The pond is always up for a history lesson ... but what if it conflicts with a legal lesson?
Oh dear, that legal affairs lesson sounds more like a Christian revival crusade, so perhaps the pond should start with the history lesson ...
Well yes, that's all fine and well, but that mention of the Australian Christian Lobby reminds the pond of the legal lesson we put on hold, though perhaps it's more a religious lesson ...
Can we put that question about 'those views' on hold so we can get down with the lawyering? Or crusading, if you will ...
Uh huh. Oh dear. Lawdy, lawdy ...
There's going to be a lot more stuff like this should Malware actually manage to get his plebiscite up ... all that prima facie relevance and countervailing rights and verbatims and enlivenings and curtailings and pertaining to retrospectivity and so forth and etc, when it might all be summarised as "won't someone forget the gays and think of the long suffering Xians ..."
Back to the history lesson...
Public opinion? That sounds dangerously populist. What we need is a good Xian lawyer ...
There's going to be a lot more of this dissembling religious gibberish dressed up in legalese that's going to do the rounds in the next few months if the plebiscite manages to get up.
Why does the pond call it gibberish?
How else to describe lines like "the historical propensity of religious conviction to challenge state totalitarianism..."
It would simply be too tedious to indulge in yet another history lesson wherein it might be demonstrated that this statement is so tendentious it heads over the mountains into the valley of meaninglessness ...
More to the point, wouldn't it have been more honest of Mr Fowler to acknowledge his bias and his patently obvious prejudice?
And the reptiles doing the same? What's that disclaimer about the QLS got to do with the nub of it?
It wouldn't have taken much for the reptiles and Mr Fowler to put in more relevant information and references. Mr Fowler is a busy lawyer and is all over the intertubes and other sites are quite happy to note his role in certain groups ...
Oh goody goody gumshoes, that makes it all a little CLEARer ...
And so to a Wilcox cartoon and the pond beginning to feel like it's being swamped ... and by the way as well as the usual Fairfax homes, Wilcox has a wiki here ...
Love the Wilcox cartoon. Those swampies really don't know how to fit in with the modern Australian way of life do they? What happened to them to make them such dysfunctional people I wonder.
ReplyDeleteYour damn right about that one DP, as you very often are,..... on many of the daily trials and tribulations of journalist knob-ends.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/16/chris-mitchells-massive-marxist-memory-lapse-youve-made-a-mate-i-could-have-put-you-right
Based on everything I've heard of it, this book should be titled "Chris Mitchell - FIGJAM !".
DeleteI wonder if Mitchell's News contract has a clause requiring the company to purchase a couple of thousand copies of his book? It's difficult to imagine anyone in their right mind actually purchasing the thing.
In the interests of full and frank disclosure, I am a lawyer.
ReplyDeleteSo if I understand Mr Fowler's furious hand-wringing exercise correctly, he is trying to say that same-sex marriage will, somehow, impinge on the religious freedom of priests who don't believe in same-sex marriage.
Apparently, he is unaware that priests can refuse to marry anyone, regardless of their sexual orientation. Indeed, some 'traditional' Catholic priests will refuse to marry anyone who does attend their church.
In that event, the loved up couple simply find a priest who will. Not hard to do. From personal experience, a little cash goes a long way.
The rest of that waffle about international human rights is utterly pointless. Just because there is no right to same sex marriage enshrined in some UN charter or whatever, that does not mean a sovereign nation cannot legislate to allow it.
It reminds of me a wonderful line from a former Supreme Court Judge of the Wild West:
“The insuperable difficulty in the way of the applicants is that their arguments are baseless and the theories of law they advance are wrong.”
"....[t]herefore there is a question...."
DeleteIn the interests of full disclosure Anon, the pond has only ever quoted Shakespeare on lawyers at a party while shockingly drunk ...on sober days we do appreciate a legal mind, especially one that can dig up that judge from the wild west and his immortal line ... and yes, the priest in the pond's family always enjoys a little cash in the paw ...
DeleteI find the framing of either side of the debate interesting - the left's "marriage equality" -v- the right's "same-sex marriage".
ReplyDeleteAfter all the if's - if a plebiscite and if it gets up and if a bill is tabled, and so on - it occurs to me that if a same-sex marriage bill was passed, it would still not achieve marriage equality for all. I'm thinking of intersex people, who, in a number of jurisdictions are legally neither a man nor a woman. The sex reported on their birth certificate may be "indeterminate" or "X" or such like.
I'll be interested to see whether "Man + Woman" will receive the minimal extension of "or Man + Man or Woman + Woman", or all same sex couples (ie including "X + X"), or whether it will be framed as the Irish did their referendum - " two persons without distinction as to their sex". That seems ideal to me, since it covers all combinations, but every step-forward will be a "die in a ditch" fight with the fanatics. Nevertheless, I have a high degree of faith the coalition will do the right thing, if they have absolutely no other option open to them.
But still, what about polygamy...I can't really see why the law should prevent multiple consenting adults being party to a single contract only in this particular case? I foresee years of Fowler's sort of tendentious drivel ahead, between the nailing and washing of teeth from the Shelton's and ilk.