Miranda Devine, Tony Abbott, and the sweet apple of wonderful conservative social and sexual Catholic values ...

(Above: eek, it's the sisterhood at work again. And what's in the box, young possums? Tony Abott's heart!! Beware the sisterhood and the boojum).

In the revising of history and putting the best gloss on things, it's important to have a woman as the wicked witch.

After all, where would Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Tony, Andrew, Wilson, Bronwyn, Barnaby, Nick and Eric) be without the wicked witch?

So it goes with the rehabilitation effort of Miranda the Devine in Abbott's real trouble is the sisterhood.

But instead of a woman as the wicked witch, heck it's the whole damn sisterhood. Yep, as usual, it's the women who are to blame, this time a sinister sisterhood clucking in the media like addle-headed chooks. All excepting Miranda the Devine of course.

Hence the header to her column. No header of a sisterhood kind, such as Abbott's real trouble is Abbott and his dumb adherence to the more arcane stupidities of the heresy of Pellism and fuckwitted backward thinking Catholicism.

Nope, it's the sisterhood:

The fact is, Abbott's so-called woman trouble is with a particular subset of female - the aggressively secular, paleo-feminist, emasculating Australian broad, for whom unabashed red-blooded blokeishness is an affront of biblical proportions.

They are unrepresentative of women, and disproportionately influential, because they either work in the media or politics or have high-profile, heavily networked careers which mean they are quoted in the media, and their opinions sought after.

Yep, unrepresentative swill and disproportionately influential, unlike the Devine and her swill.

So it must have been this evil sisterhood which penned the lines in Abbott's gratuitously stupid and offensive book Battlelines. In it Abbott brought back the notion, dropped in 1975, of fault-based divorce, so that the blame game could once again reign supreme in the courts.

Now if you talk to younger possums who swim in the sea without reference to history, they have no idea of the implications of 'at fault' divorce, or the bizarre, arcane behavior it induced in couples wanting to split and to go their separate ways.

At the time he scribbled his nonsense, Abbott was roundly abused by many people, including that well known member of the sisterhood, Western Australia Labor premier Peter Dowding:

"The point about Tony Abbott's argument is that he wants to retreat to a blame game so you can actually blame someone in a divorce situation," Mr Dowding told ABC News Online.

"It's completely ludicrous to talk about making divorce harder at a time when people can separate easily. If you can separate easily, the question of making divorce harder or less hard is irrelevant.

"It's like Alice in Wonderland. It's like stepping through a looking glass into la-la land where Tony Abbott happily sits with his morality judging people while no-one's life gets harder or easier." ...

.... "I don't like people who are right-wing judgemental Catholics trying to bring their religious politics into Australian life," he said.

"We're not a bunch of Americans. We don't go round with our politicians pretending to be deeply religious and demanding that everyone else be while they go around committing adultery on the side, as they do in America.

"And we don't want to be in a position where people with right-wing and intolerant attitudes, like Tony Abbott, control what people believe.

"If people separate because they're unhappy with each other and live their lives apart, is he suggesting we want to go back to the 1960s and before when private investigators jump through windows and photograph people in bed?

"What's that going to achieve? Say you've been separated for five years from your wife or husband and you choose not to remarry and you have another relationship, you expect a private eye to come and [take a] photograph. I mean, how ludicrous is that?" (more here).

Abbott tried this desperate ploy because of another bogey in his life, gay marriage, and his seeking of a way to separate heterosexual marriage from the fearful new concept of homosexual marriage, by bringing back an 'opt in' traditional heterosexual matrimonial causes act.

It was such a stupid bit of dinosaur thinking that even the likes of Helen Coonan said she would need convincing. Guess that makes Coonan part of the evil sisterhood.

How does the Devine write this up?

On A Current Affair, Tracy Grimshaw gave him a hard time about contraception, abortion and making divorce harder to get.

Yep, it's all Tracy Grimshaw's fault for asking Tony Abbott about a dumb fuck idea he had that he wrote up all by himself. (Golly, it's good to have Abbott in the arena, we can say fuck and shit and poo and know it's just being manly).

But stay, wait a second. In this modern age, the Catholic church still disapproves of the use of condoms and other contraceptive devices and mechanisms. And Abbott is a devout Catholic of the Pellist heresy kind. WTF!

And if the Devine thinks she's doing Abbott a favor by reviving the abortion issue, she should take a deep breath.

First she presents him as being unobjectionable and never supporting any move to recriminalise abortion or stigmatise women. Next she drags in the "ostentatiously Anglican" Kevin Rudd, then she runs with the line of 100,000 abortions a year as being this generation's legacy of unutterable shame, and then she starts to peddle the line that really there might be a good case for a change in policy, since we currently live in a totalitarian state:

This led to protesters hurling themselves at him, wearing T-shirts with slogans such as ''Get your rosaries off my ovaries''. But he was echoing the feelings of many people, whose opinions have been suppressed as successfully as in any totalitarian state.

Polls have found Australian support of abortion on demand vacillating between about 53 and 61 per cent for 20 years, according to the 2007 Australian Election Study by Australian National University and Deakin University researchers.

