Tony Abbott, Cardinal Pell, Donald Duck, and like a virgin, but not for the very first time ...

Well by now everybody throughout the land has rushed off to the newsagents to get their copy of The Australian Women's Weekly and bone up on Tony Abbott's thoughts about sex, along with the usual bumper crop of great recipes involving canned beetroot and pineapple.

Fortunately for the canny, and the online freaks who like their news for free, Abbott decided to lather up the controversy before his interview hit print, by taking to the airwaves on 3AW, thereby pre-empting the Weekly.

In a revealing interview with The Australian Women's Weekly, Mr Abbott said women should try to stick to ''the rules'' when considering sex before marriage.

When they cannot abstain, women should use contraception, the former Catholic seminarian says.

"Look, I was subjected to a one-hour grilling from the editor of the Australian Women's Weekly, I was asked direct questions and I did my best to give an honest answer", Mr Abbott told Radio 3AW today. (here).

Oh dear, broken by the hard-ass editor of the Weekly, and her fiendish Manchurian Candidate North Korean interrogation techniques. How long would he last withholding information relating to vital matters of national security on 24? The job might be too big even for Kiefer Sutherland.

Well it's all rather jolly and inevitably Abbott's past indiscretions, including the son who wasn't a son, and his sideways dragging of his daughters into the debate - will provide bountiful fodder for the commentariat in the weeks to come.

Personally I'm pleased that Abbott is now officially a heretic, at least in the eyes of Cardinal George Pell:

A new book called 'God and Caesar" by Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney is to be published this week. The book deals with a widespread 'heresy' among Catholics which permits approval of contraception and even abortion by way of "primacy of conscience".

Borrowing from Oxford Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Pell calls it the "Donald Duck heresy" referring to the Disney character who "knows it all", and "has an unshakeable conviction of self-righteousness." The self-indulgent duck, explains Pell is well-meaning but "his activity is often disastrous for himself and others."

So too with Catholics who practice and indeed promote a disordered vision of human sexuality, with contraception, abortion and even embryo-destructive research suggests Pell. With claims to "primacy of conscience" they falsely believe themselves in the right, while they thus distort the image of God which the Creator intended to convey in the fruitful sexual union of husband and wife. (here).

Yep, not only a heretic but a self-indulgent, self-righteous disastrous Donald Duck.

On contraception, Mr Abbot said that "the rules are there for a reason", but individuals were not always able to live up to them, and they should "act appropriately in the circumstances''.

"I can't be prescriptive because every situation is different." (here).

Especially his own situation when he was a young 'un with a taste for the flesh.

Oh dear a dissolute relativist and reflexive modernist of the worst European kind, perhaps even a little French.

Which reminds me of a Flann O'Brien joke recounted recently in The New York Review of Books:

In At Swim-Two-Birds, the narrator mentions student societies at his university: "Some were devoted to English letters, some to Irish letters, and some to the study and advancement of the French language" - the final comic circumlocution arising from the inadmissibility of "French letters" the colloquial term for condoms, which were also banned in Ireland.

But not of course getting a feel up from your friendly neighbourhood priest, a skill the Irish Catholic church cultivated for many years while torturing innocent condoms.

Pell himself of course is splendidly anti-condom (Do Condoms Help?) and loves to yammer on - in the manner of a man who's sworn off the act himself - about the joys of having unprotected sex and acting as a baby hatcher within the holy confines of marriage. Well I guess it's always better to do as I say than do as I do, since who amongst us manages to do what they say when they can be doing the voodoo that we all love to do do?

It's all so quaint and far-fetched, and so rooted in a morality that very few contemplate these days - including, one suspects, in his saner moments, Abbott himself - that as a result it's impossible to take seriously.

Of course most adults at some time have woken up the next day wondering at the stranger beside them, and contemplating the hideousness of what passed between them, but that's life and part of the learning experience, not some fatal fall from religious grace, as Abbott himself has shown as he moved from flings to marriage.

Indeed in my limited experience, Catholic boys, especially those who've contemplated life within the church, end up as randy as rats let loose in a cheese factory. You don't have to read Boccaccio to realise that the Catholic church is steeped in rampant sexuality, from the missionary to the deeply perverted, and that Catholics just love the pestle and mortar routine in all sorts of ways, especially as they can rush off to confession and overturn any indiscretions with a few acts of contrition.

But more to the point is Abbott's canny way with virginity and marriage as an economic contract, worthy of Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Virtue Rewarded. In that tedious epic in two long winded volumes, maid servant Pamela spends the first volume luring her master Mr B in to holy matrimony, before she's prepared to hand over the sexual goods, and in the second volume she learns how to adjust to upper-class society and build a successful relationship with the master. Of an exceptionally moral and tedious kind.

Well I guess there are those tedious wretches who will sit in the Pamela camp, and then there are those who will vastly enjoy Henry Fielding more - either via his parody Shamela, or Joseph Andrews, or his joyous Tom Jones.

