Showing posts with label moral hypocrisy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moral hypocrisy. Show all posts

Wednesday 3 January 2018

A professed 'Christian' man named in at least one human rights complaint to the International Criminal Court vows to defend Christianity in 2018


The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 December 2017:

Scott Morrison says he will fight back against discrimination and mockery of Christians and other religious groups in 2018, in comments that position him as one of the leading religious conservatives in the Turnbull government. 

Mr Morrison also promised to play a leading role next year in the debate about enshrining further "protections" for religious freedom in law, which will be informed by a review currently being led by former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock.

For overseas readers who may not know this man, he is enthusiastic Hill Song Church devotee, Liberal MP for Cook, former Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, former Minister for Social Security and current Australian Treasurer Scott John Morrison.

On his ministerial watch alleged human rights abuses occurred in overseas detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru. These incidents included deaths of asylum seekers such as that of Reza Berati.

Alleged abuses continue to be reported to this day.

In a 2016 communique to the International Criminal CourtScott Morrison, along with Malcolm TurnbullTony AbbottKevin RuddJulia GillardJohn HowardPeter DuttonTony BurkeBrendan O’ConnorChris BowenChris EvansKevin AndrewsAmanda VanstonePhillip RuddockBaron Waqa and Rimbink Pato, was named as administrating authority having responsibility in relation to the offence of unlawful confinement.

Tuesday 6 November 2012

Victorian inquiry into child abuse by religious organisations continues


 
The Victorian Parliament’s Family and Community Development Committee Inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations continues, with hearings scheduled for 9,12,23,and 26 November 2012
 
This was Professor Chris Goddard from Child Abuse Prevention Research Australia for Monash University giving evidence before the Inquiry in Melbourne on 19 October 2012:
 
I have, however, a firm opinion that the abuse of children and young people in religious organisations is truly diabolical because of the lasting and terrible spiritual damage. This is supported by the literature. The abuse of children by adults always rests on a power imbalance. The large number of offences by Catholic priests reflects an extraordinary power imbalance. The religious authority they possess allows them even to turn parents and families against their own children. This has meant that many victims have had to attempt to deal with the abuse on their own, magnifying the impacts.
 
It is important to recognise that child-sex offenders are extremely cunning. Priests have used their positions to infiltrate families and gain access to children. They have used their knowledge of the families and the families’ strengths and weaknesses to gain access to the most vulnerable children. This is one of the major  reasons I believe there has been and continues to be such a long time period between offences being committed and reporting. Then of course when reports are made the Catholic Church in particular has
shown that defending itself is more important than defending the victims. The impact on children, thus, is catastrophic. They are betrayed many times. They are betrayed by the priest or priests. In some cases that I know of they feel they have been betrayed by their families who had difficulty believing them. In some terrible cases the parents of victims have gone to their graves believing the church, not their children. In many cases they have been betrayed by the church’s responses, as I have had said.
 
Professor Des Cahill, Professor of Intercultural Studies at RMIT University giving evidence before the Inquiry on 22 October 2012:
 
Mr McGUIRE — Thank you, Professor, for that multifaith overview and then coming down to the particular concerns you raised about the Catholic Church. I would just like to pick you up on the issue of prevalence. Your report at page 16 calculates the prevalence of clerical sexual abuse as between the 4 to 6 per cent range, which by implication is that about 1 in 20 ordained diocesan priests in Victoria and Tasmania become child sex abusers. The first question is: on what is that based? Then if you could also respond in regard to that this does not take into account offending by religious brothers, so what is the number of these that relate to offending in Catholic schools in terms of the current situation that exists within the Catholic school system?
 
Prof. CAHILL — The 1 in 20 is based on the analysis I have given in my submission of the priests from the dioceses of Victoria and Tasmania who trained at Corpus Christi College from 1940 to 1972. I chose that period because some from the very early period are still alive — they are very old — whereas those ordained in 1972 are now over 65. In reaching a figure I think it is important to have a data baseline, and it is very hard to achieve, but when we did that calculation and on the basis of data that I and other colleagues who are former priests know about and from information available on the Broken Rites website we were able to come up with
that figure.

** Cartoon comment found at Google Images

Sunday 19 February 2012

Misogynists of the World Unite! Then move to Oklahoma USA


This is the Oklahoma Senate in 2012. You will notice that it is predominately Republican and male.


So it should come as no surprise that this Senate has decided to pass bill SB1433. Thereby bringing closer the creation of the Personhood Act which establishes that The laws of this state shall be interpreted and construed to acknowledge on behalf of the unborn child at every stage of development all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.

This strange bill apparently makes medical abortion or even some forms of contraception a criminal offence. While at the same time, somewhat perversely, it leaves the door open for a woman to quietly neglect her health to such a degree that she spontaneously miscarries.

On the 15 February 2012 it was passed by 34 to 8 votes.

