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Post by KTJ on Aug 20, 2017 10:48:10 GMT 10
Have you learnt how to masturbate as a pastime yet?
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Post by pim on Aug 20, 2017 11:19:13 GMT 10
A beat up and Frank Brennan is right - on the legal point. But it's a bit like Pauline Hanson’s "ban the burka" bullshit: how big is the "problem" and to what extent do people have to get their knickers in a knot over it? With the burka the "problem" is almost zero since apart from Pauline's malicious racist stunt I have never seen a burka on a woman in Australia. Lots of hijabs, occasionally - rarely - a niqab, but burkas? Never! So what is this "ban the burka" bullshit?
The issue of LGBTI (hate that clunky acronym) staff in Catholic schools and how it intersects with SSM is another non-issue confected by sections of the media bent on portraying the churches as "victims" in the SSM debate. It plays right into the phony "freedom of religion/freedom of speech" beat-up invented by Tony Abbott and the Australian Christian Lobby. But seriously if you're a teacher in a Catholic school one of the criteria you must satisfy in order to get recruited as a teacher in a Catholic school is that you "support the aims and objectives of Catholic education" or words to that effect. They'd prefer to hire practising Catholics of course and, as you'd expect, a reference from your local parish priest showing that you're an active church going member of his parish would go down well when you apply to the Catholic Education Office (or whatever it's called) for a teaching job. I realise that they don't just hire only Catholics and I don't know how a non-Catholic demonstrates a "commitment to the ideals of Catholic education" but clearly they manage to satisfy the criterion somehow.
So what are we really talking about when we consider staff in Catholic schools? For one thing I doubt you'll find many atheists among them. For another thing I think it's pretty safe to assume that you're going to find the vast majority subscribe to pretty conventional social values. For example if you're a single heterosexual teacher in a government school and you live in a de facto relationship with your opposite sex partner it'll be considered your business - if you're in a big city school. In a small country town where everyone knows everyone else you might have issues with some parents who can be nosy bloody parkers. But in a Catholic school for a single lay teacher to shack up with an opposite sex partner? Fergeddit! But why do it!! Why bring the grief on yourself by pissing on your workplace in that way? And it’s the same with SSM. Are there LGBTI staff currently in Catholic schools? Of course there are. But are we to expect a spate of same sex weddings among staff in Catholic schools the moment SSM becomes legal and will the Catholic Church find itself in heavy litigation as sacked LGBTI staff sue them for unfair dismissal? Tony Abbott and the Australian Christian Lobby would like you to think so as part of their NO scare campaign.
My own answer to the scare campaigners is "knock yourselves out!" Not all opposite sex couples who live together end up getting married. In fact you might be surprised at the percentage of households in which the opposite sex couple who live there aren't formally married. Why should LGBTI couples be any different?
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Post by pim on Aug 21, 2017 16:39:26 GMT 10
My take out from the cartoon is that the cartoonist is clueless about the catholic confessional. Who's the cartoonist? Golding. Sounds Jewish. I'm very partial to Jews and indeed have some Jewish ancestry (what person of Dutch origin doesn't?). Which means that I understand enough about Jews not to ask them for commentary on the finer points of the Catholic sacraments.
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Post by pim on Aug 22, 2017 1:04:24 GMT 10
Well I guess if someone wants to turn their wedding into a political stunt then let 'em! I mean if I thought enough of another person to the point where I welcomed the opportunity to make a public commitment to spend my life with her - and it would be "her" in my case - and she wanted to turn what should be a joyous celebration of love and commitment into a controversial stunt full of aggro and divisive polarisation, then I'd be asking some pretty fundamental questions regarding my choice of life partner. Or maybe I'd try for a teaching job in the government system and resign from the Catholic system so that I could get married without a lot of grief.
But that's just my view.
This is a furphy, a Tony Abbott/Australian Christian Lobby confected distraction. Why give it oxygen? It's as Bill Shorten said tonight on Q & A in relation to these types of issues: the problem already exists and is irrelevant to the survey - unless the Turnbull Government intends to spring a question on us that we can't foresee or prepare for that's intended to complicate the issue and is tantamount to push polling (we don't know because they haven't told us yet what the survey question will be). I'm a divorced male. If I were a teacher in the Catholic system my divorced status (I've never sought a Catholic annulment and have no intention of doing so) would already be an issue for them. If I then, horrors (!), went ahead and married someone in a civil ceremony (the Catholics won't marry a divorcee unless you've gone through their appalling annulment process - i.e. a Catholic divorce which is (a) expensive (b) a money-spinning scam for them (c) has fault, blame and guilt from go to whoa all through it and (d) worst of all is a declaration "before God" that your marriage wasn't a real marriage, unpack that if you dare, so it amounts to declaring that the kids you had with your wife are illegitimate. Unsurprisingly I find it insulting to my kids and offensive so they can shove their "annulment) I would probably lose my job. How many cases of unfair dismissal do you hear of from divorced teachers in Catholic schools sacked because they remarried without going through all the Catholic annulment bullshit? Honestly if Tony Abbott and the Australian Christian Lobby want to run a scare campaign along these lines all I can say is knock yourselves out.
