Last night Media Watch went all bleeding heart for the suffering of the lizard Oz's business model … and all the investigative journalism that the country was missing out on, thanks to the shameless pilfering Daily Snail …
Well the pond is no friend of the Snail's, loathsome as it is, doesn't visit, doesn't read and doesn't link to it.
The pond remembers the Snail's glory days …
And so on and on … but pardon the pond if it says "lace" to all that talk of the lizard Oz doing decent investigative journalism, as opposed to pushing out into the world all sorts of crusades, not least climate science denialism, but also a kind of Trumpism down under …along with the incessant crow-like cry of dinkum Oz clean coal oi, oi, oi ...
The pond remembers the Snail's glory days …
And so on and on … but pardon the pond if it says "lace" to all that talk of the lizard Oz doing decent investigative journalism, as opposed to pushing out into the world all sorts of crusades, not least climate science denialism, but also a kind of Trumpism down under …along with the incessant crow-like cry of dinkum Oz clean coal oi, oi, oi ...
Ironically, that Media Watch nonsense followed a report by Four Corners in Melbourne, which astonishingly failed to mention by name the Herald Sun's rabid, fear mongering, demonising, hysterical reporting on such matters …especially given the abundance of front page examples that are available …
Their Murdochian-absolving ABC at work again …
Meanwhile, the pond faced a limited field this day, what with the bromancer pleased to be chums again with China - if he keeps up the good work, the Chinese government might give him a top citizen score and elevate him to the ranks of the trustworthy free to roam under heaven while it becomes ever harder for the discredited to take a single step … (Oh okay, the ABC here).
Instead there's another crusade the reptiles are pushing - in lockstep with angry Sydney Anglicans - and it caught the pond's eye …
Now the pond doesn't pretend to be an expert in this field. Others have paid proper attention to the angry Sydney Anglicans and their weird ways, and the pond can only skim the surface and mention them …
But in a sense even the titles set the scene for the latest crusade …
Weird, or what? Even before the pond could get going, it got distracted.
Is that an heretical, pagan Xmas tree in the background?
Is that an heretical, pagan Xmas tree in the background?
…according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "The use of evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands to symbolize eternal life was a custom of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Hebrews. Tree worship was common among the pagan Europeans and survived their conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian customs of decorating the house and barn with evergreens at the New Year to scare away the devil and of setting up a tree for the birds during Christmas time."
During the Roman mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, houses were decorated with wreaths of evergreen plants, along with other antecedent customs now associated with Christmas.
The modern Christmas tree is frequently traced to the symbolism of trees in pre-Christian winter rites, whereinViking and Saxon worshiped trees. The story of Saint Boniface cutting down Donar's Oak illustrates the pagan practices in 8th century among the Germans... (wiki here).
But enough of levity, the pagan Xmas festival is fast approaching - already the pond feels besieged in the malls by all the surging signs of paganism run riot - so let's get down to the latest angry crusade …
When I was a student at one of Sydney’s Anglican girls’ schools, we were taught in Christian studies and personal development classes that it was fine to be gay – as long as you never had sex with a person of your own gender.
I remember one teacher telling my class about a gay Christian couple she knew who lived together platonically, never sharing a bed or any kind of sexual intimacy. She held them up as an admirable example – a healthy solution to an inconvenient problem.
The same teacher told us that she believed the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was sinful. She had no problem with homosexuals, she assured us, but it just wasn’t right for them to celebrate their sexuality with all that ostentation and glitter.
I finished Year 12 in 2002. This is recent history. It would be heartening to think that in the 16 years since I did the HSC, the school might have reconsidered its approach. But the current principal of the school I attended is one of those who signed a letter to federal MPs urging them to protect exemptions allowing religious schools to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or relationship status.
My school was the kind of place where a girl could pursue any passion that took her fancy. She could act on the stage of an auditorium equipped with state-of-the-art lighting facilities. She could learn to dive in a gleaming aquatic centre. She could play football on one of several sporting fields. She could join the debating team. She could edit the school newspaper. I’m grateful for my education and its many privileges. I’m grateful for the early lessons in feminism from a school that taught me girls can do anything.
Except, of course, have sex with the wrong kind of people, in the wrong sort of circumstances. Even for girls who liked boys, like me, the lessons about sex could be confusing and, frankly, damaging. Nice girls don’t, they told us. Not unless they’re married. It was easy to conclude that, for women at least, there was something shameful, something grubby about sex...
Now contrary to what some might think, the pond is not an angry atheist.
The pond fancies that it has more in common with Patricia Fox than with Duterte, and thinks what this Australian nun was doing in the Philippines showed more gumption and spine than the pond is ever likely to have (Graudian a typical story here).