An even stranger amendment seems to have languished without support:

In the spirit of shared responsibility in issues of reproduction, if a woman declares that she is pregnant non-consensually, the sperm donor shall be required to undergo a statutorily mandated vasectomy, shall be fined Twenty-five Thousand Dollars ($25,000.00), and shall also be financially responsible for the offspring of such pregnancy until the age of twenty-one (21).

Sunday 28 August 2011

Pollies living in glass houses begin to hear the sound of smashing glass



When Aussie pollies on The Speaker's left get all holier than thou, this is what sometimes happens.......................

In The Canberra Times last Wednesday:

“The Canberra Liberals were producing invitations to a $950-a-head party fundraiser when they were caught misusing public printing resources last month.
And The Canberra Times can reveal that the breach of parliamentary code of conduct only came to light after one of the flyers advertising the exclusive event was left on a photocopier.
Liberals' Leader Zed Seselja, who apologised last week to the Assembly over the incident, repeated yesterday that the breach had been an honest mistake by a junior staff member who had just begun working at the Assembly.
The flyer that was being produced was an invitation from Mr Seselja to the party faithful to ''an exclusive and intimate'' dinner with NSW Minister for Resources and Energy Chris Hartcher.
Supporters could choose to donate $550, $750 or $950 to attend the event at the up-market Boat House restaurant on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin on July 21.
Under political donations rules, payments to political parties of less than $1000 do not have to be disclosed to authorities.
Last month the Liberal Party paid back $10,000 it had claimed from a government fund set up to help volunteer groups look after the city's poor and needy through the global financial crisis.
In the wake of the latest incident, the Speaker of the Assembly Shane Rattenbury was forced to issue a warning to 11 non-executive Assembly members last week reminding them of their obligations concerning the use of public funds.”

Saturday 12 March 2011

Tony Blair is coming to Australia and he wants to hold an audience.....



In July 2011 former British prime Minister and alleged war criminal Tony Blair is coming to Australia to do a little revenue raising in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth.

Wonder who will actually admit to paying these prices to meet him or which Australian corporations (besides Visy) might actually believe that being associated with this man will enhance business reputations?
Will someone try to claim Monbiot's bounty by performing a peaceful citizen's arrest?

An Audience With Tony Blair: Lessons in Leadership, Negotiation and Innovation

TICKET PRICES

$1,000 per person
Ticket includes a full sit down banquet meal and attendance at the pre-event cocktail party

$10,000 per Table of Ten
Tables of ten include a full sit down banquet meal and attendance at the pre-event cocktail party

$1,500 VIP Ticket
Includes a seat at one of "the best tables in the house", one ticket to private pre-event "meet and greet" cocktail party and individual photograph with Tony Blair

$15,000 VIP Table of Ten
Includes "the best seats in the house" table of ten, ten tickets to private
pre-event "meet and greet" cocktail party and individual one photograph
with Tony Blair, full page advertisement in the program, logo recognition in the program and on the screens at the event

Saturday 5 February 2011

In America 2011 zealous wingnuts are on the march and no woman is safe

 

In America in 2011 there were thirteen females amongst the around sixty members of the US Congress who sponsored a bill called the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act  which seeks to deny Medicare-funded abortion to girls and women who were raped without some form of physical restraint or violence.

Tuesday 8 December 2009

No one publishes obituaries for junkies


The October 10 - 11 edition of Brisbane's Courier Mail carried an obituary in Kathleen Noonan's "Last Word" column. It appears below:

MOST of us make mistakes and survive. We pick the wrong car to get into, go to the wrong party, kiss the wrong boy or girl, drive when we should have walked, walk when we should have caught a cab, say yes when we should have said no, try things not worth trying, trust someone not worth trusting, wake up in dumb places.

Most of us make mistakes and get away with it. We survive with no awful, lifelong consequences. Not wrapped around a tree at high speed. Not overdosed on the bathroom floor. No fatal outcome.

Robbie Edgar didn't get away with his mistakes. He paid for them. He died recently because of them.

No one publishes obituaries for junkies. That's what his sister Rosey wrote to me. You usually have to be a fine upstanding citizen, sportsman, businessman, dedicated Rotarian or notable academic.

Junkies, really, don't rate. Once we see the word junkie, it sort of makes all the other words in our head disappear. "Junkie" negates everything else. It makes a big, complex, sometimes beautiful, life disappear into one small judgmental word.

"What of someone who did not rise high above his demons, from whom others might feel entitled to withhold their respect? Who will speak to keep his name alive? I will," writes Rosey.

"I will write of Robert Edgar, born 17 May, 1954, to Thomas and Eileen Edgar in Brisbane, precociously interested in the sciences, with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a sharply detailed memory."

He left school early, started an apprenticeship with an optician, but threw that in to come to northern NSW for the Aquarius Festival and the blossoming of the emotional, intellectual and spiritual freedoms promised in the counter-culture.

