This is a condom, not a sin.

The only reason you need not to repress sex: Leia

So if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last 24 hours its that same-sex parents always abuse their kids. At least, that is, according to Wendy Francis, Family First senatorial candidate for Queensland.

So I’m thinking, if all it takes to be a high-profile Senate candidate is a batshit crazy view of human sexuality, I should give it a shot myself.

Why Sexuality needs to be repressed*

*Repressing sexuality will void warranty

1. People who have a healthy sex life find it harder to get worked up over immigrants and muslims
2. Sex is the number one cause of Sexually Transmitted Diseases
3. Regretting sexual encounters is the number one cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
4. If sexual frustration is released in a way that doesn’t involve violence, the Police would be out of a job
5. Catholic priests raping children keeps the focus off evangelical pastors hiring same-sex escorts
6. Seeing the female body as anything but shameful and ugly is just plain fucking distracting.
7. The sexually satisified won’t strap bombs to themselves, therefore ruining all the fun.
8. If we can’t shame our children for exploring their bodies, how will they learn how to feel guilt?
9. Defining marriage any more broadly than ‘between a man and a woman’ is unfairly confusing for Christians.
10. God said so.

I’ll update this as more entirely valid reasons arise.

Whether or not this was at the behest of Family First or if it was her own initiative is irrelevant. As Wendy will soon discover, the Internet never forgets. Thanks to Google’s caching, the post is back and can be viewed in this post, or in its original shame here.

Keep in mind that I do not, in any way, endorse the content of this post. This posted here in the interest of political communication.

Let’s end the gay marriage debate and protect children from abuse

By Wendy Francis or some unfortunate lackey in her charge.

*updated below

Late this afternoon Wendy tweeted about a statement she’d released calling for the major parties to end the gay marriage debate.

Released statement today calling on Labor & Coalition to end gay marriage debate. The debate is destructive to Australia’s future – @wendy4senate

I’ve screencap’ed the entire series of her tweets, though unless you’re psychopathic, sociopathic or Christian, her comments may induce such bile that an alien Glenn Beck is likely to burst forth from your chest.

The local twitterati unleashed their feral goldfish within moments, slamming Wendy as a bigoted homophobe and fundamentalist regressive.  So far at least two parody accounts have been created, my favourite being @windy4senate, sporting slightly modified but hilarious versions of Wendy’s tweets; and @wendy2thesenate, which by comparison lacks the wit of the previous account but still tries.

A search for @wendy4Senate results in a large number of rebuttals, denunciations and outcries, but honestly, taking someone like Wendy seriously should be best left to us of the ‘lock jaw blogger’ variety. For the rest of you, just point and laugh while we make her feel stupid for being such a stain on our political history.

*Update

Cameron Reilly has pointed out that Wendy Francis is on the board of a Charity that, while embroiled in controversy for the conflicting interests of its board members, would only give aid to the needy after the El Salvador earthquakes if they first attended a half hour prayer meeting.

I have commented on the article at the site, though I have no trust in a Christian organisation’s desire to be fair and publish my comment, so I’ve copied it here.

*******

This isn’t incomprehensible at all.

Firstly, the filter trial failed to genuinely ‘trial’ the filter in any real world context, and when the results were analysed, it showed that in order to produce a positive result for the filter, almost every useful feature needed to be disabled, including screening high traffic sites like Youtube and Facebook. Your reasoning here is wrong.

Secondly, it would be illogical to *filter* Australian content but not filter foreign content. It is illogical to say the government should enforce domestic laws domestically but not enforce domestic laws overseas. Your reasoning here is wrong.

Finally, the only possible benefit this filter may have had (if it had been established with competence) would be preventing *illiterate* children from accessing porn. This function is better served by parents because it allows for education and the development of stronger family relationships as the child learns from their parents what their parents believe is right and wrong. To simply block it, for everyone, at a choke point that was never designed for the purpose, helps nobody. A child cannot simply use a proxy (dead simple to use) to get around their parents. Your reasoning here is wrong.

