo-conservative movement has been a rallying cry for the bigots and religious throwbacks of the country.

This leads me to the real point…

This is about stupidity, not manners

Sure manners comes into it, but only on the periphery. Kyle was too stupid to pull the plug on a woman who was too stupid not to sexually abuse her daughter on national radio. The media is too stupid to pick the real culprit and the public is too stupid to realise that the media is shafting them.

Someone shows us a front page and our brains go to shit.

We’re shown to be a nation of dumbasses by the level of entertainment we crave, something goes wrong because of the vapid tits that come up with this shit and then the professional crybabies rush in and, instead of contributing any useful analysis, simply reinforce the notion that we’re collectively brain damaged by being intellectually lazy.

Andrew Bolt, I’m looking squarely at you here. Though I may be hasty, your editor probably dragooned you into that position. It’s not your fault, you were just following orders.

With this in mind, I’ll make my point in simple language so your average mortgage holder can understand.

We’re not getting nastier, we’re getting dumber. This is because you watch shit, read shit, and think shit. The old days were not better. This happened because our moral framework is out of date and nobody puts any thought into it. Kyle Sandilands is not an evil pedo, the girl’s mother is. Stop bitching and send the poor girl some flowers. She’s been hurt, and your focus on Sandilands is just making it worse.

Young lady, I’m so sorry that your mother failed you like this. If you’re one to look for a silver lining, hopefully it will be that your situation makes some parents wake up and do a better job of defending their children instead of hoping somebody else will do it for them.

Update: I just found this article written by the man himself.

I’ve known about this for a few months but it’s finally come out. Issue 131 of AntipodeanSF is here. I also happen to be one of the contributing authors.

This is the first time I’ve published anything without a direct shot at the submit button so I’m feeling somewhat proud of myself. Have a read and tell me what you think, though I assure you that my work has come a long way since I wrote that piece.

An attempted rape in the early hours after ANZAC day ended in a ctizen’s arrest on a middle aged man. At 20 past midnight on the Sunday of the ANZAC day weekend residents living on the corner of Queen and Ann streets heard the terrified screams of a young woman as she was accosted by a white middle aged man wearing a suit.

Within seconds of her screams being heard, several local residents had called the police and no less than 5 people were running to apprehend the man seen grappling with the woman. The man had been grappling the woman in front of the Bus stop outside the abandon building next to the Orient Hotel on Ann Street. He let go when two residents from a nearby balcony roared for him to stop.

The man ran towards the Orient Hotel and clumsily climbed over the chain link fence into the abandoned lot between 540 and 560 Queen Street. Several young men heard the residents’ screams and ran to intercept the man as he came out of the bushes in the lot. The cornered man tried to jump back over the fence but was prevented from doing so by two other men on Ann street.

The man was detained by the youths as police arrived on the scene. He appeared to be heavily intoxicated and his pants were undone at the buckle and fly. His suit jacket was adorned with numerous ANZAC day medals.

The young lady with which he had been grappling walked away from the scene before police could arrive. Several residents witnessed the event and gave statements to the police.

This is not fiction. This actually happened. I was one of the screaming residents and also one of the youths that helped apprehend the man.  My fiance was the one that called the police. This, as far as I know, is an ongoing investigation and this post may be subjected to police censorship. This is not intended to be a critique of ANZAC day but an example of the rampant stupidity caused by excessive alcohol abuse.

Judging by the man’s age it is unlikely that he actually served in ANY war and was more likely representing an unfortunate relative.

So many young men gave their lives for us, ANZAC day should be about honouring their memory. This act is a cruel betrayal of their sacrifice and a fitting parody of war itself.

Australians lack the identity and self-image to generate sufficient backlash to a conservative uprising that threatens to further erode our chances of a free and open society.

The ACMA is still suffering little-man syndrome, The Rudd government is still distracting us with shiny objects and Clive Hamilton is still in hiding on the filter issue. What has the blogosphere been doing in my absence? Did this whole situation go quiet at the same time I decided to train to the next level of political discourse or did the NBN issue accost the only minds capable of discussing the Clean Feed with any panache?

I’ve come to a frightening realisation. There is no Australian dream, the nation’s foundations are built on sand and Laurie Oakes is no Hunter S Thompson. Ladies and Gentlemen, we’re a microwave dinner away from societal collapse. There will be no conflict, no student protests, no fear and loathing. Australians are not capable of such character building melodrama. We won’t collapse through a lack of morals, we will recede into melancholy stagnation through a lack of outrage. There is no freak power movement here. Maybe we need one.

Peter Garrett used to sing about passion fatigue. I can identify with the feeling – idealism hurts and alienates, so why bother? Idealism is for those unwashed and unparented university students with long hair and hemp bags. Our inner monologue: I’m playing by the rules and social order serves me just fine. Freedom of speech is libel and freedom of expression is paedophilia. I can’t wait till Friday night so I can drink this unexplained knot in my stomach loose.

The EFA was just served with a link deletion order by the ACMA for linking to an abortion site in a political discussion. Trust Australian bureaucrats to make the USA’s legislative absurdities look sane. The only reason John Ashcroft lacks an Australian peer is because that would require more personality than we’re capable of producing. I’m seriously starting to think that the Aussie persona is a dead-set lie. We’ve spent so long telling ourselves that we’re laid back that we missed the signs of GET OFF MY DANG LAWN!

Little old ladies with glaucoma and leprous skin stand in line at Woolies telling Columbian students that they should leave their culture at home and embrace Australian culture. What is Australian culture? Tell me. First person to mention ‘mateship’ loses. Christians can sit back and be assured that I know your quantity and don’t want to hear it again.

Regardless of what merit lies in the Anti-filtering movement, it’s sad that there weren’t more people involved. Where’s the knee-jerk freedom culture? Where are the habitual protesters that show up to protest without knowing what’s going on?

For a country founded by convicts desperate for freedom from their legalistic oppressors, we’re doing a terrible job of embracing liberty. We’ve been sold on the same ‘freedom from’ rhetoric that fueled so many despotic regimes last century. Somebody think of the working family children! Respect for human life is non-core even if you make it to the mainland. Welcome to Camp Woomera; it’s not Guantanamo so stop calling lawyers.

Somebody tell me what our Nation stands for before I start filling in the blanks myself.