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Thursday, September 15, 2016

Hate Speech

The great King-Maker Who Would Be King, the dishonourable Bill Shorten, Leader (hah!) of  Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition - a misnomer if ever there was one for a man so disloyal - has been spewing his venom again about forthcoming 'debates' in the Parliament of Oz. It is on the subject of Marriage. The chaps in the Tavern were almost amused.

Mr Shorten said during the online leaders' debate on Friday night that he did not want to hold a plebiscite because it would encourage homophobia. Billy has a vivid imagination. During the debate, Mr Shorten called on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull not to give "hate and homophobia" a platform by holding a same-sex marriage plebiscite.
In the Silencing Socialist RED corner
I would have thought he would welcome the opportunity to fully employ the relevant Kommis.... er .. Commissioners who are paid handsomely to prosecute to within an inch of their lives and meagre savings anyone who would dare to be even offensive to the poor widdle LGBTUVXYZs who we may find - after overturning a lot of rocks - lurking in the great Oz bush. Perhaps he is afraid that some of them too may fall foul of 18C.

He certainly does not want to hear any debate, let alone actually let those 'People' out there in Hillary's Village to have any say at all. 

But courageous Andy Bolt knows no fear.  Andy, you see, knows a lot about Hate Speech. He has heard a lot of it. Poor fellow barely has to open his mouth to brush his teeth before some lefty looney spits on his toothpaste.
In the Freedom to Speak BLUE corner

Excuse me, but who are the real peddlers of “hate speech” in the same-sex marriage debate?
And a warning to these foul-mouthed hypocrites of the Left: you don’t just discredit your cause.
You actually make many of us fear what you’d do next if you win.
Now you howl us down. 
Next, will you shut us up?
Labor and the rest of the Left are now screaming that the public is too vicious to be trusted with the Turnbull Government’s planned plebiscite — a public vote — to decide whether to legalise same-sex marriage. They claim defenders of traditional marriage will be so abusive that gays will kill themselves in despair, so we must leave it to politicians to bring in gay marriage without any public debate.
As Labor leader Bill Shorten said this week: “A ‘no’ campaign would be an emotional torment for gay teenagers, and if one child commits suicide over the plebiscite, then that is one too many.”
You would never here Bill say that about a child aborted, would you? 
Leave aside the recklessness of Shorten suggesting to the vulnerable that suicide is not just an option but understandable.
Leave aside this moral blackmail to shut down a serious debate over a critical tradition meant to keep families together.
Leave aside Labor’s selective concern about people possibly dying, when it contemptuously ignored warnings in 2008 of the lethal consequences of it scrapping our border laws — and lured 1200 boat people to their deaths.
Let’s look instead at the record. Who exactly is doing the worst of this “hate speech”?
Sure, there are ratbags on both sides of the debate in the sewers of Twitter or on our meaner streets.
But judge this debate by the leaders of it — the politicians, the press and main activists.
There’s not just Shorten, denouncing the alleged hate speech of opponents while in the same breath accusing them of persecuting gays to their deaths.
There’s also Greens MP Adam Bandt, who this week warned.. 
Christian groups would “spread their hate-speech through a plebiscite”, 
yet then smeared “bigots like Lyle Shelton from the Australian Christian Lobby”.

