A critic of this website - sadly, there are such people - recently entreated us to use less ‘invective’ against the organisations we so justly criticise. Now, apart from an occasional (very witty) jibe, I don’t think we do throw much invective around here, if you take ‘invective’ to mean ‘abusive rhetoric’ (Oxford dictionary).

Our critic’s missive implied that Christian Right groups do not themselves employ invective against their opponents, as would indeed befit followers of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. I tried to bear this in mind as I glanced through the latest issue of Fred Nile’s Family World News (FWN) (Jul. 2006). But I’d only reached page 2 before I came across this:

The failed ACT Government ALP leader, Jon Stanhope, has made a complete mess of the ACT … in every area of society - morally, socially and economically. (Fred Nile’s editorial)

Now that doesn’t seem to be a very nice thing to say about anyone but I’ve long feared that Fred missed Sunday School the day they taught ‘manners’, so I turned more hopefully to the letters page. Here I discovered an attack on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code by Tony Evans of Orange, NSW:

Jesus called the Devil ‘a liar and the father of lies’ and it is not small wonder that Satan’s followers espouse such wicked lies and attack the wonderful sinless life, death and resurrection and deity of our Saviour … How many a faith will be destroyed or made shipwreck because of Dean [sic] Brown’s damnable book? He will one day find that the ONE he sought to belittle will be his Judge. (3)

I suppose some people might take being called ‘Satan’s follower’ as a compliment, but I think most of us would class it as invective, with a dose of fire-and-brimstone damnation thrown in for good measure.

Fred’s wife Elaine Nile, herself a former Christian Democratic Party MP, has a column in FWN and is her usual shy, retiring self:

Children aged 3-5 years in the Marrickville kindergarten are being given homosexual picture books to read on same-sex mothers and same-sex fathers … There just has to be a few homosexuals or lesbians who are taking over in brainwashing little heterosexuals in the Education Department. (5)

Phrasing isn’t really Elaine’s long suit but I’m sure I detect a whiff of invective here. And whatever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?

[The late] John Robert Marsden often spoke of himself as a ‘pot smoking poofter’ … John Marsden will not be missed by those who value the lives of young men - to keep them safe from predators who seek to drag them to the depths of despair and disease and into the world of drugs.(5)

Fred Nile can have the last word, not because FWN has run out of invective, but because I’m getting tired of sitting here re-typing such contemptible bilge:

[Nile] has warned parents about the pagan, Red/Green Party’s agenda, which is to brainwash three and four year old infants concerning lesbian and homosexual same-sex relationships [sic] … ‘This Green brainwashing of children is designed to promote the homosexual and lesbian lifestyle in the minds of impressionable children. It is not “education”, it is a form of mental child abuse. Australian infants are growing up in the real world, the normal heterosexual world as Almighty God the Creator intended.’ (’Anti-Discrimination Education or Child Abuse?’, Focus on Parliament [supp. To FWN], Jul. 2006, 2)

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and have a long shower.

Filed in: Christian Right, Family Values, Sexuality