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Janet Albrechtsen, Gay Marriage and making gravy
If you have listened to this song before then it should not have escaped your attention that the process of making good gravy is just as important as the nature of the the ingredients I hear the song on the radio this morning as I read Janet Albrechtsen this morning.
Janet Albrechtsen click for source
Gay marriage is not akin to securing the vote for women or ending apartheid. After all, civil unions are commonplace. Gay couples enjoy the same substantive rights as heterosexual couples. If they don’t they should. But the political battle to claim the word “marriage” for homosexuals is an elite agenda of the political classes for reasons not always honest.
Take the disingenuous claim that traditional marriage is an evil form of discrimination against gays. As Chief Justice John Roberts said in Hollingsworth last week, “when the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn’t get around and say let’s have this institution, but let’s keep out homosexuals. The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.”
Yet, those who oppose gay marriage for legitimate reasons are too often treated as morally inferior, out-of-date, and worse, bigoted.
Whether it’s a snooty editorial from The New York Times ridiculing the “incoherence” of opposing gay marriage in Hollingsworth or mocking grumbles from the audience on ABC1’s Q&A, too many gay marriage advocates have chosen the wrong way to advance their cause.
Redefining marriage in a way that promotes social cohesion means winning people over with reasoned arguments rather than trying to guilt them into agreeing.
What our activist friends seem to forget is that for the sort of social changes they desire they have to convince rather than coerce a change from those of us who want to see marriage remain as a heterosexual institution.
Patience is a virtue that seems far too removed from the activist mindset, maybe it shouldn’t be so if they want the changes they desire to be enduring accepted and effective.
Cheers Comrades
“They have a killing problem”
Janet Albrechtsen writes a cracking piece in today’s Oz about the Jihadist problem and explains why treating them just like normal civil criminals is a very bad idea sadly far to many “progressives” just don’t seem to get it at all.
Janet Albrechtsen
It takes a sweet but rather dim-witted Pollyanna view of the world to suppose that men infused with an ideology to kill infidels and trained to do so need only spend some time in the equivalent of a detox centre to get those dirty jihadist thoughts out of their minds. These guys don’t have a drinking or drug problem. They have a killing problem.
But in a society where we think we can treat every transgression, from swearing to homophobic language, with a stint in rehab, it’s no great surprise that we now think terrorists are just miscreants of a slightly nastier kind.
This has always been the liberal mindset. Terrorists, we were told, ought to be treated and prosecuted as criminals in ordinary courts, because we can’t really be at war with a transnational group of religious nutters. The obsession with simple moral absolutes meant that denying habeas corpus rights to alleged terrorists caught on the battlefield was equally wrong. Liberal justices in the US Supreme Court agreed, leading Chief Justice John Roberts to declare, in dissent, that the American people had just lost “a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges”. Soldiers would henceforth have to collect evidence and take witness statements from the battlefield like a cop busting a drug ring. As Justice Antonin Scalia said in his dissent, “how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch that knows least about national security”.
Now let us just imagine a twelve step program for Jihadists…
“My name is Omar and it has been six months since I made my last bomb…“
Hmm, it just does not seem to work as a joke, perhaps that is because there is nothing to laugh about here and some very hard headed thinking is needed to tackle this issue.
Cue PKD
Cheers Comrades
Iain Hall's SANDPIT 