Perhaps if this filter DOES come in, maybe we’ll see Christian forums and pages blocked for vilifying homosexuals or even see online versions of the bible blocked for the graphic violence, murder and genocide depicted within it.

********

It’d be be mighty hypocritical of me to rant and rave against censorship only to censor articles in my own publication.
So I won’t.

So far the only article censored in QUTE mag by the Student Guild Executive Board was an article about not letting chivalry die in the face of feminism. I can understand that, despite the article being written by a woman and allowed for publication by the Guild President, also a woman, the article is the kind of regressive sentiment that I loathe and helps nobody. Pitting politeness against feminism is one of the more intellectually lazy ways of making a point, but it was submitted and was well written enough to be published.

I haven’t published everything that I’ve been sent, but that’s slightly different. If I haven’t published something it’s because it’s either too long, poorly written beyond my ability to edit, or flat-out incomplete.

Now, if the Student Guild owned the qutemag.org domain, I’d be bound by their wishes and be unable to publish anything the board had censored. Fortunately the owner of the domain will remain a secret.

Kat Henderson has been extremely supportive of the magazine and she’s really stuck to her guns in allowing our own little corner of the fourth estate to flourish. She can’t, however, control the entire Guild, so the democratic process won’t always result in particularly democratic outcomes. This is the nature of democracy; sometimes the people will choose to hamstring themselves, and we must respect that as a democratic decision.

I can’t speak for Kat but she’s given every indication that she is anti-censorship and should be given all credit for never trying to censor my magazine.

A part of that respect, however, is to constantly challenge it when the result is unjust, unfair or obfuscating. That is why I will post censored articles on the site, to challenge those who would censor the magazine into siding with all censorship or no censorship. There is no line. The families of Australia do not ‘just know’ where the line is and nobody working with a human mind can be trusted to draw one.

Stephen Conroy has been polishing shit in the hopes it will shine. Indeed, he will be remembered as the go-to guy for that kind of task.

Today the DBCDE released its suite of measures to keep their website censorship policy transparent. Of the nine measures proposed only four have any real meat to them, and any sense of Lundy-esque democracy is still conspicuously absent. The greatest disappointment here is that these measures, held up by Conroy as being so far ‘above and beyond’ what we should expect as citizens, are what the current system should look like without the filter.

There’s a rather baffling report going out there that Conroy is putting the filter on the back-burner. The concensus amongst the feral goldfish is that this is a stalling tactic to put the filter off the election radar. That the report came within a few hours of the transparency release supports this (at least in my mind) as it’s the scenario you’d expect if Gillard had told Conroy to ‘clear the decks’.

As far as the measures are concerned:

Measure 1: All internet content complaints to the ACMA that are assessed as being potentially RC will be classified by the Classification Board

This is a big improvement on the current system but only in the same way that food poisoning beats being set on fire. The ACMA was never constructed as a body capable of classifying content, and its stewardship of the web content blacklist gave it control over online content that it didn’t have over any other media. The EFA supports this measure, as do I, because it’s really a repair to a previously broken system. This one’s especially funny given the distrust Labor showed as opposition for the Liberal lackies being stacked into the ACMA and Classification Board.

Measure 2: ACMA notification process

When you need a fiat of government policy before you can tell people you’ve censored their website, you know you’re cocking things up. This is meant to prevent the situation that occurred after the blacklist was leaked last year where a dentist discovered his site had been blacklisted. He wasn’t notified. The caveat to this measure is that they don’t have to tell you if you’re being investigated by the Federal Police because of the content.

Do if the blacklist is only child porn and snuff films, dear Senator, why the hell would you need this provision? Wouldn’t everyone who could be notified be under investigation? This is the first public admission that not everything on the blacklist is illegal of which I am aware.

Measure 3: Blocking notification page and appeal mechanism

I hesitate before calling this one completely innocuous. It’s far better than the government’s original plan to let the filter just drop your website request and have it look like the site doesn’t exist (and then send an unmarked van to blackbag you soon after, or so goes the joke), but I can’t help but think there’s some clever bastard out there who could script something up to use this page as a way of plucking the blacklist out of thin air. I’m not the paranoid, however, I think this one’s more or less harmless.