Robbie embraced transcendental meditation, became vegan, practised yoga, grew organic vegetables, his evenings glowed under kerosene light, he rose early, was fit from long walks, swam with platypus, found glow-worm caves, sought enlightenment.

"He created food gardens at each place: Nimbin, Tuntable Valley and Jiggi," writes Rosey. "He lived by his belief in karma. He did not steal; neither did he drink alcohol nor smoke. He abhorred hard drugs.

"His passions were for food, knowledge meditation and women.

"With the smooth golden skin, a ponytail of long wavy black hair to his waist and a beautiful face, he was a hippie heart-throb."

So what went wrong? One morning Robbie was arrested for possession and supply of drugs – LSD. By his standard, these were not hard drugs. His logic differed from the court's. He was jailed. By the time he was released, he smoked cigarettes, he ate meat and had developed a bad habit that he never came clean of – heroin.

Around this time, he acquired the hepatitis C virus. He continued to live in northern NSW, a junkie. His health suffered from his lifestyle.

But, says Rosey, his humour was resilient and as dry as the dust that swept over Lismore the afternoon of his death. Wicked sarcasm, misquotes, deliberate Spoonerisms: "Time wounds all heals" – were things Rosey loved about her brother. And always pertinent facts, a snippet of history. "Did you know that Pope Leo VIII died of a stroke while committing adultery?" he'd ask.

He made his mark in the community, with well-written and wry articles and letters to various magazines and newspapers.

"He would decimate prejudice with logic and facts," writes Rosey, "and lambast and enlighten with irony and history and humour."

His last article was published posthumously in The Northern Rivers Echo. He wrote, in part: "Greedy people smugglers . . . sneaking unwashed, unwanted aliens with a very different and foreign religion, with superstitious dietary rules and modes of dress . . . incapable of assimilation and as part of a world-wide creed bent on the destruction of our way of life. None but a soft-headed government or left-wing intellectuals would hesitate to intern, in the remotest possible location. Welcoming these illegals and queue-jumpers would open the floodgates to millions of their brethren . . . Ideally, they could all be returned immediately to where they should be waiting, in an orderly manner to be properly and legally processed.

"From a press release from the Swedish Nazi Party, late 1941, in response to the arrival of 90 per cent of Denmark's Jewish population on Sweden's shores, aboard Denmark's fishing fleet.

"Signed Robert Edgar, Lismore."

When Robbie wasn't being Robbie the junkie, he sounds like a bit of a ratbag. Back a couple of years violinist Richard Tognetti, director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, spoke on ratbags and why we need them in society. "The ratbag is one of the essential bacteria in our culture . . . By breathing in ratbaggery, we become less likely to fall to the illness of moral hypocrisy. Ratbags have no moral agenda; they have a hyperactive bullshit detector; they cannot be entrusted with money, for if they are given money, they will use it on valueless things, such as adventures and storytelling; and the ratbag should confound, astonish, query and disrupt, rather than confirm and soothe."

I think of this reading Rosey's words about her brother. "So much knowledge, such a beautiful, perverse, sharp, contradictory mind. Such a placid nature. He was not demonstrative; he never yelled or lost his temper (except that one time when the Nolan's cow gorged on his vegie patch). His laughter was a chuckle, his rage was a scowl, and his retaliation was a roll of the eyes. And grief did not fall in tears but was breathed as a sigh. Except for that one time, two weeks ago when told that he had terminal liver cancer."

Robbie died on September 22 aged 55. I spoke to Rosey the day after she and her father Tom had seen his body for the last time. Grief threatened to shipwreck her. She spoke of the waste of her whip-smart brother and the care the doctors, nurses and other staff of the Lismore Base Hospital and community nurses who cared for him with non-judgmental respect and loving kindness.

Coming home late the other night, I turn the corner near South Bank and there's a young man near the train station, too drunk or off his tree on something to be a threat. He's thin, that dry, papery Yellow Pages-thin of the addicted. I watch him shuffle off through a dirt-filled empty block, his feet breathing dust in the moonrise.

Many families have a Robbie, someone who makes mistakes and doesn't get away with them.

They don't publish obituaries for junkies. Rosey, you're right. They – we – don't usually see past the word "junkie". It's like the moon blocking out the sun in an eclipse. Everything else they are and they have done in their lives is hidden by the dark side. So let's make the exception. Just because we got away with our mistakes, doesn't make us better than anyone. Because we all make mistakes and we are more than our mistakes.


AND ANOTHER THING

Noonan had this piece in her column the following week:

Last week's obituary for Robbie brought such a strong response from readers, who emailed, wrote and phoned, stopped me in cafes and in the street to say thanks to Rosey and her family for sharing his life. Which makes you think that in this crazy world, there are deep pockets of tolerance and gentleness and open-mindedness. "It made me believe a little more," wrote Ben, who spent a year in jail for something stupid when he was 19 and is now a fine upstanding citizen, putting his kids and two foster kids through uni.


Source: The Courier Mail