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Post by pim on Aug 22, 2017 11:15:28 GMT 10
So many rabbit holes to follow you down in that post ... 1. Your furphy that the church would be "pulling a stunt". No it wouldn't. It would be acting consistent with its beliefs regarding the sacramental aspects of marriage which you and I might disagree with but this isn't about what you and I think. Look, the Catholic Church believes what it believes and it teaches what it teaches and no secular law is going to make them shift because they maintain they're obeying a higher authority. I'm not trying to debate the finer points of Catholic doctrine here so please refrain from using this as an opportunity to bag the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church believes in hellfire and the infallibility of the Pope and they don't believe in recreational sex even within marriage and masturbation is a no-no. Remember "Stop it or you'll go blind!"? Contraception is verboten except if you play Roman Roulette and if you're divorced then as far as the Catholic Church is concerned you're still linked by the bonds of marriage to the woman you've just divorced until either one of you dies or you grease their clerical palms with lots and lots of $$$ and go through their "annulment" scam. For good measure, not being satisfied with the 10 commandments it's added 6 commandments of its own. I can't remember them all offhand. The first goes something like "You shall hear Mass on Sunday and on the days commanded". Fair enough and it's what you'd expect from an authoritarian hierarchical outfit like the Catholic Church. The second one is something like "You shall confess your sins at least once a year" etc etc. Two down, four to go and I can't remember what they are and I don't care. So with all that background in doctrinaire religious totalitarianism you don't really expect them to back off on their opposition to SSM in relation to the 180 000 people they employ nation wide in their schools! In fact they'd rejoice in the victim status that litigation would give them. The shock jocks would love it and the tabloid media would lap it up: the Big Bad State coming after the school that you send your kids to because this school courageously dared to uphold so-called "family values"? If you can't see the tabloid values that could be blown up into a monstrous scare campaign in a scenario like that, then you're in complete denial about the power of reactionary populist scare campaigns run by the most practised negative retail politician in the business. Here's a thought: the only reason the Catholics are in a position to have 180 000 people on their payroll in their schools is because of the Amazon Rivers of money that pour into those schools from the Federal Government. They are a power in the land and that's a fact. If you're going to take them on over any issue you're going to have a monster fight on your hands and you'll lose a lot of skin in the process. So if you're going to go into something that you know will give you a lot of grief then choose the fight you're prepared to have. My choice would be to make education free, compulsory and secular again (who am I channelling here?) by diverting that Amazon River of taxpayer money into government schools and defend the principle that if you want your kids to go to a church school then it's at your expense - fully! - while at the same time leaving open the option of sending your kids to the local well-resourced and well-endowed government school for free. Now that would be a shitfight but it would be a shitfight worth having. And you'll find that the number of salaried lay teachers in Catholic schools would drop like a stone and we'd go back to Catholic schools being staffed primarily by nuns and brothers. Oh? What's that I hear you say? Not enough nuns and brothers because too few vocations? Shucks! Whose problem would that be!! And by the way you'd probably find that as Catholic schools dwindled in size and scope and they had to turn back to unpaid cloistered religious staff it would probably take care of the SSM issue for Catholic hierarchy. In 1905 the French State took over all church schools in France, turfed the Catholic teaching orders out and informed them that they were finished, their order was being "expulsé de France", or expelled from France, and that henceforth these were now publicly funded government schools. <sigh> If only ... What was the other thing? 2. Something about a notion that was dreamed up in an era when people thought the Earth was flat and the centre of the universe belongs in the dustbin of history. Your history is screwy. For one thing you don't appear to know anything about the history of science and for another thing you appear to know little about the history of marriage. Firstly science: yes people once believed that the world was at the centre of the universe and that Jerusalem was at the centre of the world. But the "flat earth" stuff? When did the Church ever teach that? Even in ancient times the Greeks had worked out that the world had to be round. But let's move on to the church notions of marriage. Have you ever read Robert Hughes' seminal history of convict transportation to Australia The Fatal Shore? There's a chapter on gender relations that begins with quite a salacious description of the orgy that took place between male and female convicts on 26 January 1788 when they were disembarked at Sydney Cove. He concludes that highly titillating anecdote by saying something like "and in this way the sexual history of Australia was begun". OK, enough of the soft porn but he also made the point that early Sydney Town became full of little bastards as the majority of children there were born out of wedlock. He gives two reasons for this: (a) up until 1753 in the UK the civil law had been silent on the question of marriage. Up until 1753 things like birth, death and marriage had been a "parish matter" which is why when you go to look up distant ancestors in Europe you end up looking through parish records rather than government archives. In 1753 the British Parliament