Angela Shanahan, and as usual the Murdoch press is to hand with a handy moral compass ...

(Above: a man in cappa magna frock. We always love men wearing a decent cape).

Naturally the pond was standing by, eagerly awaiting the commentariat to take the high moral ground and, after a few days of reflection and consideration, deliver thunderous denunciations of News Corp, and the corporate values currently on display (we've given up waiting on a denunciation of the corporate values on display in the promotion of Glenn Beck).

How about a withering denunciation of the completely useless UK Press Complaints Commission, and its pathetic report on phone message tapping allegations, a report so irredeemably half-baked, a report so much a part of the cover up that's been going on for years, that the PCC has now deemed it proper to withdraw it?

Talk about dubious moral compasses, and cover ups, and a refusal to explore the truth of matters.

But what do we get? Yep, there's Angela Shanahan blathering on yet again about Politicians' dubious moral compass risks our freedom:

How's this for starters?

Although well meaning, MPs generally have no idea how to debate moral issues and even have trouble distinguishing what one is.

Uh huh. Yet somehow, Shanahan hacking away for the lizard Oz, knows how to debate moral issues, and has no trouble distinguishing them.

Is that because the Catholic church tells her what they are, and what to think?

Sure enough it's the contentious matter of same-sex marriage, climate change, euthanasia, and the Greenies, in particular the chutzpah and sheer front of Bob Brown.

So much for the sheer front and chutzpah of the Murdoch empire. It's as if recent events in New York took place in a vacuum, far removed from the parochial conservative Catholic world Shanahan inhabits.

All the more strange then that same sex marriage became law in the big apple with the approval of conservative Republicans and even some who professed to be Catholics (Behind N.Y. Gay Marriage, an Unlikely Mix of Forces).

Now it turns out that Mayor Bloomberg has offered to preside at one of the first gay marriages to take place (Bloomberg Does Something Giuliani Won't: Perform a Gay Marriage - perhaps Giuliani was upset he couldn't get dressed in a frock to do the gig). And the big apple is busy turning the new law into a tourist trap for the pink dollar ...

Will the sky fall in? Will the moral foundations of western civilisation collapse? Well as Maureen Dowd observed, there were a few contradictions between a church fighting hard to keep itself as a haven for homosexual priests, and those homosexuals who saw a life of married bliss outside the church (The Archbishop vs. the Governor: Gay Sera, Sera).

And Governor Cuomo might cop the usual Latinate ire of the Catholic church - a latae sententiae excommunication - but whether that's for living in sin with his girlfriend, allowing abortions, or helping get the gay marriage law passed might be hard to say (Cuomo's Right to Holy Communion Is a Private Matter, Bishop Says). Perhaps it's an unholy trinity.

But back to Shanahan, who manages to get quite hysterical about the suffering of Christians.

If homosexual relationships are given the same legal status as heterosexual marriages, the homosexual lobby will have gained its final moral and legal triumph and, according to Somerville, that will mean widespread collateral damage of people's rights, perhaps most people's. It will become difficult, if not illegal, to speak out against this.

Institutions and individuals that have moral objections to same-sex marriage (churches, schools, ministers of religion, teachers, civil marriage celebrants, adoption agencies and so on) will have their rights of freedom of speech and association, freedom of conscience, belief and religion, curtailed and possibly eliminated. This has happened in many countries, including Sweden, where speaking out against homosexuality per se has become a hate crime. (If you think it couldn't happen here, think about the general political correctness surrounding homosexual issues, even before gay marriage has become legal.)

Much of this is simply paranoid nonsense, and in the specific case of New York quite untrue, with Republicans carefully crafting exemptions for institutions and individuals not wanting to be involved in gay marriage. And no law has managed to stop Christians, and that deviant cult Catholicism from reviling, demeaning and defaming homosexuals and homosexuality these past few thousand years. And if you actually read about events in Sweden, LGBT rights in Sweden, why it's better than smelling salts for relieving a swoon.

