4 — Homophobia

This page has been deleted.

Go instead to GLBT Resources or search this blog and New Lines from a Floating Life for “homophobia”.

Update on gay marriage, Marcel, Jim, Rabbit and David Smith…

Marcel has posted a follow-up. (See also here.) It contains a dreadful pun… Carefully argued, though. Again I anticipate more discussion.

Very serious note: yesterday Thomas posted Today’s news, one item concerning someone he had been in primary school with: Reward offered for missing Matthew. See also Help Find Matt. Not looking good, that, and it does seem it may be a reminder of the dark side of homophobia.

Related, but lighter: I see in SX News (Sydney) a write-up of the 12th annual Gay Parade at the Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro.

Education moans and giggles

The giggles first. I am really looking forward to Summer Heights High – that’s Graeme Blundell’s preview in The Australian.

IN a local television industry characterised by meretriciousness, intellectual timidity and corporate contempt for viewers, Chris Lilley may be the closest thing to a comedy genius. Lilley’s award-winning We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year is already part of the sublime lineage of TV mockumentaries that includes The Larry Sanders Show, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Kath & Kim and Extras, all of them unconventional comedies that unfold within a mock documentary format with a lateral twist on reality.

…in Summer Heights High, an occasionally quite savage new series, Lilley goes back to school to send up pretension, intellectual vanity, political correctness and do-goodism in general.

Playing all the characters, he captures some of the wonder and most of the horror of life in the public-school system, a foreign continent of coruscating slang, brutal bullying, profanity, delusional teachers, recalcitrant students, racism, homophobia and crushed innocence.

Bring it on! ABC Wednesday 9.50: this is the web site.

Think space

1.

2.

John Howard: bullying expert extraordinaire…

[WARNING: some adult content appears in the second half of this post.]

If you thought last night’s rant was over the top, check me out on the subject in 2004 here (ex-Diary-X stored on the Big Archive). Julie Bishop’s performance last night is transcribed here.

…TONY JONES: You’re not suggesting that good retention rates or higher retention rates are a bad thing, are you? Still, you haven’t explained what this means – ‘a soulless and narrow form of national economic service’. National economic service, what does that mean?

JULIE BISHOP: The focus of Labor has been very much on the numbers only and not on the individuals. I mean, we’re talking about providing choice in schooling. The Labor Party had a policy about no new non-government schools, taking away choice from parents. They were focused on a very narrow definition of education that was strictly public education and strictly on numbers. We’re looking at choice and opportunity and that’s what the Prime Minister was discussing tonight. My point about retention rates was this: you don’t set a target, you pluck a target out of the air and say, ‘That must apply across the board’, you look at what’s best for individual students. Now some students would rather leave school at 16 and then come back to education later. The point is that they ought to have the basic skills when they leave school so that they can come back to education. It’s the quality of the education they receive, not whether they were forced to stay to complete Year 12, for example.

TONY JONES: Let’s be absolutely clear on this. Does the Government think it’s a bad idea to link education to national prosperity and productivity?

JULIE BISHOP: Not at all. Of course it’s fundamental. But the point is we’re not constrained by just a narrow focus on targets and numbers. We’re looking at the individual. We’re looking at choice and opportunity for students…

What the PM actually said last night is not at this stage on his web site, but it is in The Australian.

The BP chief’s resignation

The 170-word article in the Straits Times (2 May 2007) was headlined “BP chief quits over gay affair”. The opening sentence said he resigned “after a judge lifted a legal injunction preventing a newspaper from publishing details of his homosexual relationship.”

This is technically accurate but misleading, because it was silent over the real nub of the matter. Readers are likely to be led to think that the BP chief had to go when he failed at hiding his sexual orientation from the public. This in turn calls up subliminally a host of unquestioned associations: that homosexuality is a moral failing, therefore such persons are unfit for high office, hence it should be hidden, failing which one has to quit…

It was this public scolding that brought him down. For lying to a court. Not for being gay; not for having a lover…

That’s from Fall of the BP chief Part 1 in the May 2007 section of Yawning Bread. Do go on to Part 2.

Alasdair Duncan, Metro (2006)

It would be really interesting to read what people closer in age or milieu think of this book. Alasdair Duncan is “a writer, journalist, charming drunk and freelance practitioner of dark humour, based in Brisbane on the East Coast of Australia… He survives by the good grace of cold beer, decent conversation and romantic, moonlit bouts of intense neurosis and self-doubt, and writes a weekly column for Rave, Brisbane’s most popular music magazine.” (I even joined MySpace so I could explore that profile! Don’t expect my profile there to amount to much, but I may go back and add a little to it — links and such.) He is the same age as Mister Rabbit, not to mention Ian Thorpe, but I suspect The Rabbit might not like the book.

