The great tradition of religious tolerance in Catholic parochial schools in New South Wales is under fire. Many thousands of children of all faiths have been educated in a system often chosen by parents due to a complex perception of superior education outcomes rather than as a response to the promulgation of faith within the schools, and many non-Catholics and non-Christians remember their time at a Catholic school very fondly. But from now on such experiences may be fewer and further between than in previous generations.
Cardinal George Pell and NSW Bishops have sent out a pastoral letter which bemoans the trend for more non-Catholics to attend Catholic schools and for more Catholics to send their children to public schools, and announces methods which the hierarchy wishes to implement to reverse these trends – a four way selection process giving preference first to children from the school’s local parish, then to Catholics from other parishes, then to other Christians and finally children from other religions. They also plan to move into preschool education in order to “foster the spiritual development” of younger children, which would at least be a welcome addition to the chronically short supply of pre-school places. The Cardinal and Bishops also want recruitment of staff to favour more practising Catholics and to actively encourage the school population to participate in Catholic events outside the school.
Here’s the doozy – acknowledgement that they actually considered barring non-Catholics altogether:
The Church will not ban non-Catholic students from enrolment – it says it considered, but rejected, plans for a formal “downsizing to accommodate only those who are committed to the faith”.
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: culture wars, education, religion
August 6, 2007 • 11:30 am
An attack has been made on the Australian media from the front page of Life Decisions International (LDI), whose domain name is the far more accurate fightpp.org (PP being the USA’s Planned Parenthood, the family planning organisation that offers comprehensive sex education and pregnancy services including abortion for those who choose it). The LDI are upset that somebody noticed an association between them and serial ministerial bungler Kevin Andrews.
Australian Media Shows No Regard For The Truth
It is not unusual for pro-abortion activists to use their allies in the media to attack pro-life leaders and lawmakers. But some in the Australian media are taking the practice to a whole new level. LDI has issued a response to an attack on an Australian lawmaker.
When we go to the response, the target of our media’s attack is made more explicit (the weird hyphenation of some words is in the original):
Australia Media Shows No Regard For Truth In Attack On Pro-Life Minister
8.6.2007
WASHINGTON, D.C.–It’s nothing new. Pro-abortion activ-ists work with their allies in the media to attack pro-life leaders and lawmakers. The most recent vociferous attack is against the Honorable Kevin Andrews, a Member of the Australian Parliament and Minister for Immigration and Citizenship.
“It is obvious that some pro-abortion zealot was in the United States or was searching the Internet in an effort to find something that could be used to attack Mr. Andrews,” said Douglas R. Scott, president of Life Decisions Interna-tional (LDI). “They eventually discovered that Mr. Andrews and his wife, Margaret, are members of our Board of Advi-sors. To pro-abortion activists, one may as well be a mem-ber of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Politics, culture wars, ethics, religion, sexuality
August 5, 2007 • 10:21 am
Politicians around the world are gingerly using YouTube to make policy statements, or maybe just to get their soundbites out there while avoiding having to have a press conference.
Now some Catholic seminarians have parodied the Mac vs PC ads (which I already loathed anyway) to convey the Vatican’s doctrine on Natural Family Planning vs Contraception.
They’ve got three videos up now, with more planned.
Now I disagree with the practicality of Natural Family Planning, although I applaud much of the sentiment: avoiding excessive chemical intervention with bodily functions, increased communication and intimacy between partners about avoiding unplanned pregnancies etc. Increased communication about sex before it actually happens can only be a good thing.
Unfortunately, NFP requires abstention during ovulation, which is the woman’s peak time of sexual desire, thus NFP involves a lifetime of women acquiescing to sex outside their peak period of desire and being forbidden from other forms of attaining orgasm during the peak period of sexual desire. Sounds like a recipe for frustration and resentment for me.
I notice that these videos simply don’t mention at all that NFP works (as far as it does work) only for people who are in monogamous committed relationships, which of course to the Church means marriage. So they’re simply not addressing the rather large population of adults who are not yet married but who are interested in sexual intercourse anyway. The unsaid only option for unmarried adults is abstinence. I’m not surprised that they’re not addressing that.
Anyway, it’s a very interesting exercise in propogating a set of policy soundbites. I await the replies that will surely multiply in the next few weeks with great interest. I also wonder when various lobbying groups on various social issues are going to fully embrace the viral aspect of YouTube etc for getting their soundbites more effectively out into the social consciousness. Let’s face it – I’m blogging about the videos above because they were put together with a modicum of wit about a controversial issue. Other people will do the same. If other groups do similiar things, those videos will be viraled and generate discussion. Get your issues out there, folks.
crossposted at LP
Filed under: Media, activism/charity, culture wars, netgeek, performance, religion, reproductive freedoms, technology
“Oh, the civility!” is of course the catchcry of pearlclutchers everywhere, especially on that subset of socially-conservative blogs where a bit of cussing is viewed as inherently and self-evidently an order of magnitude more offensive than calling someone a pervert or a traitor.