The pond also doesn't mind Xians who have read the bible, forgotten all the bigoted, fundamentalist tosh in the old testament apart from the poetry and the story-telling (did they realise there was a Hollywood in their dreaming?) and taken from Christ the notion that he was a tolerant socialist with an attitude problem towards establishment figures such as angry intolerant Sydney Anglicans?
Never mind. where there's a Pope there's sure to be a Rowe …
During the Roman mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, houses were decorated with wreaths of evergreen plants, along with other antecedent customs now associated with Christmas.
The modern Christmas tree is frequently traced to the symbolism of trees in pre-Christian winter rites, whereinViking and Saxon worshiped trees. The story of Saint Boniface cutting down Donar's Oak illustrates the pagan practices in 8th century among the Germans... (wiki here).
But enough of levity, the pagan Xmas festival is fast approaching - already the pond feels besieged in the malls by all the surging signs of paganism run riot - so let's get down to the latest angry crusade …
Now around this point, the pond must head off to a memoir by Louise Schwartzkoff, published by the Fairfaxians a few days ago in relation to the current fuss (the full piece is here) …
I remember one teacher telling my class about a gay Christian couple she knew who lived together platonically, never sharing a bed or any kind of sexual intimacy. She held them up as an admirable example – a healthy solution to an inconvenient problem.
The same teacher told us that she believed the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was sinful. She had no problem with homosexuals, she assured us, but it just wasn’t right for them to celebrate their sexuality with all that ostentation and glitter.
I finished Year 12 in 2002. This is recent history. It would be heartening to think that in the 16 years since I did the HSC, the school might have reconsidered its approach. But the current principal of the school I attended is one of those who signed a letter to federal MPs urging them to protect exemptions allowing religious schools to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or relationship status.
My school was the kind of place where a girl could pursue any passion that took her fancy. She could act on the stage of an auditorium equipped with state-of-the-art lighting facilities. She could learn to dive in a gleaming aquatic centre. She could play football on one of several sporting fields. She could join the debating team. She could edit the school newspaper. I’m grateful for my education and its many privileges. I’m grateful for the early lessons in feminism from a school that taught me girls can do anything.
Except, of course, have sex with the wrong kind of people, in the wrong sort of circumstances. Even for girls who liked boys, like me, the lessons about sex could be confusing and, frankly, damaging. Nice girls don’t, they told us. Not unless they’re married. It was easy to conclude that, for women at least, there was something shameful, something grubby about sex...
Schwartzkoff ended this way …
...It’s hard to imagine the damage those lessons must have done to the girls who were yearning for other girls. It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to call it child abuse. The reason it was wrong to love another woman, we were told, was that sex outside marriage was a sin. And you couldn’t marry another woman, could you? That excuse doesn’t exist any more. And yet here we are, with the heads of 34 Anglican schools in NSW fighting to protect the values that make it OK to tell a 16-year-old they can never experience true intimacy with a lover.
The principals’ letter says there is little evidence of faith-based schools expelling gay students or sacking gay teachers. But there are more insidious kinds of discrimination. The homophobia behind this demand for the protection of religious freedom must surely seep into classrooms – as it did when I was at school. The principals rightly point out that a teacher delivers more than academic content – that they are mentors who help shape young minds and hearts. They must take care not to fill them with poison.
...It’s hard to imagine the damage those lessons must have done to the girls who were yearning for other girls. It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to call it child abuse. The reason it was wrong to love another woman, we were told, was that sex outside marriage was a sin. And you couldn’t marry another woman, could you? That excuse doesn’t exist any more. And yet here we are, with the heads of 34 Anglican schools in NSW fighting to protect the values that make it OK to tell a 16-year-old they can never experience true intimacy with a lover.
The principals’ letter says there is little evidence of faith-based schools expelling gay students or sacking gay teachers. But there are more insidious kinds of discrimination. The homophobia behind this demand for the protection of religious freedom must surely seep into classrooms – as it did when I was at school. The principals rightly point out that a teacher delivers more than academic content – that they are mentors who help shape young minds and hearts. They must take care not to fill them with poison.
Ah, but poison and guilt are grist to the Xian way, so let's have a little more of it ...
Actually what speaks volumes are other recollections … and this time the pond must revert to their ABC here …
Members of Canberra's Anglican community have distanced themselves from a bloc of NSW schools that want to preserve their right to sack gay teachers.
It comes as the ACT Government moves to close any loopholes in local laws which would allow gay teachers and students to be fired or expelled.
But the new legislation would still allow schools to selectively hire based on religious adherence as long as criteria were publicly stated.