At some levels I did like the book. First, there were some pretty hot sex scenes… However, it tended to confirm all my worst suspicions/observations about the young clubby gay scene, even if I suspect it was meant to. I will now steal a summary from Daniel Smith on GAYinWA:

Louis Nowra on Lateline last night

As good a preface as any to this post is Poor bugger me… from ABC Radio National’s Awaye Saturday 24 February 2007: “Professor Marcia Langton and [theatrical director] Wesley Enoch literally enter the ring to debate the notion ‘poor bugger me leaves you up a gum tree’.” It is a highly amusing debate between two prominent and successful Aboriginal Australians. Later in the program some of the issues Nowra is concerned with are canvassed. That is the part you should listen to most carefully.

Another good preface is RINGY’S RAMBLINGS: I’m not racist but… from the National Indigenous Times 22 Feb 2007.

Now what happened in February 2001?

Quite a lot, it seems. I was just idly reading the archives I referred to yesterday, and decided to rerun a sequence from February 2001 here. Why? Well, some odd things did happen… I was teaching English as well as ESL then at you know where, and one of those little teaching dilemmas came up. The site I mention in the following entries morphed and moved, though a stub is still there… It eventually became the English and ESL Blog here on WordPress! Oh, and you’ll have noticed a bit of template fiddling here lately; there has been even more over there where a brand new template that appeared on WP only yesterday has solved some problems a few users of the ESL site had reported. Looks good too.

Rants and raves 1

I here put up a number of pages on “political correctness” as a more “permanent” record than the daily posts. I am beginning, in the context of the 2007 Australian elections, to track back to the earlier years of the Howard government whose real politics has been a politics of division, often called “dog-whistle politics”, rather than what it would have you believe, a politics of inclusion. So on this page I take you back to Tampa and all that, transferring here for the first item in this set of pages my Angelfire page “Massaging the Asylum Seekers”. Much in these pages is being addressed now by the Rudd government elected in November 2007.

I believe that the reaction against “political correctness” in the past decade or so has borne bad fruit:

1. It has licensed prejudice and ignorance in the name of freedom of speech.

2. It has muted compassion and tolerance.

3. It encourages mental laziness and discourages critique of our own assumptions.

4. It fosters arrogance and uniformity rather than understanding of and acceptance of diversity.

5. Paradoxically, it creates disharmony in the name of harmony.

6. It is unjust and from a Christian perspective it is sub-Christian, breaking the golden rule.

OTHER PAGES IN THIS SET

2. Multiculturalism: diversity versus uniformity

3. Homophobia: we are all losers when this takes hold

4. Indigenous Australians

 

1. Massaging the Asylum Seekers

UPDATE: Go to What’s a billion dollars, mate? (26 August 2007)

Between 2001 and 2004 I maintained the rage on Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policy on Angelfire, but took the page down after a while.

I was prompted to restore some of it in 2005 by the latest stories to emerge from Immigration, such as Cornelia Rau. Cornelia Rau proved to be the tip of the iceberg, with hundreds of cases of immigration injustice emerging since.

In July 2004 I wrote:

Sometimes one can only welcome policy backflips, especially when the policy concerned has been as draconian, as heartless, as unnecessary, as dishonest, and as big a waste of tax-payers’ dollars as the immigration and refugee policy has been since Tampa sailed over our horizon. Well, partly of course because “the temporary protection issue has become a sticky one for the Government in marginal electorates in Victoria, where the Coalition is polling poorly,” but also because there actually are people even in the Liberal Party who like to think of themselves as compassionate, given half a chance, ” the Government will announce as early as today that most of the 9000 temporary protection visa holders, many of whom have been living in the community for more than three years, will be able to apply for permanent residency.” The temporary protection visa was a disgrace anyway, a kind of limbo.

The decision follows a number of other immigration policy backflips by the Government, including its release of all but one child of boat people from mainland detention centres, and permitting 146 Afghans who have been held on Nauru for more than two years to come to Australia, as it winds back the “Pacific Solution”.

Government MPs say there are indications that the Prime Minister, John Howard, has softened his line on the issue of asylum seekers since he won the 2001 election on the back of his tough border protection policies.

I suspect Rural Australians for Refugees especially should take a bow- ordinary decent Australians with a better idea of what that means than Mister Ruddock apparently had. Well done.

