OFF TO A FOREIGN CLIME

Only intermittent posts if any for the next three weeks or so, I'm afraid; I'm off to Fiji. It's for work rather than for lying around on golden beaches: besides, most of the beaches away from the expensive resorts are black. Might I recommend that new readers happening across Argus for the first time go back to the earliest posts and - if they find enough to engage them - read through to the present? It is gratifying to see how many people have discovered the blog recently, but in its earlier days statistics show it was not much read at all. There is therefore plenty of "new" material back there for those new to Argus.

A.C.J.Akehurst

9 May 2013

YOU CAN'T TRUST A REFERENDUM

So there you have it. The lobby group "Australian Marriage Equality" doesn't want a referendum on same-sex marriage. It thinks it would lose it.

So much for all the talk about "70 per cent" of Australians supporting a change in the marriage laws. Suggest putting that assertion to the test of a referendum and "marriage equality" proponents slink away. The Left, of which gay-marriage campaigners, as assailants of tradition, are broadly a part, is never known for its attachment to democracy, and the explanation for opposing a referendum is disingenuous. Whines Rodney Croome, "national director" of Australian Marriage Equality: "Overseas referenda on marriage equality have been exploited by cashed-up, anti-gay groups to conduct fear and hate campaigns against gay people." In Australia he means by that the Rev. Fred Nile and various Christian groups (and now some Muslims as well - rather ungratefully, it may be said, given the Left's indulgence to them).

Apart from it being pretty offensive - though instructive as to how Croome himself thinks about people he disagrees with - to suggest that a wish to preserve the status quo in marriage amounts to "a fear and hate campaign against gay people" (does Croome not know of any gays opposed to gay marriage?) the notion that the religious constituency in Australia is "cashed-up" enough to conduct mass political campaigns strains credulity.

Even if it were, it doesn't seem much to have the Rev. Fred against you when large sections of the media, especially the ABC and the Fairfax press, are on your side, shamelessly spruiking your case at every turn. The irony is lost on Rodney, of course, but who gave him the free publicity of a platform to proclaim his opposition to a referendum? The Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, naturally. Did they give equal space to pro-referendum campaigners? Of course not.

Besides, if a majority of voters are in favour of same-sex nuptials, as the Croomes of this world tirelessly tell us, are they going to change their mind because of the siren voice of Fred Nile?

This exposes the real objection to the referendum. Same-sex-marriage enthusiasts know that it is not a majority of Australians who have no objection to their getting married but more likely a majority of Fairfax readers and ABC viewers and listeners. The rest are impervious to the propaganda daily disseminated by these media organs because they seldom if ever read, watch or listen to them (it is always worth remembering, when the ABC is invoked in controversy, that no more than one fifth of the population ever turns it on).

Croome seems to recognise that a referendum, requiring majorities voting for change in all states, would be hard for the same-sex marriagists to win. He doesn't say it, but this is largely because the people he and his organisation would have to persuade to vote in their favour are beyond the influence of the tame metropolitan media who support and promote his campaign. There was the same disconnection between voters and the metropolitan media over the republic.

So instead of a referendum giving everyone a say on a question that goes to the heart of how our society orders itself, "marriage equality" activists want parliaments to do the legislating for them. They know they are on much safer ground there, parliaments being full of pliable MPs who are far more responsive to lobby-group pressure than is the public who elects them.

1 May 2013

FEMINISTS AND HYPOCRISY

The death of Margaret Thatcher is a reminder of just what hypocrites feminists are. A woman who rose to the highest elected office in her country ought to be a heroine to the sisterhood, a source of inspiration and a model for emulation. Lady Thatcher incarnated what feminists are always exhorting their fellow women to do. Yet professional feminists, as exemplified by organised women's movements of various sorts, have never admired her. It is probably not too much to say that many of them loathed her.

There are at least two reasons for this. One is that Lady Thatcher was never a feminist herself, except in the true sense (that all rational people are) of believing that being a woman is no obstacle to rising in the world and breaking through the "glass ceiling" that feminists like to think stops women getting to the top in their careers (rather, say, than inability or family commitments). But she was not a grudge-bearing card-carrying ideological feminist forever spouting sub-Marxist claptrap. She was not a feminist of the type that can only succeed in some artificially conditioned environment such as the academic world, where female promotion is as much a result of male terror at being thought "sexist" as of any specific talent. She competed against men on the terms imposed by the harsh world of politics, where nobody gets a soft ride. Nor, when she fell from power, did she blame "misogyny", as our own female Prime Minister constantly does for every real or imagined slight.

The other reason feminists disapproved of Margaret Thatcher is that she was a conservative, in both the large and small "c" senses. The feminist movement is innately left-wing, and is not really on behalf of women at all. Women are only its vehicle. Feminist theorists want to use women to revolutionise society. Women who co-operate with and accept the existing social order and make a successful career within it are seen by ideological feminists as quislings (perhaps they should be called Auntie Toms). Mother Teresa was disapproved of by feminists for similar reasons. She didn't accept the existing social order she found and she did her best to ameliorate it. But she didn't preach revolution or suggest that women be ordained priests (most feminists have no time for Christianity but think that if it has to exist it ought to be feminised). So no kudos for her either.

Feminism is the greatest heresy of our age. It has censored our speech: we think we have freedom of expression but try writing for publication in "non-inclusive" prose. It has poisoned our social attitudes: feminism is not about the equality of men and women; it is about dividing society and pitting them against each other. It has ruined the lives of those women who have allowed themselves to be persuaded that traditional femininity is demeaning, that child-rearing at home is an obstacle to self-realisation and that marriage is legalised rape: many women who "left" their marriages in midlife rather than stay "trapped" in what feminists told them was a prison are now old and sad and lonely. It has destroyed objectivity and rationality in public discourse. Objectivity has been replaced by partisanship based on sex.

This is illustrated by the case of Julia Gillard. Australia's Prime Minister is certainly no Thatcher and is never subject to the vituperative hatred (from of course the Left) that Thatcher endured. But what criticism there is, and it is increasing and is by no means limited to her political opponents, is portrayed by feminists not as a legitimate point of view, as an assessment of her policies and character by politically uncommitted observers not bound by party loyalty whose only interest is that the country be efficiently governed, but as "misogyny". The Prime Minister, feminists maintain, is criticised because she is a woman, not because she is a disaster as Prime Minister. It would seem to follow according to this logic that because she is a woman it is unthinkable that her policies could be at fault, or that she could ever merit criticism. (Of course it's not, because Margaret Thatcher was a woman and her policies were constantly criticised, not least by feminists themselves. But as we have said, she was the wrong kind of woman).

A particularly egregious example of this subjective feminist partisanship could be found (where else?) in the shrunken pages of the Melbourne Age this week, from the pen of one Sally Young, described not as the silly little airhead she obviously is but as an associate professor in the social and political sciences department of Melbourne University. Sally's view is that the public has an unfavourable impression of Julia Gillard because that is how the media presents her, and it does this because the press has always presented women in a negative light. That's because it's run by men, nasty patriarchal men too. The fact that women abound in senior positions in journalism is not allowed to upset the feminist symmetry of this defence of Julia by a woman because she is a woman and with not the faintest attempt to understand what the Prime Minister is doing politically that is causing voters who couldn't care less whether Australia is led by a male or a female to turn against her.

It used to be possible for civilised men and women to judge the quality of human endeavour in any field by standards that were at least intended to be objective. That some no longer can, preferring to base their assessment on common membership of a sex, is to reduce cultural conversation to the politics of the primary schoolyard. That is an achievement of feminism.

19 April 2013