Mission & Justice

Muriel Porter; 6/5/08

Predictably, the Australian Christian Lobby has praised the Rudd Government for deciding to override the ACT’s planned gay marriage legislation. Most Christians will be grateful, the lobby’s managing director, Jim Wallace, has said. Yes, the mainline churches will openly or tacitly agree with him, and I imagine many individual Christians will, too. But not all Christians will be happy with this backdown and some of us feel quite dismayed. Not many will speak up, however, because they have been effectively silenced by the recent concerted conservative push that has made homosexuality the great taboo in the churches. My own church, the Anglican Church, stands on the brink of an international schism over the issue. Conservative forces, fuelled by right-wing American money and led by pugnacious African bishops spoiling for a fight with the West, have declared war on the Episcopal (Anglican) Church in the US and the Anglican Church of Canada.

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Paul Maley & Samantha Maiden; 6/5/08

The ACT Government has accused Kevin Rudd of pandering to the “extreme Christian Right” in its threat to scuttle the territory’s controversial civil partnerships bill. Yesterday, the ACT’s federal Labor members and senators were labelled hypocrites for failing to condemn the commonwealth after it threatened to disallow the bill on the grounds that it would mimic marriage. ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell accused the Prime Minister, a devout Christian, of “kow-towing” to the Christian lobby.

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Paul Maley & Siobhain Ryan; 5/5/08

A furious ACT Government has backed down from its plan to allow gay couples to enter into civil partnerships, accusing the Rudd Government of hypocrisy after it threatened to override the legislation in exactly the same way John Howard did. ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell announced yesterday the Territory had abandoned its civil partnerships legislation and would instead settle for a system of relationship registers virtually identical to the ones operating in Tasmania and Victoria. The ACT decision comes as the deeply religious Mr Rudd faces growing attack from Christian groups over his Government’s decision to remove discrimination against gays from all other federal laws.

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Editorial; 2/5/08

Imagine being refused access to visit your dying lover in hospital because you were black or female. Or being denied the payout from your dead partner’s pension, superannuation fund or workers’ compensation scheme after a lifetime together because you had a disability. It may sound far-fetched, but for far too long similar injustices have been the reality for many in our community — merely on the grounds that they are gay. Finally, after years of political quibbling and timidity, much of that is about to change. The Age applauds moves by the Rudd Government to honour its election pledge to end discrimination against gay couples in about 100 federal laws sooner rather than later.

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Rodney Croome; 1/5/08

Imagine risking your life for your country in the armed services, only to discover that if you die your partner will receive no compensation or pension? Imagine not being able to fully provide for your partner after your death because you are not permitted to name him or her as the beneficiary of your superannuation? Imagine needing to place your partner in aged care only to discover that because you’re not officially a couple, and your home isn’t exempt from the assets test, you’ll have to sell the place where you live to pay the fees? This is the world of financial disadvantage and insecurity that Australia’s same-sex couples inhabit.

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30/4/08

Attorney-general Robert McClelland said gay people will gain equality in a wide range of areas in society under proposed laws. Legislation to remove same-sex discrimination from a wide range of commonwealth laws will be introduced in the winter sittings of parliament, he said. “The changes will provide for equality of treatment under a wide range of commonwealth laws between same-sex and opposite-sex de facto couples,” Mr McClelland said. “Importantly, the reforms will also ensure children are not disadvantaged because of the structure of their family.

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12/4/08

One of Brisbane’s most prestigious all-boy schools says its willing to debate a ban on gay students taking same-sex partners instead of girls to the senior formal.

The Anglican Church Grammar School, or Churchie, was in defence mode after it emerged several Year 12 students wanted to take their gay partners to the college’s end-of year dance on June 19. Under current policy, the young men may only attend the ball with a female partner.

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Richard Ackland; 11/4/08

Old Testament thunderbolts are being hurled down from Bellevue Hill’s Anglican parish onto the head of homosexual “sinner” Justice Michael Kirby. The Reverend Richard Lane’s missive emerged on Tuesday night at a forum at the Banco Court where Justice Kirby was conducting a “conversation” with the Herald journalist David Marr under the auspices of the Anglican parish of St James. … Frankly, if Lane is worried about Kirby’s restrained and modest version of “sin”, he should travel a few kilometres down the road to see how the other half do it in the real world.

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Linda Morris; 10/4/08

A senior minister of a Sydney Anglican parish has made an extraordinary attack on the High Court judge Michael Kirby, warning he would face the wrath of God if he remained unrepentant as a gay man. The rector of St Stephen’s Church in Bellevue Hill, the Reverend Richard Lane, denounced the judge for calling himself a Christian Anglican while living in an openly gay relationship and warned as a “messenger, watchman and steward of the Lord in the Anglican Church of Australia”, he faced God’s judgment.

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Rod Liddle; 30/3/08

Should Britain afford Iranian homosexuals political asylum or send them back to be hanged in their home country? Surely not many people still cleave to such a view, although we ought to remember that within my lifetime homosexuality was illegal in Britain.

This point is made frequently by lefties who wish to draw some sort of equivalence between the Muslim world and Britain: see, we persecuted the poofs, too. Yes, we did, unforgivably, but we didn’t actually hang them, or whip them.

Or indeed, as they do in Iran and Saudi Arabia, whip them first and then hang them. Two gay kids were hanged in 2005 in Mashhad. They were 16 years old at the time of their offence, but this cut no ice with the Iranians.

The whole business has re-emerged with the case of Mehdi Kazemi, a gay Iranian teenager whom the British Government wishes to send back to Iran. Kazemi’s boyfriend was hanged there and he fears, reasonably enough, that the same fate awaits him. In the 29 years since Iran experienced its joyful and uplifting Islamic revolution, an estimated 4000 homosexuals have been put to death.

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