Try and wrap your heads around this one, would you. Bill Shorten, the leader of the Labor party and thusly the leader of the opposition, will apparently be presenting a keynote address at this year’s National Conference for the Australian Christian Lobby – a notoriously pompous group of white dickheads with a collective pathological fear of change.
Have a real good think about that. A member of the parliament representing
a nation where 72% of all people now support marriage equality will be addressing a group who published an article TODAY
that contained the sentence “
Some overseas jurisdictions recognise polygamous and even child marriages. Should Australia provide ‘marriage equality’ for these too?“
The leader of the Labor party, whose senior senator
Penny Wong delivered
one of the most powerful addresses on the issue of latent, casual homophobia in Australia you’re ever likely to hear – and on the floor of the actual Senate, no less – is addressing a group so notoriously anti-gay that during last night’s live broadcast of
Q&A, their managing director
Lyle Shelton seemed to imply that same-sex marriage was to blame for the
HIV epidemic.
(And whose mystifying bullshit didn’t so much stop close to the line of the completely illogical as much as it ploughed straight over it with a gun in one hand and bottle of red strong enough to repress all the immoral thoughts in the other)
Seriously. The leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, will be delivering a keynote address to the Australian Christian Lobby. This is the same address that former Prime Minister Julia Gillard was booked to address, but cancelled after the organisation’s then-leader Jim Wallace – in a feat of mental gymnastics that would have Nadia Comaneci in fits of delirium – suggested that the homosexual “lifestyle” was more hazardous than smoking.
If he’s not using the opportunity to firmly and formally request that the Australian Christian Lobby cease being a mob of unimportant, loud-mouthed, backwards crybabies, then honestly what on earth is the point of using your time as an official representative of so many people to address a hate-mongering group that represents the interests of so few?
Bill, please. Sort your shit out.
Photo: Graham Denholm via Getty Images.