Canberra Girls Grammar School (CGGS) acting principal Peter Milligan said the exemptions were effectively irrelevant as they hadn't been used in recent memory.
"The immediate response from our school and our community was that we don't discriminate against students and staff," he said.
"We go back to core values of inclusivity. We go back to forgiveness. We go back to integrity, justice and compassion.
"People might say inclusivity is not a gospel value, but it's a core value for us that came out of the founding values, underpinned by Anglican values."
Mr Milligan said he wouldn't judge the NSW schools pushing for the exemptions to stay in place.
But he has spoken of their contrast with the local Anglican community, which falls under the broader NSW umbrella…
Yes, there's more to read at the link and there is an Anglican world outside the angry Sydney Anglican bubble, but you won't find the angry Oz reptiles spending too much on it … and meanwhile, Media Watch wants the pond to anguish over the reptiles' business model? A model, wherein the fundamentalists and the bigots always get first call, and the rest have to settle for the Fairfaxians, the ABC and the Graudian?
We should celebrate and support a rag intent on publishing nonsense about climate science and fair dinkum clean Oz coal oi oi oi on a daily basis?
Around this time the pond felt an urgent need for a return to the real world, perhaps by way of instruction from a Pope the pond follows religiously …
By golly, the pond knew it … ScoMo is actually Krusty the Klown in disguise, and it was up to the Pope to produce that Revelation, with more revelations here …
Oh dear, too much of the real world, a dangerously politically incorrect cartoon, with hints of "lace", so it's back to the angry Sydney Anglicans ...
Around this time the pond has to revert to another piece that appeared at their ABC, this one by Matilda Dixon-Smith, available in full here …
This past week has been one of the first times in a decade I've overtly considered the Anglican values I learnt at school.
I went to SCEGGS Darlinghurst. I was not religious as a student, and I'm not religious now, but at school we attended chapel once a week and Religious Education classes until Year 10. I also sang in the chapel choir until I left school in 2007.
Head of school Jenny Allum loomed large as an intelligent and righteous figure in my formative years. I remember distinctly her visit to our Year 7 Design and Technology class to explain we did not study Home Economics at SCEGGS because she believed it wasn't the school's job to train young girls as wives.
For the most part, our sojourns into religious practice were nothing like what agents of the Anglican Church have intimated in their controversial letter to MPs.
Thirty-four of Sydney's Anglican schools signed the letter, defending their "right to discriminate" against LGBTQI+ students and teachers. The letter, which is addressed to federal Education Minister Dan Tehan, asks that the schools retain the right to sack gay teachers and expel gay students, following a recent announcement from Prime Minister Scott Morrison that these legal protections for religious schools will be eradicated.
But in the chapel at SCEGGS, Reverend Garry Lee-Lindsay preached, above all, respect, acceptance and love. This is how he interpreted the Bible, and how he encouraged us to interpret it as well...
...My grandfather was an Anglican minister, who served as a chaplain in the RAAF during WWII, and who later taught at Barker College in Sydney for more than 30 years as chaplain and the economics teacher.
Though he died in 1983, before I had the chance to meet him, strains of his Anglican practice have absolutely influenced my life. Barker College, which is also my mother's alma mater, is one of those 34 schools to sign the controversial "right to discriminate" letter.
On the morning news of the Anglican schools' letter broke publicly, emails passed between members of my family about the meaning of "the right to discriminate", and particularly about Barker's involvement in the controversy.
I rang my mother, who attended Barker when her father taught there. She told me that, while she could only speculate about what he would think of the letter, she was "disappointed in the school's position".
"I feel like emailing Barker to tell them how saddened I'm sure my father would've been by it," she said. "For him, religion was all about tolerance and loving each other and accepting people for who they are."
It appears my mother is not the only former Barker student who feels this way. Inundated with correspondence from concerned students, parents and alumni, the Head of Barker College, Phillip Heath, released a letter stating:
"I am sad and dismayed by the grief and anger that has been prompted by my willingness to support the letter from Sydney Anglican Schools. It is clear the letter has been perceived as a message of discrimination and cruelty. Such a message was never intended, and I am truly distressed to see this impact."
It's heartening to see the communities within these schools pushing back against the outright cruelty of the original Anglican schools' letter. No matter what people like Mr Heath say, the message received was one of discrimination — it was in the very specific wording of the letter itself. Only, it wasn't about the schools' retaining the right to discriminate, but the power to discriminate…
...When the schools' letter was released, I quickly searched for Jenny Allum's name on the list of signing principals — and was relieved to see it was not there. SCEGGS was one of few Sydney Anglican schools not to sign.
I was relieved again to read a sound and consoling note from Mrs Allum to the school community.