Here’s a couple of comments from another blog which point out just how much this “civility” standard is rank hypocrisy, which cuts right to the heart of our Civility Guidelines here at Hoyden About Town.
Rheinhard:
Consider 2 pieces of writing:
1. A lengthy screed written by lawyers and statisticians explaining, with numerous polysyllabic phrases and data extrapolations galore, the benefits that would accrue to the national discourse, the economy, and morality in general should the polity choose to put all of the citizenry who happen to be of Jewish extraction into cleansing facilities (which, it is explained in a technical footnote, will contain only the most humane and sanitary of gas chambers and crematoria)
or
2. A short flyer posted on lamposts telling the Nazi Punks to F**K Off.
Which set of writers would you prefer to dine with?
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: blogging, conservatism, culture wars, ethics, moral panics, peeves
From The Australian (!):
THE key plank of a controversial British documentary has been discredited by new research showing that the sun is not causing global warming.
The findings are in stark contrast to claims made in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which is to be shown on ABC television on Thursday.
The program dismisses the widely held conclusion that greenhouse gases from human activity are driving global warming, instead claiming that changes in solar activity have triggered recent warming.
“Manmade global warming is unmitigated nonsense,” the program’s writer and director, Martin Durkin, wrote in last Saturday’s The Weekend Australian.
But solar physicists at Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Southampton, along with colleague Claus Froehlich of the World Radiation Centre in Dorf, Switzerland, have found that while solar activity may have played a role in climate change in the first half of the last century, it is not driving the recent rapid warming.
Their conclusion was based on a study of all the available solar data for the past 100 years.
They found no correlation between total solar radiation, the number of sun spots or cosmic ray intensity and global warming since 1985.
“Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability,” they will report this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
Filed under: Science, culture wars
On a day dominated by the media attempting to beat up a story about NSW Premier Morris Iemma taking time off to spend the school holidays with his young children, another story got hardly any traction. Both stories tie into Guest Hoyden Helen’s post from last week on the “Real World” of time-management around school holidays not being perceived as a male i.e. “real” issue.
Call for curbs on unsocial work hours
ALL fathers should receive two weeks’ paid paternity leave, and unsocial work hours should be restricted to preserve family life, a group of academics says.
Increased retention rates and lower absenteeism would be just two of the benefits to employers, while for employees it would mean more control over their work arrangements and being able to accommodate family and caring responsibilities, they said. The Benchmarks for Work and Family Policies report, taken from the latest Australian and international research, pushes against the trend towards excessive work hours.
Of course, it’s exactly those excessive work hours that Mr Iemma is being slammed for not performing, the accusation that “he lacks the commitment to lead NSW” being made most forcefully by Liberal leaders former ex-Premier of NSW Nick Greiner and ex-Federal Opposition Leader John Hewson, with fellow Liberal ex-Premier of Victoria Jeff Kennett reported as joining this criticism even though the only quotes from Kennett that I can find sound wistful about his own failure to spend the time with his own family that Iemma is insisting upon, noting that Kennett’s wife actually left him for six months because he was failing to share family duties, before getting onto the obligatory denunciation of NSW as a “basket case”.
Another Liberal ex-leader in NSW, former Opposition Leader Kerry Chikarovski, sounded reluctantly yet staunchly supportive of Iemma’s prioritisation of his family, Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Media, culture wars, family
That’s Eryn Loeb’s title for her Bookslut review of two recent feminist primers: Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters and Megan Seely’s Fight Like a Girl: How to be a Fearless Feminist. Loeb details the strengths and weaknesses of both works, and questions both the clarity of the stated authorial intent in the first place and the effectiveness of such books in advancing feminism.
I wonder, too, if people are really likely to find feminism through a book whose agenda is plastered across its cover. It tends to be a more slippery process, without one clear entry point. Feminism is at its best when its politics have some room to breathe… its best expressions are books and music and movies and ideas that live in the world, rather than trying to explicate it directly. That’s why so many people embody feminist politics without recognizing them as such. A lack of specific identification with feminism is not what’s holding back the movement.
I’m not sure that I agree entirely with the final sentence above, although I was nodding assent all the way through the rest of the paragraph. Primers are useful for those who are already half-persuaded that feminism is worthwhile, as they help to shape a coherent perception of the bigger picture, but do they persuade anyone utterly unaligned? And if the lack of a specific identification with feminism arguably is what’s holding back the movement, are feminist primers actually the best way to persuade women to identify and advocate for the feminist movement?
I have no cavils with Loeb’s concluding paragraph however.
It’s time for us to demand more of feminist books. Sure, let’s recognize their authors for giving it a shot. With that gesture out of the way, let’s get real. Good intentions aren’t enough to make for a convincing argument, a useful resource, or even just a good book. Feminism has come far enough for us to stop worrying about hurting it with our criticism. We have to take ourselves seriously enough to hold feminist work to task.
