He’s baaaaaack!
Yes, the irrepressible Kiwi homosexual who “represents” an inner Sydney seat in the New South Wales State Parliament, is sharpening his claws to get stuck into traditional values and everyday people who live in the burbs and the bush, yet again.
Having cleaned up on infanticide on demand, as Tony Abbott correctly termed the recent NSW abortion laws, and mercy killing, aka “voluntary assisted dying”, Alex Greenwich is turning his attention to “equality” for his tribe. The member for Taylor Square wants to complete the revolution that began in the 1970s with legalisation. There would be few people around today who think it was a good idea to lock people up for what they do in their consensual bedrooms. Perhaps public toilets are a stretch. Yet there are many who should and will baulk at supporting the latest Greenwich bomb, typically and mischievously couched in the benign language of equality and rights.
The Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Fisher, along with all of the other religious leaders in the State, is vigorously opposing the Bill. (Full title Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill 2023).
The archbishop put his signature to a document detailing the havoc the bill would wreak on religious freedom in NSW, alongside Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Kanishka Raffel, Imam Shadi Alsuleiman of the National Imams Council, Surinder Jain of the Hindu Council of Australia, and the heads of various Protestant denominations, the Australian Christian Lobby, and NSW Council of Churches.
The heads of major religious schools bodies also signed, including Catholic Schools NSW CEO Dallas McInerney, Christian Schools Australia’s Mark Spencer, and Abdullah Khan from Islamic Schools Australia.
https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/faith-leaders-reject-equality-bill/
It is surprising that this lot can agree on anything. But here, they are as of one mind. This legislation, they say, is dangerous and should be opposed.
In the recent Red Mass for the legal fraternity, Fisher put it succinctly:
… the archbishop described freedom as “the golden calf of secular modernity,” and our contemporary view of freedom as simply the right to “do what we like.”
The promoters of this legislation and similar moves typically speak of freedom, while in practice promoting its opposite. In a liberal society – like the libertarian Robert Nozick’s “utopia” – each community has the right to live unimpeded by others, save for the prohibition on coercion. Nozick failed to know, or chose not to, that culture is upstream from politics, and that soft power can come to closely resemble coercion. Like lawfare that can send non-gay cake bakers and others broke. Libertarian rights need good actors in order for liberal societies to work. Equating freedom with the right to “do what we like”, as per Fisher, misconstrues what freedom is for. For traditionalists and for many others, this is freedom for virtue. Not for vice. Or coercion.
Nozick also misses the law of unintended consequences, sometimes known as “the cobra effect”. The latter has been explained as follows:
There is a story that during British rule of India, colonial officials became concerned about poisonous cobras in the city of Delhi and decided to offer a bounty for every dead snake. Enterprising locals, naturally, began to breed cobras in order to collect the reward. When the British discovered the ruse and withdrew the offer, breeders set their now-worthless cobras free, thereby making the problem significantly worse.
The so-called “Cobra Effect” is a classic illustration of what’s come to be known as the “Law of Unintended Consequences”. Quite often, actions designed to accomplish one outcome actually generate a cascade of other effects, most of which were never envisioned or desired.
(Why was the Catholic Hearld – a British magazine – talking about the cobra effect? Well, the Pope’s recent bizarre document, Fiducia Supplicans, on the blessing of persons in same-sex unions, has led to the emergence of Cardinal Ambongo of Africa as a serious contender to become Francis’s successor).
Unintended consequences. Or in the case of the Greenwich Bill, perhaps, intended consequences. The promotion of Greenwich’s understanding of gay equality will mean the traducing of the rights of others. There is no other way of seeing it. Nozick’s utopia is a little simplistic, for a philosopher. He ignores cultural power and he ignores the consequences of actions outside the traditional understanding of “coercion”. His mistake is important in the context of this debate because of the bastardisation of the notion of freedom, as Anthony Fisher noted, and the use of the language of freedom and rights to crush freedom and rights. Destroying the rights of others in order to advance your own.
Is this about about innocent gay normalisation? Back in 2015, Robert Reilly wrote a book called Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything. Amazon states:
Why are Americans being forced to consider homosexual acts as morally acceptable? Why has the US Supreme Court discovered a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, which until a decade ago, was unheard of in the history of Western or any other civilization? Where has the gay rights movement come from, and how has it so easily conquered America?