Measure 4: Access to information regarding the list

… is not nearly as useful as it sounds. You can find out why a site is blocked but you’ll still be taking the ACMA’s word for it. The only person outside the ACMA, classification board and initial complainant who can judge whether the reasoning is sound is the Independent Expert from measure 7. They’ll also be publishing a categorical run-down of how many sites are banned and for what reason. The measure includes a staff position at the Ministry of Truth to create the numbers, publish them and ultimately be jailed for thought crimes.

Measure 5: Avenues for appeal and review

Honestly, this goes right up there with FOI as being something that no self-respecting democracy would actually charge people for. This would be fine, if a little ’stab in the dark’ were it not for the likely massive charges you;d have to pay.

Measure 6: Incorporation of URLs of child sexual abuse imagery from international lists

Given the trouble some of these international organisations have had in not blocking things like wikipedia, I’m not entirely happy with this. What ever happened to politicians having conniptions about sovereignty every time a foreign body makes a decision for us. Somehow a group of net-hating soccer mums in Europe mean more to our government than the United Nations.

Every URL on these lists should be submitted to the classification board. As the measures currently stand, the ACMA will drip feed a few to the Classification board every now and then. Not acceptable. The AFP has been cooperating like this for years to wonderful effect, yet somehow we still need to bring in foreign organisations that aren’t already working with the police? Whatever, we’re getting into the mushy end of things here.

Measure 7: Review by an Independent Expert and report to Parliament

I’m a big fan of this, though as we’ve seen from the Labor party’s use of an independent committee to stop them abusing tax-payer funded policy advertising, it’s probably going to go nowhere. Likewise, Rudd announced an Independent National Security legislation Monitor (to make sure the government didn’t go all American on us with crazy counter-terrorism laws) which the government has failed to recruit two years later but has slated the position to be part-time with two part-time assistants. If that’s how they treat oversight on counter-terrorism laws, I don’t imagine this independent expert will be adequately funded at all.

Measure 8: Industry review of technical aspects of filtering

I’ll just quote straight from the release shall I. “This could be done for example through the establishment of a Departmental email address which would allow ISPs to submit any concerns or queries they have on technical matters.” An email address. Fuck off you demented plebs. Take this seriously, please.

Measure 9: Reporting against service standards and statutory requirements

This means essentially nothing until the NBN is in place, and even that’s me speculating that there may be some legislated minimum performance targets for ISPs in the future.

So until Mark Newton files a complaint to the Australian Federal Police, don’t expect much in the mainstream media about this. The naive will accept this as reasonable and the Government has issued a fiat declaring this ‘uninteresting’ for the election.

I’m looking for responses to something current, whether it be a response to Clive Hamilton’s latest article or an interview with Mel Gibson or a government policy you dislike.

Example a)

You’ve just read an article called “Fighting Child Porn: thinking about the children” by Wei Tu Yung, advocating a mandatory internet filter as the best way to prevent domestic violence against children. You realise that Miss Wei is full of shit so you write an article for QUTE that picks their apart. You submit, I publish, we all win the prize.

Example b)

Your law student friend left the OQPC website open at the bills page. You see an upcoming bill (which will probably become law soon) that wants to prohibit people from saying negative things about religious people. You realise Anna Bligh is Kim Jong il’s evil sister and tear the policy to shreds, in QUTE mag, which all the important people read.

Example c)

You’ve just seen a band that you like. Some idiot in skinny jeans reviewed them the next day and you can tell that they either weren’t there or wrote the review under the influence of crystal meth. Write a review and bag the idiot out. Then submit it to QUTE and receive 53 virgins.

Be constructive and don’t just rely on your own ramblings. If you’re sending me a rant it better be the funniest thing you’ve ever written. I’m looking for articles that can’t exist in a vacuum. Respond to the world around you, culture is a conversation, not a monologue.

Our Prima Spinster had this to say about Australia’s allergy to the poor and defenseless.

It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’.