Naturally, being metaphysically related to Helen Lovejoy, Shanahan plays the 'won't someone think of the children' card:

For all the "rights talk" around gay marriage, it seems that only the emotional arguments based on adult perceptions of a private relationship get an airing. When gay marriage is finally debated, be prepared for an avalanche of emotive testimony from long-term gay partners, their mums and dads, siblings and kids. It will make La Cage aux Folles look like a Quaker meeting. However, no matter how sympathetic one may be to formal legal protection for gay domestic partnerships, homosexuals are precluded from marriage because of the relationship itself.

As usual, the bile bubbles away beneath the surface, in the form of the snide joke about Cage aux Folles looking like a Quaker meeting, when we all know that the Catholic church's penchant for outrageously camp clothing makes it look like Cage aux Folles on tour. Hey that gives us another chance to show more men in frocks:

(And more here, with snaps of an ecclesiastical fashion show, along with Matthew 23 saying of the scribes and the Pharisees sitting in Moses' seat: they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments, and love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues...)

Hang on, back to the collapse of western civilisation as we know it:

Marriage exists as a social institution only to protect the children born of the union and give special legal status to the natural family, and homosexual relationships cannot produce children. By abolishing the exclusively heterosexual nature of marriage, the special legal status of the natural family will collapse. Children will suffer and, as Somerville stresses, that includes children conceived, naturally or by biotech connivance, within a same-sex relationship because it deprives them of a father or a mother.

The Somerville in question? Is that the same Margaret Somerville who copped a serve from Judge Robert Hanson, who ...

... rejected the expert testimony of Dr. Somerville and stated that her testimony would be inadmissible at trial, on the basis that her opinions were "not based on observation supported by scientific methodology or... on empirical research in any sense."

Oh sure, it got turned over on appeal, but I do like that Judge Hanson.

Somerville has come over to save Australia at the behest of Sydney-based Ambrose Centre for Religious Liberty, a proudly independent body which somehow manages to have Archbishop Peter Jensen, Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop Barry Hickey, and a couple of heavyweight Rabbis on its board of advisors. Oy vey, now that's what we call a like-minded group of proudly independent thinkers ...

Somerville's completely scientific take on this?

... according to Somerville, that will mean widespread collateral damage of people's rights, perhaps most people's. It will become difficult, if not illegal, to speak out against this.

Fear mongering at its finest.

As for Shanahan's own scientific take? Well of course the carbon tax is going to cause the collapse, willy nilly, of the entire Australian economy, electorate by electorate, so a few people mightn't realise they need to sweat over gay marriage:

Nevertheless, that won't stop the Greens (who are of course keen to see the live cattle trade or the coal industry collapse) from their quest to override the status quo and fundamentally change the meaning of marriage, and all that flows from it, by putting up falsely emotive arguments for homosexual marriage - and indeed climate change. Put that way, perhaps it is easy to see how Brown can be seen as the master of distraction.

Yes, yes, climate change and homosexual marriage are so similar, they deserve to be raised and despatched in the same sentence.

And once again the Greens are demonised in the pages of The Australian, never mind that Republicans got same-sex marriage over the line in New York, and Catholic countries like Portugal and Spain, and even so help me, mother Maria, in Mexico City (same-sex marriage wiki).

Here at the pond of course we're pro-marriage in the way Donald Trump (third), Rush Limbaugh (fourth) and Newt Gingrinch (third) are - and let's not try to count the affairs.

We like it so much we can't seem to stop doing it. No wonder Newt said that gays muddle marriage, they probably helped him muddle his own many muddles.

Yes, it's time to bring back 'no divorce', hefty guilt clauses, put women behind the veil, and maybe introduce the lash for adultery, and let's hope Shanahan and The Australian are on hand to sort out the world with their handy moral compass.

Meanwhile, should any stray conservative have lasted this long, the pond now offers the fiendish torture of a song from Oy Vey! My Son Is Gay!, which amazingly, according to its wiki, was on the short list for Oscar nomination for Best Original Song in 2009. It'll stop playing once you say 'oh yes, gay marriage, gay marriage I love it, I'll do anything, disavow Angela Shanahan, anything at all, just make the music stop.'

Take it away Lulu. Yes, that Lulu, what a trooper. Or should that be trouper?