passed the first ever Marriage Act which held that the only valid marriages recognised in law were marriages solemnised according to the rites of the Church of England. There was a context to that to do with the growth of Wesleyanism and non-conformist religions such as the Baptists and the Methodists. So it wasn't just aimed at Catholics although what that meant was that Catholic marriages weren't recognised in British law. That 1753 law was the one that came to Australia with the First Fleet. But this brings us to (b) which is the point that Hughes makes - convicts tended to be drawn from the sweepings of the streets of London. In other words the "lower orders" who tended not to get married anyway. They weren't "respectable" which is why the Botany Bay colony was called in England the "Colony of Disgracefuls". Hughes' point is that in simply rutting and producing illegitimate little brats the convicts were simply behaving as they would have behaved back in England. Up until 200 years ago marriage was about property and inheritance so it was something contracted by people with property. In Holland lots of people didn't even have surnames until Napoleon made them take surnames. Surnames have traditionally been about who your father is and since men were the ones who owned property it was important for inheritance purposes that a potential beneficiary to a deceased estate should be able to prove that he (it always tended to be "he") was the legitimate heir. Look, the reactionaries and the rednecks are out there and the debate has turned ugly already. As Bill Shorten said last night on Q & A to that gay guy who'd had "Fag" daubed on the outside of his house: this is the last thrashing around of a dying dinosaur - or words to that effect. When SSM becomes lawful and a gay teacher in a Catholic school decides he wants to set himself up as the sacrificial victim by getting married in order to be the test case then bully for him. He personally mightn't intend it to be a stunt but a stunt is exactly what it'll turn out to be. Is that what anyone who loves the partner they intend to marry wants their wedding to be? Seriously? Good luck with that! Because the Catholic Church will crave victim status on this one as the Big Bad State comes after it in an unfair dismissal case of monumental proportions as it's dragged through the courts. Bolt will love it. I can see 60 Minutes salivating at the prospect and Miranda Devine will dip her pen in vitriol. What a prospect for the gay guy at the centre of the storm. As well as having "Fag" daubed on his house he'll open his door to a forest of TV cameras, microphones and shouted "questions". Who'd want it!! Would you?? You wanted your dodgy "plebiscite" - well, maybe you didn't get quite what you wanted but you got ... something. So instead of nitpicking why don't you spend your time campaigning for a YES response to this fucked-up stunt of a dodgy "survey"?
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Post by pim on Aug 22, 2017 12:19:01 GMT 10
In my opinion, the Catholic church sacking people who get married legally (if the law does in fact change) would be a stunt. Perhaps akin to the "don't ask, don't tell" situation in the military??? There could be gay couples in catholic schools as we speak, but if they become married, suddenly : Sorry! that's it - you're OUT!!! That would be a stunt in my opinion. Your opinion differs. Fine. With 180 000 people on the payroll in Catholic schools throughout Australia would some of them be LGBTI? Of course there would be. Would some of them want to get married in the event that SSM becomes lawful? How would I know? But would the Catholic Church take a dim view of it? You bet your arse! We know this even before it happens and so would the LGBTI people on their payroll. A stunt? No, because to the Catholic Church marriage is one of the seven sacraments which the Catechism teaches are "visible signs instituted by God to give grace". They are: Baptism, Confirmation, Penance (i.e. confession), Eucharist (i.e. communion), Extreme Unction (i.e. the last rites to the dying), Holy Orders (i.e. the ordination of priests) and Matrimony. So whatever you or I think, marriage is up there as one of the seven most sacred rituals of the Catholic Church. To them it isn't about the civil law and when that bishop said he'd go to jail I believe he was serious. No stunt there! This is deeply held principle that goes to the very DNA of the Catholic Church. Accept it or not, I don't give a shit. But if you think it would be just a cheap "stunt" on the part of the Catholic Church then you know nothing, zip, nada about Catholicism.
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Post by pim on Aug 22, 2017 13:36:38 GMT 10
That's fine. Care factor from the Catholic Church? Zero. What you'll go on failing to appreciate is that the Catholic Church wouldn't go into an unfair dismissal case over a SSM issue involving one of the 180 000 staff in its schools from a position of weakness. With all of the legal resources at its disposal, its highly placed friends in politics, its deep networks within Australian political parties, its friends in the media and in business and on top of that it's got God on its side? You're talking about a major power in the land. I will concede one thing on the "stunt" issue: there would be a "stunt" aspect but who would be pulling the stunt? Not the Catholic Church because in defending to the death the sacramental aspects of marriage it believes it would be fulfilling its mission which is doing God's work. The same sex couple prepared to put the job of one or both of them on the line? I have a problem with that idea. You're assuming that there's a gay lay teacher in a Catholic school who'd be ready to offer himself as the sacrificial lamb. The test case with everything that involved - including the inevitable media circuses. Maybe there would! Would you? Mention of media circus puts the finger on the real stuntman - the media: the tabloids, the shock jocks, 60 Minutes, Bolt. There's your "stunt".
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