arleeshar's picture
Tue, 30/10/2007 - 3:49am — arleeshar

Pell makes his first foray into academic life with a book of ten short essays pondering the relationship between church and state. Depressingly, this is what he chooses to focus on:

Dr Pell said a “false analogy” between alleged discrimination against homosexuals and racial discrimination was beginning to appear in Australia. He cited English newspaper reports of two foster parents to 28 children being forced to give up their work because authorities wanted them to teach that homosexual relationships were as acceptable as heterosexual marriages.

A big problem with this sort of thing, apart from the obvious, is that Pell is often taken by mainstream political commentators to represent a Christian Voice; to speak with authority for the Christian Vote, or at least to be representative of Christian Views or something. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

At the weekend, Paddington Uniting Church held a candidates electoral forum which specifically addressed the outcomes of HREOC’s Same Sex: Same Entitlements report, and which was attended by a variety of lower house and senate candidates from parties other than the Liberal Party (who declined the invitation). From all reports, the most boisterous moment of the forum occurred when the Christian crowd questioned Labor MP for Sydney Tanya Plibersek’s inability to budge on the party line on gay marriage - which is, of course, that there shouldn’t be any. Thing is, they were heckling from the left.