Miranda Devine and Piers Akerman banging on like dunny doors in a London gale ...

(Above: a tear sheet of silliness, as sourced from Crikey, with links below).

It's been awhile since we've dropped in on the conflated silliness and assorted sundry stupidities of Miranda the Devine, and I guess that's for a reason.

Why risk madness on a Sunday, when it's a routine part of the diet most days of the week.

Truth to tell, Piers "Akker Dakker" Akerman is even more indigestible, and you can give yourself stomach ache just by reading Welfare creates a poverty of values.

Akker Dakker somehow manages to drag Coonabarabran, Noel Pearson and Cape York into his tirade against welfarism in the UK, and one wishes he'd head off to generate some real wealth for the country, instead of producing loads of hot air, blather, and enough carbon to change the climate of the planet irrevocably.

Akerman doing the hard yards as a council worker or in an abattoir? You've got to be dreaming, he's just on a Rupert Murdoch pension ...

As for a poverty of values, his relentless right wing, wrong end of the telescope, absolute lack of balance or clarity is an exemplar for modern-day poverty of values in the newspaper commentariat...

But really, Akker Dakker's small beer, bee in bonnet, coins rattling around in an addled head, up against Miranda the Devine's effort in Pregnancy of Penny Wong's female partner no cause for mass celebration, wherein she manages to conflate Wong and same sex marriage with the London riots.

The first step is to present herself as a victim, Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby style:

The issue is presented as an inevitability linked, illogically, to tolerance for gay people. Opponents are homophobic, intolerant, backward, evil bigots, not people of good will who are entitled, whether on religious grounds or otherwise, to believe that marriage, as the institution best served to protect children, should remain between a man and a woman.

Uh huh. Well yes, but surely there's some other point to make, apart from demonstrating Catholic bigotry?

Why yes, the Devine wants to prove she has absolutely no sense of humor while being up with the latest trends, and so comes out with this:

There's even mounting pressure on the makers of Sesame Street to have Bert and Ernie get married and become gay exemplars.

This is right up there with Robyn Wuth being exceptionally silly up on the Gold Coast with Keep adults off the street (and good enough to score her an honorable mention gong in Crikey).

As a result of all this fuss, Sesame Street has felt the need to produce a disclaimer:

"Bert and Ernie are best friends," the Workshop statement said. "They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.

What? Different? Wash out your mouth with soap. As we all know from our Catholic catechism, different is evil.

Okay, how solemn, how utterly lacking in a sensahuma can we get?

"Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation." (No wedding bells for Bert and Ernie).

Don't you just love the™ but sssh, whatever you do, don't mention the puppets in Avenue Q, and the hit song If You Were Gay ...

Puppets who talk about sex? Oh noes ...

Back to the Devine. You might still be wondering how we can get from gay marriage, via Bert and Ernie, to the riots in London? Wonder no more, or perhaps wonder in admiration at the dexterity of the Devine's linkages:

Maybe same-sex marriage is as inevitable as its energetic proponents say, but it would be a pyrrhic victory if it were achieved through intimidation of opponents.

As a Catholic, I believe the push for same-sex marriage is not about enhancing the lives of gay couples. In countries where it has been legalised, there has been no rush to the altar.

The issue is largely symbolic. It is simply a political tool to undermine the last bastion of bourgeois morality - the traditional nuclear family.

You only had to see the burning streets of London last week to see the manifestation of a fatherless society.

There, done and dusted in an epic piece of conflated stupidity.

Then it's on to the fatherless children as the root cause of the riots, along with irresponsibility, and the welfare state, and without any awareness of any kind of historical perspective on riots in the UK (for that, you'd be better off reading Bernard Keane's Back to the future with Cameron's digital Riot Act).

Of course when you're being a mealy mouthed, offensively personal and abusive Catholic commentator you sometimes have to wave your hands apologetically:

Marriage is not just a private relationship: it is a social good. Collectively, the erosion of the institution of marriage, and the relegating of fathers to the sidelines, is destructive to society.

And, obviously, that does not mean that all fatherless households are bad for children.

Wong and her partner, Sophie Allouache, will no doubt be fine mothers, with the financial and personal competence to provide their child a stable, loving upbringing, despite not having a father in the home - though Wong says he will be "known" to the child.

Phew, that's a relief. It seems Wong and her partner might not be directly responsible for the fatherless society in the UK, or even the London riots or perhaps even that some of the rioters might actually come from heterosexual marriages with the father present (but we know about Wong's role in the welfare state, don't we, damned socialist ...)

So we can afford to be generous:

Individually, these things work themselves out. Allowances are made, extra effort applied. Love conquers all.

Individually. But that's not being part of the Catholic collective.

And so love doesn't conquer all, and allowances can't be made, and no extra effort applied, and so the Devine can never hit a grace note, not even when she tries.

So it's on to the final, grudging sour sentence in the column, an echo of earlier parts of the column where the Devine takes exception to some people congratulating the pair for having a child, and wishing they might be able to get married, instead of raising a bastard (not that we care too much about that old-fashioned term, being surrounded by jolly fine bastards, and refusing to give in to the sanctamonious bastardry of the Catholic church using the possibility of raising bastards as a reason to get married).

Yep, even though the Devine is forced to scribble the line Wong, to her credit, has not politicised her private life, the last line from the lemony Devine is:

But for Wong's decision to be praised - as if it is the loftiest of ideals - is wrong.

Uh huh. To have and nurture and celebrate a child, with love, isn't the loftiest of ideals, especially if it's destined to be a bastard outside the church and a fatherless child of the kind that's led to the London riots.

But hang on, if the problem is two women having a child together, and the next thing you know, there's the fatherless society and the London riots, surely there's an entirely dandy solution to hand.

Two fathers! Yep, you get one dad, and then you get another as a bonus.

Could it be that the only way to avoid rioting in London is to have gay marriage with a father-full society, and male gays doing the hard yards by accepting that fatherhood is their mission in life?

Remember how Bart Simpson got Homer to pay attention in Brother from the Same Planet by getting a new chum?

"You've been flouncing around with that floozy of a bigger brother of yours, haven't you? Haven't you!"

The pond, in its usual mathematical way, has devised a formula for this social insight:

M2 = no riots (™ )

Well it's no more stupid an idea than the fatuous, offensive absurdities of Miranda the Devine, conflating heterosexual lifestyles with the dangers of gay marriage...

One thing's for sure. If gay marriage gets introduced, and two father families take off, and there are riots in country, you can bet London to a rioter's brick that the Devine will produce a piece explaining how a motherless society produced the riots ...

(Below: okay Bert and Ernie, time to throw away that rubber duckie and have a baby together. It's the only way forward to produce a dad-full society and save London from the next round of riots).


Or maybe: