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.

*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.

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.

********

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.

Our Prima Spinster had this to say about Australia’s allergy to the poor and defenseless.

It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’.

I couldn’t agree more. More accurate terms would be ‘ignorant’, ‘narcissistic’ or ‘paranoid’. At least she’s not taking Frank Salter’s ‘assimilation was a great idea’ angle. Yet.

We can filter things too …
via godblock.com hat-tip Simon Gilby

If mandatory filtering wasn’t so abhorrent I’d be lobbying Canberra for this one.

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions.

Perhaps rape, genocide and oppression are okay when God does it though?

Straight up your daughter’s leg
via abc.com.au

NSW parliament isn’t sure illegal activities in NSW are illegal enough.

[Clive] Small says banning membership of bikie gangs could be unnecessary. He says many pre-existing laws can already be used against gangs.

Catch up Clive, crime is best solved by frowning real hard and directing as much legislative hate towards abnormal people as possible.

The executable offense that dare not speak its name
via the BBC

British immigration officials want homosexual asylum seekers from countries where homosexuality is a capital offense to try ‘not telling anyone’ before they’ll let them in.

In one case, currently before the UK Supreme Court, a gay man from Cameroon was told he should relocate elsewhere in his country and be “more discreet” in future.

What do they expect? Queer refugee zombies coming back for a second attempt?

Don’t make a 1984 reference
via brisbanetimes.com.au

Former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon defended her love of Big Brother by saying young people’s love of Facebook is a sign that we would love to have her watch us wherever we go.

”Young people don’t seem to be bothered,” she said at last night’s IQ2 debate, organised by the St James Ethics Centre and sponsored by the Herald. ”These arguments about protecting people’s privacy: in many cases people don’t care about their privacy being protected.”

She’s just pissed that everyone saw her eating cake while her state burned to the ground.

Gillard supports her own filter policy, bloggers shocked
via the ABC

Our Usurper-in-Chief has restated her commitment to the mandatory internet filter policy that she and Rudd’s Kitchen Cabinet created in the first place.

I understand that there’s a set of concerns, technical concerns about internet speed

I’m glad that freedom of speech, privacy violations and becoming an international joke are all technical concerns for Jules.

cc drhenkenstein

Voters seem to care so much about this tax because of two things, employment and getting back into surplus. The original RSPT got such a panning from the industry over jobs that Rudd’s brutal execution might seem reasonable. Gillard’s new deal, announced this morning and rebranded as the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, somehow gives analysts hope that mining stocks might actually benefit. Well that’s good news for everyone but the planet and makes Abott’s position, promising to repeal the tax if elected, wobble slightly.

He’ll do more than wobble if Labor can keep it’s early return to budget blackery promise. The reduced revenue from the tax, everyone’s reporting $1.5Billion less than under Rudd’s tax, makes Labor’s run at surplus trickier, but people need to remember that while we’re in deficit, the Government won’t spend us into high interest rates. So far for anyone owning a home this tax is working out well.

I’m calling this a victory for Gillard. She’s made the deal while her honeymoon keeps her safe from her own party’s dislike of compromise, everyone but the opposition is happy and she knows how to frame the issue to her benefit.

Of course Murdock’s crew are using the words ‘backflip’ and ‘cave in’ like they cure cancer. A news.com.au poll is currently running the question ‘Does the mining tax resolution make you more likely to vote Labor?’ with numbers around 74% No and 22% Yes.

News.com.au’s polls are essentially meaningless, however, they’re usually so swayed by the idiot yuppie conservative crowd that you can bank on them being correct from the opposite direction. The question, as well, is as useful as Andrew Bolt at a communist rally. It says nothing about supporting the resolution, or the tax, but only about it changing your mind. A 22% ‘might change my mind’ vote is fucking huge in that context.

I’ll let the Australian, especially Bryan Frith, have their vitriol. They make a good point when they need to but the illusion of objectivity died long ago. If you want decent journalism, not just agenda-pushing, read the ABC. Read Crikey too, they have some damn fine coverage of this sort, better than mine.

We’ll stroke our beards until the tax reaches the Senate, where it needs support from the Greens before it can go to the ball. I’m hoping it goes through, I’m not sure the Greens vote would like them throwing it out.

I don’t think Senator Lundy will replace Senator Conroy as head of the DBCDE, no matter how much we wish, pray, hope or cross our fingers. Conroy, as I’ve commented twice today, is neck-deep in NBN and Digital TV implementation and swapping him out mid-coitus makes no sense. He’s not doing badly enough in either of those policies for our bitching to have any effect. His Victorian Unity faction (Labor Right) also backed Gillard’s preselection to the safe Labor seat of Lalor in 1998.