The cost and the idiocy of it all may be summed up in the story of Aladdin Sisalem and his cat: “Mr Sisalem fled Kuwait in 2000, eventually arriving at an island in Torres Strait by boat from Papua New Guinea 18 months ago. He immediately sought asylum, saying he would face persecution if sent back to Kuwait. He was sent to Manus Island, where for the past 10 months he was the sole occupant, apart from a small staff of guards and cleaners hired to look after him at a cost to the Australian Government of $250,000 a month.” For more see Axis of Logic: World Refugees.

In October 2003 I wrote:

The latest edition of Face the Facts spells out current policy clearly at least.

There are clear differences, however, between the 1997 and 2003 editions of Face the Facts. My comparisons between the two are here.

There are some interesting statistics in the 2003 edition, though of late our attention has been drawn to their being a touch rubbery at times. It appears we have fewer immigrants than we thought as people on certain visas have been counted again each time they enter Australia.

In May 2003 I wrote:

ABC TV here in Australia (Four Corners) last night raised some very interesting issues about what went on in Woomera Detention Camp (now mothballed.) That Dickensian bad guy Phillip Ruddock (Minister for Immigration) promises to investigate, but I am sure he will give it his usual snooty, legalistic whitewash.

Read the transcript of Four Corners: “Debbie Whitmont penetrates the secrecy that has shrouded the Woomera detention centre, revealing its traumatic impact on both staff and detainees.”

At that time I revised this page thus:

This page replaces one I made over a year ago. That page collected various rants from my Diary Pages dating from before and during the last Australian election — see August to November 2001.

That election made much of the then “flood” of asylum seekers proceeding mostly from the Middle East and Afghanistan via Indonesia. Although subsequent investigation, reported in the Sun-Herald quite inconspicuously in December 2002, found that (whatever else the “boat people” may have been) none of them had terrorist links, September 11 2001 exacerbated the xenophobia that was not far below the surface in public and government discourse on the subject, and the government knew it was on a winner and played it for all it was worth (hence the title of this page), while the Labor Party floundered. The other winners were the Greens who attracted a much larger vote than usual from those disgusted with the major parties, particularly on this issue. The Greens tend to favour open borders.

While I found myself voting Green as a protest against the poisoning of our discourse on refugees and asylum seekers, I do not in fact support open borders. What I do support is a humane regime of processing, with “detention” only for those “illegal” arrivals initially being processed (and preferably not in deserts or foreign countries) for whatever quarantine and security reasons are necessary, with that detention being operated transparently, not by secretive multinational corrective services corporations (see Update above), as has been the case in Australia. I would like to see the investigatory process streamlined, and people whose applications are deemed worth pursuing allowed to live in the community, a system which would cost the government less than the current system. I would also like to see such “detention” of new (“illegal”) arrivals to be totally separate from whatever arrangements are in place for those who await deportation, whether through failed applications or through criminal and security concerns. The assumption should be that the asylum seeker is genuine (or “innocent”) until proven otherwise.

That is consistent with our laws and traditions.

Most of all I would like to see a healthy compassion restored in the Australian community, together with a willingness by the media to highlight the humanity of the asylum seeker, the fact that the majority of them (whether they appear in this country by “legitimate” or “illegitimate” channels, a distinction not easily maintained from a refugee perspective) are genuine and end up contributing to rather than detracting from the country as a whole.

As a first step, I would like to see everyone take time to see Tales from a Suitcase, the excellent but unexciting SBS series that puts a human face on refugees and highlights the history of Australian policy and the contribution refugees have made since World War II. The Third Series particularly focuses Afghan refugees and has also been published in book form.

Second, I would urge readers to explore the following sites which inform you with an authority that I cannot aspire to; I defy anyone with an ounce of humanity to come back from reading the information here and still be prepared to back our current way of doing things.

Links

NEW — Villawood Refugees Blog.True stories and pictures of people who have been locked up indefinitely in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre (Sydney, Australia).

For a thorough general background on refugee issues, go to New Internationalist No. 150
UNHCR — The United Nations High Commission on Refugees.
Human Rights Watch.
Amnesty International.
Racism No Way — the Library section in this Australian educational site leads to many relevant documents.
Migration Heritage Centre of NSW has much relevant information.
Study the Australian Government’s own fact sheet on refugee policy here.
Refugees and asylum seekers: Oxfam/Community Aid Abroad.
Human Rights Commission, Australia
Asylum seekers in Australia: some fallacies.
Seeking Asylum — Seeking Asylum looks at the differing styles of Australians who devote their personal time to supporting and assisting asylum seekers to cope with the demands of detention or temporary transit visas.
Refugee Council of Australia.
Rural Australians for Refugees

Gay and lesbian immigration task force — Given that in some parts of the world gays and lesbians face real persecution, even execution, this is a very relevant issue.