Sad to say, Abbott is firmly in the Pamela camp, because clearly he likes the notion of 'marrying up' or 'marrying well', which was one of the new ways of social mobility for women back in the eighteenth century. What relevance it should have to a new age where women can work and do their own thing is another matter, but in the old days an equitable marriage - sex for a decent lifestyle - seemed like solid thinking (especially as Anne Hyde was a maid of honour who married up in style, if at first in secret, to the soon to be king James 11).

Pamela spends the first volume brooding about sham marriages until Mr B folds and seals the deal:

... remember, my dear, what the lawyers tell us, That marriage is the highest consideration which the law knows. And this, my sweet bride, has made you mine, and me yours; and you have the best claim in the world to share my fortune with me.

Oh naturally Mr B rabbits on about her education, her genius, her grace, her sweetness of temper, her noble sincerity and a beauty that excels all the ladies he ever did saw - the usual sort of claptrap you get from Catholic boys anxious to get into your pants - so that the deal, the loot, the fortune, the status, and the social climbing, can be dismissed as an incidental blessing:

Where then, my dearest, is the obligation, if not on my side to you? But, to avoid these comparisons, let us talk of nothing henceforth but equality; although, if the riches or your mind, and your unblemished virtue, be set against my fortune, (which is but an accidental good, as I may call it, and all I have to boast of,) the condescension will be yours; and I shall not think I can possibly deserve you, till after your sweet example, my future life shall become nearly as blameless as yours. (you can read the whole tawdry pile of nonsense at Project Gutenberg, here, but be warned, you could lose your modern mind in the process. You could also read Fielding at the same place. Your choice).

Hah! An accidental good fortune! Tell that one to a downstairs maid on the move.

Anyhoo, here's Abbott doing his Pamela schtick:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is standing by his comments that women should try to remain virgins until they are married ...

... "I think all of us should act in ways that value ourselves. I'm trying not to be prescriptive here, I am trying not to be a preacher, but if someone asks my advice I would say don't do anything you will live to regret if you can possibly help it."

Asked to reveal his advice to his daughters, Mr Abbott told Neil Mitchell on 3AW: " They shouldn't give themselves away lightly."

Yep, sex is still a solid economic commodity in the free enterprise mind:

In the interview, Mr Abbott says women's contraceptives have liberated men as much as they have women and warns that unmarried women are being taken advantage of as a result. Asked what advice he gives his own daughters on sex, Mr Abbott says it should be treated as ''a gift''.

Taken advantage of? Oh stay you villain, unhand the fair lady, or it will be at your peril. Because you know, petite women can't possibly enjoy sex, and are still known to faint at the sight of exposed uncovered piano legs, or Tony Abbott in budgie smugglers.

Well of course Julia Gillard - always ready to do a little flirting with Abbott - naturally stuck in her oar:

Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard believes Mr Abbott's comments will leave many females fuming.

"These comments will confirm the worst fears of Australian women about Tony Abbott," Ms Gillard told reporters on Tuesday.

"Australian women don't want to be told what to do by Tony Abbott.

"Australian women want to make their own choices and they don't want to be lectured to by Mr Abbott." (here).

But this is dangerous ground, since she has another albatross around her neck when it comes to preaching sexual freedom for women, and that's Chairman Rudd, who when he isn't going into ecstasy about the sainthood of Mary Mackillop, comes across like a fundamentalist Lutheran preacher of the most pious, anti-Bill Henson kind.

In fact in an octagon match up of piety, it's a hard choice to pick between Abbott, Rudd and Senator Conroy as the most regressive sexually repressive politician in the country, except for the way South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson wins hands down.

Meanwhile, Abbott can dog whistle his conservative tribe, rile up the feminists, get the hippies agitated, while doing the flip flop of a practised thong wearer:

... he insisted he wasn't being prescriptive.

"I'm not trying to be a preacher," the former seminary student told Fairfax Radio Network.

"I'm no one's parish priest. Just because you're leader of the opposition doesn't mean you're kind of counsellor of a nation."

Happily, if we ever get three years of Abbott in power, the decade after his defeat will see the nineteen sixties return with a vengeance. People will want to party and fuck their brains out, a temptation already to hand as people glaze over before the sights and sounds of Chairman Rudd. Throw in a decade of Howard, and we've already done a lot of the hard yards that saw the nation explode after living in the fifties under Robert Menzies.

Before then, we can just settle back, enjoy the roller coaster, and marvel at the wondrous statements of our very own heretic Donald Duck.

Pity about the daughters, having to deal with their dad being a goose, and blathering on about the gift of virginity. But what can they do, knowing they're living with a "lame, gay churchy loser". Pity they think gay is a pejorative term. And a pity they're getting advice from a man who believed in Vatican roulette as a form of contraception. And a pity their views have to get an airing, as in Tony Abbott's daughters knock him off sex 'high horse'.

Poor things. As punishment, they should be made to read Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded from cover to cover.

(Below: and don't forget Donald Duck's advice, and never be without a pro!)