This last bit of factional war-history is odd to me. Conroy’s been lumped in with what Beazley called the ‘Roosters’ (Conroy, Kim Carr, Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith), placing the senator in close alliance with Kimm Carr, a man that has tried everything to keep Gillard out of politics altogether. Well, so did Lindsay Tanner, and now he’s buggering off, Wayne Swan is deputy and Stephen Smith is apparently okay with stepping out of cabinet to make way for Rudd. Things must be pretty chummy at the moment for all this to work but if Gillard doesn’t keep the polls happy (or loses the election) it’ll be Conroy and Carr et al that move on Gillard; Swan would make a dissapointing amount of sense to be the next leader of the party.

Nicola Roxon is also (last time I checked) engaged to Michael Kerrisk, one of Conroy’s mates. I say this only to highlight to complexity of factional movements. I’m predicting an internal-only reshuffle with no new faces.

If all that made no sense, good. It makes little sense to me too, but I’m keeping an eye on it.

I’ve learned my lesson. My shit stayed skeptical at all stages this time. Julia #Spillard’s shotgun ascent to the primary office of our land will not draw the same misplaced optimism I offered Chairman Rudd in his guise as Kevin07.

At roughly Nine last night Jacque Prior messaged me; The Labor party looked close to a spill. I leapt online like Jim Wallace leaps on the emotionally vulnerable. Within two hours a challenge was called and the next few pages of Australia’s political novel written. The moment Gillard walked into the boss’s office there was no way Rudd could lead Labor to an election victory. Today, less than 24 hours since someone pressed the button, our first female Governor General swore in our first female Prime Minister.

That makes me happy, not because I think it’s a victory for feminists, but because it’s a victory for a woman. Those can be hard to come by in politics, business or war.

The sheer speed of Rudd’s removal from office over the last 24 hours puts it in the same chapter, with all the same vicious narrative, as Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975. Rudd’s been compared with Whitlam before, and validly so, but the biggest comparison to be made is the nature of the tragedy. Both came into office with massive popular support, a catchy slogan and big ideals. Both kept key business to a core group of trusted MPs. Both infuriated the opposition. Both had to leave the main office with less than a day’s notice.

I still think Rudd was slightly less effective as a PM, but his accomplishments won’t be ignored by history. His outgoing speech in the Prime Minister’s courtyard listed an incredible number of things that most of us, myself included, had forgotten he’d done. I don’t mourn his passing; a one-man show in government is anathema to me in every way.

Many today have made the comment: “If only he’d cried like that while he was in office.”

What about Gillard? There’s a certain circularity to her story, but I’m saving that for a paid article. What I will say is that she knows what she’s doing, even if it is just occupying the centrist sweet-spot the Liberals have been pining after since Howard the stagnant left stage.

Her politics are less a breath of fresh air than her ability to menstruate. Sure the Labor party might approach the election with less pants-wetting fear than they would have under Rudd, but gratitude for that only assumes the Labor party has anyone’s best interests at heart but their own. They don’t. The Labor machine protests the sour reality of the working class like a paedophile protests the demolition of  a childcare centre; mobility in the working class hurts their ability to feed.

Gillard is, as my fiery colleague Kat Henderson puts it:

anti-union (see ABCC & NAPLAN); anti-refugees (see attacks on Labor for Refugees in 2004); pro-war (see praise of Rudd for increasing troops in Afghanistan); against same sex marriage (see 2009 TV interview); pro-Israel (see comments made after 2008 attack on Gaza in support of Israel).

Even just one of those would count me out as a Gillard fan. Unfortunately for me, it’s more or less what the electorate wants, and in our ham-fisted mockery of democracy, that’s really all that counts.

Grilling Gillard at this stage is scary, the conservatives are expecting it. On first glance my internal ‘Bush the younger’ makes his fiat against criticising the extant powerful for fear that ‘the enemy’ might gain traction. Abott scares me more than Gillard, undermining her feels like supporting the raging regressives in the Liberal party. I will, however, rely on hitting both parties with my usual vitriol to ensure the balance isn’t tipped in his favor.

More to come.

For the teal deers:

I’m trying to explain (via blogpost) that I will tolerate (and in some cases support) personal faith despite loathing organised religion. Apparently I’ve been alienating people on Facebook (not that I mind really). A bit angry that people can’t see the difference between me alienating Christians on Facebook and Christians Alienating homosexuals IN PARLIAMENT!

By now it should be obvious to all involved that I’m strongly, deeply atheist.

During the last month or two I’ve been stretching my rhetorical legs in this field. My attention to media and policy makes it hard for me to escape the ham-fisted souring  that the religiouso bring to public discourse. I don’t hold back when ontological proclamations appear in my Facebook stream, unless said proclamations have a very specific aspect to them.

That aspect is that they have nothing to do with the life of anyone but the proclaimer.