I couldn’t agree more. More accurate terms would be ‘ignorant’, ‘narcissistic’ or ‘paranoid’. At least she’s not taking Frank Salter’s ‘assimilation was a great idea’ angle. Yet.

We can filter things too …
via godblock.com hat-tip Simon Gilby

If mandatory filtering wasn’t so abhorrent I’d be lobbying Canberra for this one.

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions.

Perhaps rape, genocide and oppression are okay when God does it though?

Straight up your daughter’s leg
via abc.com.au

NSW parliament isn’t sure illegal activities in NSW are illegal enough.

[Clive] Small says banning membership of bikie gangs could be unnecessary. He says many pre-existing laws can already be used against gangs.

Catch up Clive, crime is best solved by frowning real hard and directing as much legislative hate towards abnormal people as possible.

The executable offense that dare not speak its name
via the BBC

British immigration officials want homosexual asylum seekers from countries where homosexuality is a capital offense to try ‘not telling anyone’ before they’ll let them in.

In one case, currently before the UK Supreme Court, a gay man from Cameroon was told he should relocate elsewhere in his country and be “more discreet” in future.

What do they expect? Queer refugee zombies coming back for a second attempt?

Don’t make a 1984 reference
via brisbanetimes.com.au

Former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon defended her love of Big Brother by saying young people’s love of Facebook is a sign that we would love to have her watch us wherever we go.

”Young people don’t seem to be bothered,” she said at last night’s IQ2 debate, organised by the St James Ethics Centre and sponsored by the Herald. ”These arguments about protecting people’s privacy: in many cases people don’t care about their privacy being protected.”

She’s just pissed that everyone saw her eating cake while her state burned to the ground.

Gillard supports her own filter policy, bloggers shocked
via the ABC

Our Usurper-in-Chief has restated her commitment to the mandatory internet filter policy that she and Rudd’s Kitchen Cabinet created in the first place.

I understand that there’s a set of concerns, technical concerns about internet speed

I’m glad that freedom of speech, privacy violations and becoming an international joke are all technical concerns for Jules.

cc drhenkenstein

Voters seem to care so much about this tax because of two things, employment and getting back into surplus. The original RSPT got such a panning from the industry over jobs that Rudd’s brutal execution might seem reasonable. Gillard’s new deal, announced this morning and rebranded as the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, somehow gives analysts hope that mining stocks might actually benefit. Well that’s good news for everyone but the planet and makes Abott’s position, promising to repeal the tax if elected, wobble slightly.

He’ll do more than wobble if Labor can keep it’s early return to budget blackery promise. The reduced revenue from the tax, everyone’s reporting $1.5Billion less than under Rudd’s tax, makes Labor’s run at surplus trickier, but people need to remember that while we’re in deficit, the Government won’t spend us into high interest rates. So far for anyone owning a home this tax is working out well.

I’m calling this a victory for Gillard. She’s made the deal while her honeymoon keeps her safe from her own party’s dislike of compromise, everyone but the opposition is happy and she knows how to frame the issue to her benefit.

Of course Murdock’s crew are using the words ‘backflip’ and ‘cave in’ like they cure cancer. A news.com.au poll is currently running the question ‘Does the mining tax resolution make you more likely to vote Labor?’ with numbers around 74% No and 22% Yes.

News.com.au’s polls are essentially meaningless, however, they’re usually so swayed by the idiot yuppie conservative crowd that you can bank on them being correct from the opposite direction. The question, as well, is as useful as Andrew Bolt at a communist rally. It says nothing about supporting the resolution, or the tax, but only about it changing your mind. A 22% ‘might change my mind’ vote is fucking huge in that context.

I’ll let the Australian, especially Bryan Frith, have their vitriol. They make a good point when they need to but the illusion of objectivity died long ago. If you want decent journalism, not just agenda-pushing, read the ABC. Read Crikey too, they have some damn fine coverage of this sort, better than mine.

We’ll stroke our beards until the tax reaches the Senate, where it needs support from the Greens before it can go to the ball. I’m hoping it goes through, I’m not sure the Greens vote would like them throwing it out.