Filed under: culture wars
Sue Dunlevy writes an excellent column today on the legacy of Senator Brian Harradine, who held the balance of power in the Australian Senate for long enough to drag our foreign aid policy into a position whereby, Dunlevy argues, we actively perpetuate poverty through being forbidden to provide family planning services as part of foreign aid programs.
Harradine left parliament in 2004 and the Howard Government now controls the Senate in its own right, but Harradine’s legacy lives on. A pity that can’t be said for scores of women worldwide, some 186 of whom die every day – according to one estimate – from unsafe abortions.
Edited to add: I missed the story last week whereby Harradine has denounced plans to lift the Harradine Amendment on funding that promotes family planning to alleviate poverty:
“Any attempts by members of the House of Representatives – (Mal) Washer and (Warren) Entsch – to allow scarce foreign aid funds to be used to, quote promote abortion as a method of family planning, should be condemned,” Mr Harradine told AAP.
More on the Washer/Entsch movement to lift the Harradine Amendment [here].
Dunlevy’s column points to her own family history of women relatives mired in poverty through having too many mouths to feed, and goes on to note
Being able to control our fertility is what has made the feminist revolution possible.
But in hundreds of countries around the world today, still millions of women are enslaved, like my great aunts, by their fertility.
They don’t have access to the contraception which would stop them getting pregnant in the first place.
And when their abject poverty leads them to abort the unwanted babies they can’t support, 13 per cent of them will end up dead.
Aid agencies from the World Health Organisation to the UN now recognise that birth control is one of the primary solutions to world poverty.
As policy currently stands, we are saying to the poor people of our region that we don’t care about promoting a blatant double standard in our foreign policy:
Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: activism/charity, culture wars, health, law, medicine, reproductive freedoms
February 17, 2007 • 12:10 pm
Sorry, this got published before I finished it – I meant to save it as a draft before I went out, and I obviously hit the wrong button. So some links weren’t in place and also some pieces that I planned to include were omitted. So please cast your eyes over the links again.
Bloggergate-inspired:
Pam at Pandagon: This I Believe (this is one of the best pieces on the pros and cons of institutionalised religion I’ve read in years)
Amanda Marcotte tells her story for Salon and runs some analysis by the Huffington Post.
Melissa McEwan tells her story for the Guardian.
Violet Socks
Netroots solidarity for Shakespeare’s Sister: We are Spartacus. Melissa responds.
Other issues:
Prison Rape.
Ezra Klein got the ball rolling with these three pieces [link 1] [link 2] [link 3]
The ball was taken and run with by many other mostly male bloggers, in a rare incidence of putting political partisanship aside to point out that society’s tolerance of prison rape as an expected part of punishment for the convicted is utterly immoral and cruel. Barry at Alas a Blog has a round-up of these posts, and chooses a powerful quote to head it:
“The opposite of compassion is not hatred, it’s indifference.”
–Anonymous prisoner quoted by Human Rights Watch
Racial Trends:
also at Alas a Blog, Rachel S. looks at how trends in framing the discussion of race in the US might develop in the coming year.
Valentine’s Day:
My political Valentine? by Mark at Larvatus Prodeo (mine’s Thomas Paine)
My culture-wars Valentine by Kim at Larvatus Prodeo (already linked to in a previous post here, but I can’t recommend the discussion thread highly enough).
BitchPhd talks up Scarleteen, an online resource for comprehensive sex education. Just in case you are or know a teen living somewhere without access to proper sex ed, or too embarrassed to ask questions face to face.
Sexism and sexuality: – to keep up the obstreperation component.
Helen, the Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony, on Dalla-Riva and Police culture.
Ann at Feministing notes this Disturbing Product of the Day and Jessica notes the move in Tennessee to require death certificates for aborted foetuses.
Jess McCabe at The F-word: the landlord is renegotiating restrictive leases in Harley Street so that no doctor will be allowed to perform abortions there. Just like the Catholic Church does here in Australia.
Other linkage:
Club Troppo’s continuing roundup of the Australian blogosphere, Missing Links. Each week has a different editor, and there are usually two but maybe three editions weekly.
Wordplay:
Sarsaparilla’s Ben H. has Test Your Word-Power against a Dead Squirrel
The Editors over at The Poor Man Institute are utterly disrespectful of Camille Paglia’s return to writing for Salon, and are uttering dictionary diktats to boot. They read Paglia’s piece and mocked it so that you don’t have to: seriously, why not just refuse to click on any link to Paglia at Salon? If people don’t read her then Salon will stop publishing her.
Copyright:
metaphorical, of Politics, Technology and Language, examines YouTube’s ongoing problem with users posting copyrighted material and alleged corporate misuse of copyright infringement claims to have fair use postings of copyrighted material removed.
Enjoy!
Filed under: Read 'ems, authoritarianism, conservatism, culture wars, interblog, law, religion, reproductive freedoms, sexual violence, sexuality
