The whole marriage equality 'debate' is rather unfortunate. It's unfortunate in the sense that there really isn't any logical reason to deny marriage equality. The pseudo-arguments being mounted against it by the christian lobby and conservatives of this country are in most part spurious and idiotic, not even worthy of analysis except that we have to pretend to take it seriously for the sake of it looking like there's a debate.
I don't know about you, but I think this is a kind of intellectual malaise. It's the sort of regressive thinking that allows equal airtime to climate change deniers or extreme right wing nutbars who want to loosen the gun laws of this country. Yes democracy means canvassing all opinions but should the media work so hard to accommodate the unpalatable? Aren't the outlier opinions outlier opinions for a reason? Just as we don't let creationism sneak into science classes, we should not let idiotic ideas receive the spotlight.
Nonetheless the media is full of democratic niceness and gives platforms to these people in order to create more drama and tension where there need not ought to be. A sensible editorial position would be to not let climate change denial have a place in the national discourse. Allowing such topics oxygen subtracts from our polity, not strengthen it, and the inability of the media to discern such distinctions essentially has weakened our democracy.
Of course, a lot of this is harder to do in practice, and there will always be somebody who champions the democratic right of stupid opinions to be aired and disseminated widely, but they do so at the indulgence of better minds, and at the expense of better discourse. As for the plebiscite, it is clear that it is unworkable if it is not binding; and the current government will not make it binding because a significant portion know that a majority will vote in favour of it and that is something they would seek to deny. Given this situation where the government itself is committed to this anti-democratic parlour game, it is worth saying we should not entertain this idea of a plebiscite and we should just push for a vote in parliament instead.
Arguing Against History
It goes without saying that the victimhood posturing made by the Australia Christian Lobby is pretty pathetic. These are the people arguing against legalising gay marriage because doing so would take something away from Christian marriages. Hence the argument they can mount is that the symbolic loss on the part of Christian marriages is something for which the government and the law cannot compensate, and therefore it must be stopped. You know what? Just writing that sentence made my head hurt.
The core of the Christian Lobby's argument is that they don't want it because they don't want it, and all it takes is a little bit of digging to get to the homophobia that resides not too far from the surface of calls for 'religious freedom'. It's a compete and utter joke that this kind of thinking holding up a very simple process which, really should be no skin off tor collective noses, but they carry on as if this is some kind point of principle that cannot be altered. You sort of wonder why these charitable Christians can't find the same passion in protecting the human rights of asylum seekers or the homeless or the drug addicts and mentally ill of this world.
But no, they persist with the deranged notion that somehow this entitled whitbread middle-class is the victim in the process. Pardon me if you think I'm being harsh but this bullshit really ought not to be aired by the media as the counter-argument to marriage equality. It's not an argument, it's a statement of prejudice and an ancient and ugly one at that. (And that's coming from somebody who isn't gay.)
Who would have thought the problems of the Twenty-first Century involved shedding the prejudices of centuries prior to the Twentieth?
The Absence Of Critical Thought Amongst Conservatives
For close to a decade starting from the mid-2000s, we've seen the rise of the late BabyBoomer generation to the ranks of ministers in this country. The Coalition is still firmly in the hands of the Baby Boomers while the ALP has moved on to Gen-X as their front-bench. What is particularly notable about the conservative Baby Boomers is that they are the people who benefited the most from Whitlam making tertiary education free, and then went on to try and raise Tertiary education fees to unprecedented levels. Not only are their policies crap, they seem to be largely unaware of the perception in the community of them as eying the most entitled people putting a wrecking ball to the national consensus.
The fact that things have not improved under Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership is not very surprising given that the paucity of talent amongst the Liberals and Nationals. The paucity of talent is also unsurprising because the kinds of kids who signed up for young Liberals bacon campus were either spoilt brats from Private Schools who never really leaned anything and were protected their parents' money, or people so stupid to think ideology was a good substitute for doing one's own thinking.
Thus the ideologically motivated have become the front-and-centre face of conservatism, and worse still it's an un-reflective, ill-conceived ideology that is masquerading as something more effective than it actually is. This of course gives rise to a Treasurer like WTE Joe Hockey who announces an end to the age of entitlement and proceeds to cut welfare while cutting taxes for the rich. So far Scott Morrison is faring a little better in that he hasn't cut welfare as much as Hockey did, but he too is intent on giving the wealthy a tax-cut because he believes whole-heartedly in the laughable principle of trickle-down economics.It's enough to make you wonder what kind of education these people got - or perhaps what part of their expensive education they heard enough to take away, because there doesn't seem to be much logic or mathematics or economics or sociology involved.
The tremendous electoral success of the neo-liberal agenda based on Milton Friedman has sort of covered up the vast intellectual blackhole at the heart the neo-liberal project. It is no surprise then that after the GFC, the right has scrambled to find a way to explain away the colossal failure of the massively financialised economy and the global banking crisis it brought about. It is even pitiful that some have taken to Ayn Rand as their go-to thinker. It doesn't et more pathetic than that. Even today the reason the Turnbull government struggles to arrive at a compelling narrative is because it can't formulate one from a position of reason. It can only keep playing the ideological position statements as if they can substitute for actual thinking.
But The Problems Are Mounting
The truly compelling global problem is climate change. Somebody is going to have to pay to deal with it and it can't all be put on the general public nor the governments. It's going to have to come from the private sector. The rampant denialism notwithstanding, they're the facts. The added fact that our government can't bring itself to deal with those issues, and instead rolls around in the political mud trying to figure out how to get past marriage equality shows you just how feeble the minds of our politicians have become. Not only are we living in a time of catastrophic climate change, we're living in a time of catastrophic failure of intellect amongst our national leadership.
Another is the issue of the over-financialised world economy which is centred around banking and the issuing of credit to a world awash in debt. If the GFC triggered by the Lehman collapse of 2007 was one thing, we're staring down the barrel with the potential collapse of Deutsche Bank. If Deutsche Bank goes down, so do derivative trades that amount to about the same as the entire world's GDP. Angela Merkel is saying the German government won't be bailing out Deutsche Bank,but when you think about it, DB is the walking talking quacking, waddling exemplar of "too-big-to-fail". Somebody is going to have to dig deep and keep it going or else any number of scenarios that lead to the implosion of the global economy would be on the horizon - just as it was when Lehman bit the dust. Do we hear a peep out of our treasurer in Australia about all this? No. So, once again, not only are we living in a time of catastrophic economic failure, we're living in a time of catastrophic failure of intellect amongst our national leadership.
It's one of the luxuries of living in Australia - we're so far removed from the world's problems. Most of the time, the world's problem don't really affect us that directly. In the past we've sent troops to the Old World just to get ourselves involved in the world's terrible affairs (like WorldWar I!); but in most part we've sat outa great deal of global issues,and that has worked for us. And that's all well and good except with these two problems, we're firmly in orbit of the looming black hole. Honestly, conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. What we're seeing is the process of intellectual foreclosure.
It's one of the luxuries of living in Australia - we're so far removed from the world's problems. Most of the time, the world's problem don't really affect us that directly. In the past we've sent troops to the Old World just to get ourselves involved in the world's terrible affairs (like WorldWar I!); but in most part we've sat outa great deal of global issues,and that has worked for us. And that's all well and good except with these two problems, we're firmly in orbit of the looming black hole. Honestly, conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. What we're seeing is the process of intellectual foreclosure.
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