Uh huh. Just as in the case of 'at fault divorce', talk to younger possums, and they have no memories of the old days, of coat hangers and evil substances, of backyard aunts, or furtive 'midwives', or of trips to Sydney to have a baby and foster it out, a social disappearing and shunning which led to profound sadness (as in the case of an illegitimate member of my family who was only ever spoken to or recognised by my mother, and who lived a life of deep rejection and sadness).

I always recommend a viewing of Vera Drake, by Mike Leigh, to see the consequences of Christian/Catholic social policy in action. Most young possums reel away, incapable of comprehending the story or the fate of Vera. Pray to the lord that we never return to that kind of deeply offensive nonsense. But if you're Miranda the Devine, drill down deep, and you might find there are grounds for a debate:

But drill down and attitudes are more nuanced. A 2006 poll commissioned by the Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations found, similarly, that 60 per cent of Australians support abortion on demand. But it found just 39 per cent support abortion for financial or social (non-medical) reasons; just 20 per cent agree with partial birth abortion; 54 per cent believe abortion involves the taking of a human life; and 57 per cent believe a 20-week old foetus is a person with human rights.

And, reflecting the change Abbott introduced as health minister, to fund a pregnancy support national phone counselling service, 95 per cent of those polled agreed women should receive free independent counselling before abortion.

The extremist viewpoint is not Abbott's but that of abortion fundamentalists posing as feminists who are his most strident critics.

Free independent counselling from a mad as march hare, baying at the moon Christian Catholic counsellor, just as welfare has been farmed out to the religious sector, and chaplains introduced in to schools to warn children of the madness masturbation can induce.

Well I'm sorry, but the extremist viewpoint is that of Abbott and the Catholic anti-abortion fundamentalists posing as humanitarians who are the most strident critics of women and their right to control their bodies. And as Abbott himself might say, with his vigorous manly language, they can get fucked, and so can the horses on which they rode in on.

But keep the debate on abortion going. The more Abbott gets tagged as a dinosaur and a lickspittle lackey in relation to women's issues, the more the likes of the Devine will help him sink into a morass of controversy, involving the old fashioned Pellist heresies and conservative Catholic values. It's bad enough having Chairman Rudd at the helm, just imagine the ghost of Pell manipulating the goose Abbott.

Oh and so on you go, women journalists across the country:

Women journalists across the country railed to each other that Abbott was ''the devil''. The female twitterverse was almost universally condemnatory. The former Cleo editor Mia Freedman's attitude was typical: ''Oh, Tony Abbott also anti-IVF,'' she tweeted. ''Seems like his Speedos are the least reprehensible of his crimes against women.''

The ex-Dolly editor Marina Go tweeted: ''I would rather eat my first born than vote for Abbott … what concerns me most [is] his anti-free choice views … [Tweetfems are] outraged that a man with Abbott's beliefs could possibly head up a major political party in Australia in 2009.''

The Devine desperately and comically tries to scrub the numbers clean. After all, Abbott has three daughters, a wife, two sisters, and surprise of surprises, a mother (who knows, perhaps she thought he came about as the result of a virgin birth via a camel). So surely there's no problem with his 'blokeish, confrontational style'.

... as Abbott pointed out to Grimshaw, polls shows his women problem is a myth. ''The last poll showed me somewhat more popular among women than men,'' he said. ''People will make judgments based on what they see now, not some caricature they heard some years ago.''

A Newspoll taken last week shows, while Abbott's overall popularity is low compared with Joe Hockey, there is no significant gender gap: Abbott had a 19 per cent following among women, and 18 per cent among men.

Yep, never mind that the 'at fault' caricature was just six months ago, they done went and appointed the third and least popular politician to head the Liberal party. Never mind that, women just love Abbott:

... when it came down to a choice between Abbott and his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, whose appeal to women went unquestioned, guess who was the clear front runner, especially among young females? Abbott was more popular with women at 41 per cent, compared to Turnbull's 39 per cent. For women aged 18 to 34, Abbott picked up 43 per cent, compared to Turnbull's 35 per cent.

One female Coalition MP, an Abbott fan, said yesterday that support for him in the party room this week was ''gender neutral''. ''Tony's the quintessential Australian bloke … but he's matured a lot. In the end people will judge Tony for his ideas as a conviction politician.''

Matured a lot? In the area of conservative social Catholic values? Younger women have no idea what Abbott is talking about when he tries on ideas like 'at fault divorce', and bashes gay marriage, and opposes stem-cell research, and would love to corral women's bodies and limit abortion.

What to make of the way he reflexively adopts conservative Catholic values on almost any social or sexual issue? Well he's got a big makeover to make, and he's got a problem with women, and not just the sisterhood, whatever that paranoid perception of women en masse might be.

And when Abbott's got the wholehearted backing of the likes of Miranda the Devine, he's got an even bigger problem. (Why even CityKat, deep in the heart of the deep north, is worried - sex and love under Tony Abbott? Forget about it.)

For a start, Abbott's a keen cyclist, and we know what she thinks about them ...

(Below: go on sweet young things. Eat the apple. Uncle Tony has carefully plucked it from the tallest, ripest, most remote branch of certified conservative Catholic values, and guarantees it will turn you into the sweetest, most devoted Stepford wife of all, and he's the fairest in all of Liberal land. Eat of the apple, my child, and all will be well, because Miranda the Devine says so, and you can trust Miranda the Devine ... unless you ride bicycles).