"I don't want SCEGGS to have any exemption from any Discrimination Act or the Fair Work Act based on our religion," she wrote.
"SCEGGS has always demonstrated an ethos which includes acceptance, respect, love, inclusivity, social justice, equal rights, courage. We will continue to do so."
Now contrary to what some might think, the pond is not an angry atheist.
The pond fancies that it has more in common with Patricia Fox than with Duterte, and thinks what this Australian nun was doing in the Philippines showed more gumption and spine than the pond is ever likely to have (Graudian a typical story here).
The pond also doesn't mind Xians who have read the bible, forgotten all the bigoted, fundamentalist tosh in the old testament apart from the poetry and the story-telling (did they realise there was a Hollywood in their dreaming?) and taken from Christ the notion that he was a tolerant socialist with an attitude problem towards establishment figures such as angry intolerant Sydney Anglicans?
Never mind. where there's a Pope there's sure to be a Rowe …
What is it with ScoMo in singlets? Perhaps punters will find more clues by breakfasting with Rowe here …
And so to a final gobbet of angry Sydney Anglicanism, wherein it seems that the Anglicans finally seem to have come to understand that they kicked yet another own goal with their letter ...
The alumni simply missed the point?
No, they got the bigoted, fundamentalist point, they heard the dog whistle and they cheered the dogs who refused to salivate when the bell rang …
"I don't want SCEGGS to have any exemption from any Discrimination Act or the Fair Work Act based on our religion," she wrote.
"SCEGGS has always demonstrated an ethos which includes acceptance, respect, love, inclusivity, social justice, equal rights, courage. We will continue to do so."
Good on them, good on them for standing up to the fundamentalists, good on them for wanting to treat gay people as human beings in every respect …
And as for the reptiles v. the Daily Snail, who cares. The world would be a better place if both of them disappeared.
Just as the pond finds it hard to get agitated about who might win between Sinclair, Fox News and the Ruddy mob … and luckily for anyone interested, The New Yorker recently did a disturbing profile of Sinclair and the fundamentalist wars that at time of writing was outside the paywall here ...
Good on the US journalists who haven't gone the full reptile Trumpian way … though it must have been tough to work inside the Sinclair cesspit, and then tough to find work outside …
And so a closing thought ... if the reptiles ever get around to balanced, decent investigative journalism -as opposed to recycling far right extremism and Luddite nonsense - the pond might actually pay attention to their blather about their long-suffering business model.
Meanwhile, there's only so much Trumpian climate denialism and far right wing fundamentalism and angry Sydney Anglican religiosity that the pond can tolerate, unless it comes in the form of a Rowe cartoon …
Hmmm. Now Louise Schwartzkoff describes some of her school lessons as "Nice girls don't, they told us. Not unless they're married."
ReplyDeleteNow I presume she thinks that they meant some form of official Christian marriage here. But then, the problem is that "Christian marriage" has only been in existence for a bit less than 2000 years. So what did the human race do for the preceding 198,000 (or maybe 298,000) years of its existence ? Did all of the Neanderthals commit sin just so they could have some Neanderthal babies ? Is that why God killed off the Neanderthals ? And the Denisovans ? And then drowned all the Jews (and everybody else) in Noah's day because they were all committing sins in order to procreate ?
And what about those other stalwarts of "Western civilisation", the Greeks and Romans ? Not a single Christian marriage amongst the lot of them until well into the first millenium CE. Oh, all those 'out of wedlock' sinful offspung. It just doesn't bear thinking about ... which is why Angry Anglicans and their ilk never, ever think about it.
And they don't want us to think about it either, they just want to keep on agitpropping for their "religious privilege" which they love to lyingly call "freedom".
But then Davies butts in: "...a school had the right to employ staff who were committed to the Christian ethos of the school."
But surely it is possible for sinners to be both sinners and true believers ? You know, "the spirit is committed but the flesh is weak". Surely, that's what the whole thing about confession and repentance and redemption is on about ? So such teachers would be excellent at supporting some key aspects of the religion ?
Besides, does God have any say or not ? Surely "He" can simply decide to refuse any unconfessed, unredeemed sinners entrance to heaven ? Isn't that what "He's" been doing all this time ? So what does some little school - itself not guaranteed to be sin free - add to God's judgement ?
Besides, whatever happened to "the untested faith is a weak faith" pronouncement ? Surely religious schools would want all kinds of 'challenging' teachers - LGBTQIA, Muslim, Hindu, and most especially, atheist - so that their pupils will not have to put up with taking away a fragile, coddled faith but will have a strong faith that has faced and overcome challenges.
They don't even believe in their own bullshvt, do they.