Unfortunately for the Abrahamics in my life there is so much outward pressuring built into the fabric of their religions that they seldom say something that isn’t bothering someone else. Not just bothering, but inciting a world-view that alienates others in practical ways. Here is where I differ from them.

For starters, the Abrahamic religions are not silent on political leanings, especially not in the US or here in Australia. To say that I am Christian has implications for my political viewpoint, whereas to say that I am atheist does not. Atheism simply means that you do not believe a personal God exists. If a religious person said they were a Deist, then they too would be refraining from political comment in their statement.

Even in situations where a person’s identification as a Christian is followed by a denunciation of the alienating ideologies of that church, the identification is still harmful because they have added themselves to the number of people that supposedly support the ideology. The government will use the argument that, say, 60% of Australians are Christians, Christians don’t like homosexuals, therefore 60% of Australians don’t like homosexuals and will vote for me if I don’t like them either. This is a blunt case, but the mechanism runs deep.

This is not a case of the government getting sloppy with statistics, it’s an acknowledgment that the power doesn’t lie with individual Christians, it lies with the opinion makers in the church. Deny your complicity all you like, you’re not doing anything to stop the resurgence of fundamentalism in this country via the brigades over at Hillsong, AOG and the like.

Before I get on to distinguishing between a personal faith and a communal faith, I’d like to mention secularism.

Atheism isn’t intrinsically political, but secularism is. Secularism is an approach to government that separates the State from the Church so that many churches may exist to cater for as many different faiths as exist. The fashionable way to prove your ignorance these days appears to be claiming that secularism is anti-church. Secularism is about as pro-church as you can get before establishing a theocracy. I want all Christians to hear this: You need a secular state so that another denomination doesn’t gain power and oppress you. You know as well as I do that Christianity is fragmented and inconsistent. Don’t forget your history:

• The English civil war was pretty much Protestants killing Catholics killing Protestants.
• Serbs versus Croats is essentially orthodox Christians versus Catholics.
• Freedom of Religion in the US came out of a law preventing the congregationalists (a Christian sect) harassing Baptists and Presbyterians.
• Calvinists killed a hell of a lot of Catholics after the reformation.
• The puritans fled England because other Christians oppressed them for being daft.

Leaving secularism aside, claiming that Australia is based on Christian values means essentially nothing. If you’re talking about the don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat kind of values then, well, thanks for the input, where the fuck were you when we were sent here for stealing bread (first fleet), murdering aborigines, and disrespecting women by disallowing them the vote? If Australia is based on Christian values in that sense then we can probably add ‘only if it suits us’ as a Christian tenet. Apart from those core values, which honestly, aren’t real hard to figure out, it would appear most of the values still left to implement are homophobia, ignorance and authoritarianism.

Please stay the hell out of politics, you keep ruining everything.

So if we take the public face out of religion, what does a personal faith look like? My temptation here is to say it would look pretty silly because the whole basis of faith is delightfully unhelpful to any meaningful progress in society and does nothing but remove people from the collective intelligence of a nation. I’m going to resist that temptation because as a liberal I think it’s more important to let each individual improve themselves in whatever way they see fit (assuming they don’t do something that stops others from improving themselves likewise). So how can you have faith without having it rammed down people’s throats?

For starters, simple things like not trying to convert people helps, but really doesn’t mean much if you then go and vote for someone that wants to maintain the alienation of queers in society. Having a personal faith is about one central and all important self-injunction:

I will live my life by the rules of my faith but make no action that structurally, legally or socially inhibits somebody else’s ability to completely ignore my beliefs.

That’s why I would never vote for the abolition of Religion, no matter how tempting it may become in the future. Examples of applying the above might include:

• Not supporting a man-woman only definition of marriage
• Not having an abortion but not supporting anti-abortion laws
• Not looking at porn but also not supporting Internet censorship
• Telling an atheist he’s wrong but agreeing that he’s allowed to be
• Fighting for the down-trodden and poor WITHOUT telling them you did it because of your faith

The idea here is not to force religion out of the public sphere, that will never happen and never should happen. The aim of secularism and of maintaining personal faith is to reduce the strain and angst in this country. The strain between the religious and the otherwise, the angst of not measuring up to the standards of some celestial dictator, both of these cause far more trouble than I can pinpoint in my research.

The difference between the straw-man Kieran and the straw-man Christian is that when I mouth off on Facebook, I’m trying to ease the burden on the human spirit, not add more rules, not add more obligations, not add more oversight. Abrahamic religions are at their core authoritarian and I am at my core not. I believe in positive reinforcement not a fear of eternal damnation. I believe in atoning for my sins instead of praying them away.

There are so many differences that conflating my outbursts with those of my religious opposition is mentally lazy and shallow. Beneath my remonstrations is my tacit permissiveness and the acknowledgment that my distaste for religion is less powerful – the current political climate won’t allow for me to activate it in any oppressive sense even if I wanted to.