The answers are in the dynamics of the rationalization of sexual misbehavior. The power of rationalization--the means by which one mentally transforms wrong into right--drives the gay rights movement, gives it its revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest because the security of its rationalization requires universal acceptance. In other words, we all must say that the bad is good.
At stake in the rationalization of homosexual behavior is reality itself, which is why it will have consequences that reach far beyond the issue at hand. Already America's major institutions have been transformed--its courts, its schools, its military, its civic institutions, and even its diplomacy. The further institutionalization of homosexuality will mean the triumph of force over reason, thus undermining the very foundations of the American Republic.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Making-Gay-Okay-Rationalizing-Homosexual/dp/1621640868
(Ironically, Reilly has also penned a book called The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. New crises make strange bedfellows).
Yes, this book is about America. When the USA catches a cold, we get pneumonia, as the saying used to go. The subtitle says that the homosexual push is “changing everything”. Well, the latest Greenwich Bill makes more than eighty changes to twenty-two Acts of parliament, including fifty-two amendments to the Anti-Discrimination Act. It will change a hell of a lot.
But the homosexual revolution has now moved beyond the long period of cultural normalisation, of which the apotheosis was the same sex marriage legislation. This, incidentally, was opposed by a number of homosexuals. Certainly, the first generation of Stonewall activists didn’t see this coming, nor did they wish for it.
Stonewall riots, series of violent confrontations that began in the early hours of June 28, 1969, between police and gay rights activists outside the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. As the riots progressed, an international gay rights movement was born.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Stonewall-riots
They had REAL issues to confront. For the gay case against gay marriage, see, for example:
Now, we are in a new phase, exemplified by the Greenwich Bill.
The revolutionaries are seeking to remake society and the law in their own image, steamrolling anyone who stands in their path. We might think of this phase of the permanent revolution (Trotsky’s term) as post-normalisation, or beyond making gay okay. Like all post-modernists and neo-Marxists, part of their plan is to sow confusion. And create endless distractions. The legacy media helps with this. Dis-orient the masses, then go militant. Change things, for good. As the great (and mercifully re-formed) band of the eighties – no, it is not an oxymoron – Tears For Fears opined, everybody wants to rule the world. China does. The World Economic Forum does. The Islamists do. And Team Greenwich does.
The late Jimmy Buffett, about whose views of gay pride and transgenderism I have no idea, has sung of confusing times, perhaps anticipating the now culturally embedded gender confusion of our day. The song was titled Simply Complicated.
When you find out things about yourself that you hadn't thought to know
When your grandma calls and books you on the Jerry Springer show
And you find out you and your wife of ten years just might be related
Brother, life's not over, it's just simply complicated
There's other situations that might challenge you, I guess
When your daughter tries out for the football team and your son tries on her dress
And you start to think that the devil's in charge of how you're situated
Life is still worth livin', it's just simply complicated.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jimmybuffett/simplycomplicated.html
As I say, making things complicated is a core strategy. And now, with the next phase of the revolution, the activists seem determined to ensure that our lives are NOT worth livin’.
But back to New South Wales. What is the fuss about, here? The Catholic Weekly headlined the Bill as follows:
‘Equality’ bill puts religious freedom under threat in NSW in 2024.
The Weekly got that right. The paper also quotes a Christian, legal think tank, Freedom for Faith, which is doing its bit to publicise this proposed legislation. The FfF website says:
Freedom of religion is vital to building a diverse and pluralist nation. Australia should be a place where there is true freedom for people to hold and live out their deepest convictions.
https://freedomforfaith.org.au/
The very clever use of typical progressive hurrah words here reminds us that forcing people of faith out of the public square diminishes diversity, as even Blind Freddie can see. FfF states:
If it passes this legislation would:
· Slash religious protections for churches and schools;
· Allow people 16 and over to change their sex on their birth certificate at any time;
· Allow children to bypass their parents to get medical treatment (including puberty blockers);
· Remove restrictions on prostitution;
· Legalise and support commercial surrogacy.
The bill seeks to remove provisions in the Anti-Discrimination Act that allows faith-based institutions to teach their own doctrines on gender and sexuality, and preferentially hire those who uphold an institution’s faith and values.
Religious schools, for instance, will be required to show that their actions (aside from the appointment and training of leaders and direct religious appointments) are “reasonable” if challenged in court.
This might include teaching the traditional Christian view of marriage in schools, directing teachers not to teach views contrary to the faith …
The Greenwich team started with the desire to stamp out the perfectly harmless practice of so-called “conversion therapy”, and have upped the stakes into omnibus legislation. “Holistic”, as they say.