Then there’s Bernard Keane of Crikey, likewise wringing his hands and warning that “for Australia’s LGBTI communities, the plebiscite will be a highly personal attack”, only to then vilify the luckless Shelton as a “creep” and “fact-free hypocrite” who was “obsessed with sex” and “a nauseating piece of filth”.
Or take novelist and Fairfax columnist John Birmingham, sanctimoniously warning this week of “the poison certain to be injected into our politics” by the plebiscite.
Having put on his chic halo, Birmingham, too, felt licensed to unleash the poisonous hatred he’d just denounced, attacking opponents of same-sex marriage as “weirdos” — “a sweating pig circus of morons and bigots” wanting to “mangulate their hate boners in the marriage equality plebiscite”.
You do have to give Birmingham a smile. He is almost at Olympic Standard. He is certainly a qualifier. 
How many more examples of this hypocrisy do you need? How about Equal Loves campaigner Anthony Wallace, warning against the vileness of opponents and vowing to “shut down their hate speech”. Yet there he was at a rally with Bill Shorten, shouting: “Tony Abbott, stick your plebiscite where the sun don’t shine.”
The poor lefties are STILL blaming Tony Abbott. They must really miss him. 
The important issue here is not the hypocrisy. It is the tendency of so many in the same-sex marriage push to dehumanise, demonise and abuse their opponents.
These are people who consider opponents of same-sex marriage so vile that they must be not answered but shouted down. Even silenced.
Already we’ve seen this totalitarian streak made clear. Greens candidate Martine Delaney dragged the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart to the Tasmanian anti-discrimination commission for politely arguing against same-sex marriage in a pamphlet. The commission even ordered the archbishop and his bishops to defend their opinions until Delaney dropped her complaint.
Marriage was going along nicely, with all the usual caveats about difficulty and seven-year itch, before the homosexuals decided to be divisive.  And then they accused the traditional folk of being just that  - divisive. A super-mendacity.
Suddenly, the defence of traditional marriage — until recently the policy of both Labor and the Liberals — is not just legally dangerous but a social sin.
Marriage Alliance, a grassroots organisation, last year booked and paid for television advertisements supporting traditional marriage. Channel 9 and Foxtel ran them, but Channel 7 and 10 refused.
So what next?
Once we get same-sex marriage will these punishers stop there? Or, convinced their foes are filthy bigots, will they just keep going, not just screaming down the traditionalists but demanding laws to silence them?
Will priests be allowed to refuse to marry gay couples? Will bakers be punished if they refuse to bake the wedding cake? 
Will defence of traditional marriage be made a crime?
Don’t dismiss these worries as far-fetched. 
See how same-sex marriage crusaders are acting already. What makes you think victory will make them stop?
And so we shall enter another round of madness. King Billy will make sure we are all taken for a ride. But some of us will be on a Tumbril. 

It has happened before.

Brendan O'Neill was in to give Andy some confirming support.
The gay-marriage debate down here gets madder by the day. 
The fear of the plebiscite has morphed into a full-on moral panic about the mob and the dangers of democracy. If we ask the little people about this sensitive issue, they’ll only go and vomit up homo-hating bigotry, apparently.
Richard Di Natale went so far as to say that the ‘hateful’ bile a marriage plebiscite would unleash might even cause young gay people to kill themselves. 
What a warped view they have of the public: 
as a pogrom-in-waiting, a latent hateful riot waiting for a green light to let it all out. Again with the elitism: apparently only officialdom, being cool-headed and not scum, can be trusted to make a call on something like gay marriage. 
Where are all these bigots anyway? I didn’t encounter any at the four talks I did for the Australian Christian Lobby. 
I met thoughtful, liberal-minded people, opposed to gay marriage, yes, but not homophobic. 
So often today, the true bigots are those who bang on about bigotry: those who see racism in every nook of society, hatred in every Christian campaign, a lingering loathing for Indigenous people among ordinary white Australians. 
In claiming to oppose bigotry, these anti-bigots, these 18C-supporting, plebiscite-fearing, mob-allergic thinkers and activists, reveal their own bigoted view of Australia as stuffed with nasty, ugly people whose passions must be kept in check by the law and us decent folks. 
At pretty much every talk a perplexed-looking audience member said something like: ‘I like you. You make sense. So what’s all this about being a Trotskyist?’ In response, I quoted my favourite Trotsky line: ‘We must increase the power of man over nature and abolish the power of man over man.’ That’s my political worldview in a nutshell. If it’s yours too, maybe you’re also a Trotskyist? Come, join me.
This old Tavern Keeper is about as far from being a Trot as any decent Knight, but Brendan does not piss on my carpets and can drink here anytime he wants to. 

Drink deep of Courage.

Pax


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