Ros and David Phillips of SA run what’s left of the old Festival of Light, now re-titled Festival of Light Australia (FOLA). (Organisations like this seem to have several chiefs to every Indian: David Phillips claims to be FOLA’s National President, while Fred Nile in NSW says he’s the Director of the ‘Festival of Light - Community Standards Organisation’, but he doesn’t pay much attention to this body any more.)

I always knew that the Phillips were arch-patronisers. They seem to inhabit some far superior planet located about two kilometers from God, but they occasionally deign to favour us with their ineffable wisdom. They produce a publication called Light and in the May 2005 issue, they actually succeed in patronising Tony Abbott, something I thought impossible.

In their editorial, the Phillips’ tell the story of Abbott’s reunion with his supposed natural son, Daniel O’Connor. At the time he allegedly fathered Daniel, Abbott was ‘an immature teenage university student’; ‘Kathy [Donnelly, Abbott's girlfriend] realised that Tony was too immature to be a support for her and the baby’ and had Daniel adopted out. 27 years later, the three were reunited, only to be split asunder again when another former lover of Kathy’s, Bill Kensell, was shown by DNA tests to be Daniel’s actual father. Everyone was ‘emotionally devastated’, but the Phillips’ then point out several lessons that can be learnt from this sorry tale.

Firstly,

Kathy and Tony made the best possible choice for Daniel, enabling him to grow up happy and well-adjusted in the secure environment of marriage … Adoption is often maligned these days, but studies show it can be a very positive option for mothers with crisis pregnancies.

Don’t bother explaining that many marriages provide anything but a secure environment, nor that there are huge question marks over the whole adoption issue. You’ll simply be referred to ’studies’, often emanating from American Religious Right think-tanks such as the Family Research Council.

Secondly,

Shared male and female accommodation can lead to sexual temptation.

So can passing an attractive person on the street, but what’s that got to do with anything? Oh, I see, Bill Kensell was Kathy’s former flatmate at the time of Daniel’s conception. Yes, maybe we should bring back those curtains they used to run down the centre of classrooms to keep the boys and girls apart. Didn’t I tell you the Phillips’ lived on a different planet?

Thirdly,

When condoms are used by immature teens after a party [apparently the circumstances under which Daniel was conceived], they are a less reliable form of contraception than the denigrated rhythm method [employed by that naughty, immature 'Tony'] which requires abstinence around the time a woman is ovulating …

Whether you call it the rhythm method or the Billings Ovulation Method (BOM), don’t try it, kids - at least, not without a condom as back-up. You’ll probably finish up both pregnant and struck down with a Sexually Transmitted Infection.

Fourthly,

The best method of contraception is the little word ‘No’. Saying no to sex outside faithful marriage means never having to say ’sorry’, never having to face the heartache of abortion or relinquishing a child, never contracting a possibly fatal or fertility-destroying sexually transmitted disease, never having to face the shock of unexpected DNA test results.

This is nice and glib, but quite wrong in every single respect. Many married women have abortions, and the rest of it depends on the sexual practices of your partner, something that you can never be entirely sure about. Ask all the people with ‘inexplicable’ STIs, and all the children now discovering that the man they call ‘Dad’ is no such thing.

The Phillips’ whole weird ideology depends on a series of highly vulnerable ‘ifs’, and these are no basis on which to make a life in the very real world out there. If I never cross the road, I’ll almost certainly never be hit by a bus, but if I’m reasonably careful I can cross the road, not be hit by the bus and I’ll have a lot more fun.

Same goes for sex.

Filed in: People, Sexuality