So, instead of asking me ‘what’s the theme?’ or ‘what should I write?’, read this instead.

1. Attack something. If you’ve read an article or op-ed piece you disagree with, write a response to it. Take each point made in the offending article and strip it bare like the cold, vicious intellectual you are. Then cite references.
2. Find some policy and write about it. Seriously, go to the OQPC or COMLAW sites and pick a bill (or part thereof) apart. If you don’t know what this means, don’t do it, this is the hardest but easily the most awesome thing you could possibly submit.Law students pay attention.
3. Submit your old assignments. Seriously, someone smarter than you decided it was a worthwhile topic and you had to write more than your own opinion. I instantly accept assignments of a 5 or better (though even sixes are edited, sevens not so much). For BFA (writing) students it’s a sin not to submit your better work to QUTE unless you’re selling it elsewhere. Two of my own pieces were assignments.
4. Submit something that would change a person’s schedule. Changing someone’s mind is better left to people with a lot of experience doing exactly that. Opinion is good but practical advice is better and far harder to fuck up. Even the people I respect most (in terms of opinion writing) get things horribly wrong. If you’re under the age of twenty you’ll probably suck at it. Students get more out of schedules than opinions anyway (a decade under the libs having destroyed the link between ‘education’ and ‘ideas’) May Adamson is currently the reigning champion of this.
5. Submit something with spine. It’s rare that anyone other than a creative writing student is every asked to submit an assignment without references, please don’t disrespect me by failing to back your opinion/analysis with evidence. Get a topic you’re passionate about, read up on it and put the pieces together for us. Give people a roadmap to an issue.
6. We have two issues out now (probably more by the time you’ve read this), why not attack something we’ve already published?
7. Write about your least favourite subject. Don’t get mad, don’t get offensive and don’t just rant. Think clear, calm rational thoughts. Are you the only one that doesn’t like it? The CI core subjects get panned on a daily basis, why not write about them? One caveat: if you’re hating the subject because you’re useless at it, maybe you should be writing about why you’re useless instead.
8. Read a magazine other than Woman’s day, you’ll get the idea real quick.
9. Review a book. Reviews of Twilight will be summarily ignored and my refusal is likely to offend, injure and possibly crush your soul.
10. Review a Religion. Why not? Write a meaningful review about the Mormon Church. Write a meaningful review about Islam. Try not to bleed on the keyboard while writing about Christianity. Avoid slander and bitterness, but seriously, if religions want to make claims about their primacy as universal constructs, be my guest and hammer them as if they were (But tell the truth, don’t make shit up because you honestly don’t need to).
11. Defend a religion. Why not? It’ll be harder to use facts, evidence or reason but hey, don’t take my word for gospel. If you’ve written it well I will publish it (with a discalimer about the magazine not promoting self-harm). The upside for me is that I get to update my list of people with whom I can argue.
12. Get off your arse, do something crazy and then write about it. I’m fairly open with this one. Bungee jumping? Sure, go for it. Got arrested? Hell yes! Accidently slept with your cousin? We’ll use fake names. Like I said, don’t make shit up, I want photos as proof. Why not go on a road trip to Nimben, that should work.
13. Interview someone that has done something interesting. Keep in mind that the less interesting the person is, the better your writing has to be.

I know as well as you do that you’re not being paid for submissions. I don’t hold you to the same standards even if I don’t accept trash. Creative pieces are all well and good but in these post-neo-liberal-nothing-without-economic-value days its important that even creative pieces add something to public discourse. Keep in mind that the best contributors to QUTE will be the first people I call when I’m editing my own proper mag/site that can afford to pay contributors.

Don’t see me as overly political, by the way, I take non-political content as readily as I take the political. The only difference is that I need less justification from the contributor for political content because I already consider it important. If it’s not political content, it’ll probably only take one sentence in your email telling my why it’s important regardless.

Anyway, all submissions should be made to websinthe@gmail.com as an RTF, DOC, ODT, or TXT file. Include a bio of yourself, a reason for why I should publish the article and a sworn statement that you’ve proof-read your own work at least twice.