The old joke about British politics resonates here now. It went, in Britain, the Labour Party wants to make homosexuality legal. The Liberal Party wants to make it compulsory. The Rum Corps State is starting to feel a bit like the old UK Liberal Party. The homosexuals openly, repeatedly, tediously – for, above all else, they are very tedious – demand (not request) “affirmation” of their “lifestyle”.
The problem, as we see it emerging this week, is that your affirmation is my denied rights. Your sacked lesbian teacher in a religious school – if that actually ever happened – is my child’s right to be taught Christian (or Jewish, or, dare one say it, Muslim) values. (Yes, the Muslims are part of the current NSW religious resistance, as we have noted). Of course, we know what they do to homosexuals back in the old country.
No doubt the stars of the Seamus Bruner book, Controligarchy, will be cheering Greenwich on in his latest endeavours. For, as noted previously, from the 1970s onwards the progressive billionaires have been advocating for homosexuality as a population reduction strategy.
Reducing the population seems to be going pretty well already, without the need to ramp up gaydom. There are far more pressing issues at hand, with this latest attempt to drive religion from the public square. For the Bill will do this, whatever anyone says. Team Greenwich might burst into tears at the sound of a Mark Latham dirty tirade. But don’t ever mistake this for weakness. Team Greenwich plays for keeps. And it will never, ever stop coming for Team Normal.
Meanwhile …
The Sheffield Shield cricket commentator on Kayo Sports informs us from The Junction Oval, St Kilda, that, no, they are not broadcasting from a nightclub. The background noise is coming from the road next to the ground, where there is in progress … a pride march!
As I say, the marching gay parade is utterly indefatigable. Occasionally, I suppose, heterosexuals pause and acknowledge, quietly, unostentatiously, how good their “lifestyle” is. I can’t say I give it much thought myself. But really, marches? Pride? Endless legislation? Colonisation of lifestyle television, and BBC dramas? An unfriendly takeover of the public square? Permanent gay revolution? Y’all just ain’t that interesting.
The only thing missing, so far, is welcomes to Taylor Square country. We respect gay elders, past, present and emerging …
Alex Greenwich’s Bill will keep us going until early March and the Mardi Gras. Then, of course, there aren’t too many sleeps from March until the inevitable Pride Month or Pride Year or Pride Decade or whatever it is they are up to now. In the meantime, many parents, Christians and other religious people, and people of absolutely no faith who, nonetheless, see faith’s value, silent citizens for much of their lives, must be shaking their heads and wondering how on earth we got to a place where a tiny, radical minority can keep getting its way over the great majority.
And, of course, there was no discussion of this during the last NSW election. It simply sprang from nowhere. That is the way of the times, where democratic rights, like those of parents and people of faith are relocated to the back room.
I remember, back in the early 1980s, in a job interview for a position with the then (“dry and warm”) NSW Liberal Opposition Leader, Nick Greiner, his policy guru, Garry Sturgess, proudly touted his boss’s support for the Wran Government’s legislation advancing gay legal rights. Very John Stuart Mill. It was all so obvious and easy, then. This might just qualify for yet another example of the Good Intentions Paving Company.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/06/the-good-intentions-paving-company/
What will the NSW Liberals do now, I wonder? God only knows. Greenwich mean time is round about now.
Paul Collits
4 February 2023
The Sick Puppy Syndrome has been approaching plague proportions for some time, encouraged by fellow travelers and various other dimwits in our self appointed "elite".
Sooner or later, for the survival of the nation, these deranged vermin are going to have to be reined in, with their disgusting habits confined to private places (not including public toilets).
As for the clown Greenwich, "it" is just another example of the urgent need to deport undesirables who have been allowed into Australia by the aforementioned dimwits.
This is an example of never enough. Legislators have been dragged into recognising alphabet rights but it is never enough. Doing this is recognising sin as a virtue as George Herbert says.
I have sent my local member-I am in the safest Labor seat in the country- letter pleading guilty with her to vote against it and got back a nonsensical letter about making g it safe for confused children by outlawing the outdated and sometimes coercive way they used to be treated. It just smoke and mirrors. I pounded out in my reply that no one does that anymore and hasn’t done for a long time. She reassured me faith groups would be protected but I just don’t believe her.
What is about Greenwich- is there no moral compass in the NSW parliament or does he know where all the bodies are buried? Send Greenwich back to NZ.