To fisk or not to fisk?

To “pilger” has somewhat different connotations, if a similar genesis. Both words derive from the names of prominent journalists.The verb “to fisk” is defined as “To deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere.” I actually have considerable respect for Robert Fisk; even if he is not always absolutely correct with his facts or interpretations, he is usually nearer the mark and far more interesting than his critics. I first encountered the term “fisking” on Bruce’s and Arthur’s sites, where you may sometimes see the technique deployed and whose links take you to more information about the practice. It is Arthur’s response to being travestied (definitely not “fisked” in any sense) on another blog that has led me to think about this topic. I love the pic there.

I am old-fashioned enough to hesitate about adopting the term myself when “critique” and “deconstruction” — the latter in its popular rather than Derridean sense — already exist, but I have no objection to the practice so long as it is used for substantial critique and not just to break butterflies on wheels or to score personal points. A danger (drawing here on a reader-response perspective) is that fisking can very easily turn personal, or be seen as personal, and the fisker is always in danger of being seen as (or even being) a superior and somewhat supercilious pedant. It is all a matter of focus and tone, I suppose. Certainly I have seen many worthwhile examples of the practice, and Arthur’s original “fisking” of a rather muddled effusion on gay issues, which led to accusations of “jealousy”, was not a bad example of the art. I said as much at the time. The long-delayed response on Seeking Utopia was itself infantile**; ironic, as that seems to have been the charge against Arthur.

Angry Penguin

Queer Penguin has written passionately about an event last weekend that has sullied our reputation as a comparatively tolerant and civilised city and has rightly pointed to the deeper issues involved: The Proud Sport of Fag-Bashing.

…Admittedly, these sorts of attacks are few and far between so I don’t mean to sound alarmist – but when you are there, at that time, going into or coming out of Slide (pretty much the only good gay venue in that localised area) there is certainly always the sort of vibe where you feel a punch-up could break out at any moment. For every one vicious and cowardly attack like this, there would be maybe ten occasions of wankers yelling out “fag” or “poofta” as they drive past (reeeeal tough-like). There are maybe twenty dagger glares or comments under the breath. So while the attacks are incremental, the source of resentment always seems to be there, festering in one form or another…

Homophobia is alive and well in too many places

Consider this little swag of recent stories from Planet Out.

1. New laws in Africa further restrict gays.

As many Western countries continue to expand rights for gay men and lesbians, many African nations are going the opposite direction with legislation to further curtail their already restricted rights.

Now, in Zimbabwe, an intimate hug, kiss or even hand-holding between men may be a crime under dramatic changes in the country’s new criminal law.

Great! Meanwhile Mugabe presides over his ruined country, unable even to feed his own people. Just shows that Marxists can be bigoted anti-human idiots too.

Read Queer Penguin on the latest bit of government gay bashing…

He says it much better than I would, and really says it all. See What More Can be Said?

There is an upbeat article by Craig Scutt in the latest Big Issue (No. 255), written before The Cadaver (pic on right) performed his latest feat of progressive thinking by scuttling the ACT’s civil union law. Of the Cadaver’s puppet master Craig Scutt writes:

Lawyer Marsden: Paul Sheehan’s vitriol

I would not doubt that the late lawyer John Marsden, who is not even buried yet, was a wild man who often sailed in murky waters, but I was simply appalled by Paul Sheehan’s character assassination of Marsden in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, the tone of which you may gather from this short extract which tells you more about Sheehan than it does about his target.

…whenever things got hot for Marsden, he and his supporters in the lavender mafia [sic] would raise the cry of homophobia, a cynical debasement of gay rights…

Of all the lawyers who should shut up about bringing “disgrace to our profession” it was Marsden. Given the sanitising, laudatory comments made in recent days by the Premier, Morris Iemma, the president of the NSW Law Society, June McPhie, and the head of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, portraying Marsden as a civic hero, let the record show that Marsden was a serial liar, a proven perjurer, a flagrant illegal drug-user and drug provider, a professional who had sex with his own clients, a wealthy man who boasted about sodomising young men he picked up on the streets, a standover man who was vexatious and constantly at war, a bully who used the law as a weapon…