Melbourne’s Salt Shakers group, led by Peter and Jenny Stokes, has the reputation of being one of Australia’s more puritanical Christian Right organisations. It came as a shock, therefore, when they appended a paper entitled ‘Understanding Propaganda’ by Dr R. Winfield to their e-newsletter of 6 Jul. 2006.

Winfield’s main message was that the Academy Award-winning film Brokeback Mountain was nothing but a vehicle for pro-gay and anti-family worldviews - in Winfield’s own words, ‘one of the most blatant propaganda pieces of recent times’.

What a pity that Peter Stokes, who sent the paper out, didn’t read it a little more carefully. Some of Winfield’s claims are simply peculiar, such as the idea that:

… the plan is to get women interested in gay [male] porn as an addictive and isolating tool of division.

Don’t ask me what that means, but apparently the ‘biggest thrust in this wave is coming out of Japan and targeting your preteen daughters’:

Travelling extensively, I warn you this epidemic is rampant throughout Europe, Russia, Asia and now making heavy inroads into the Americas. Parents have no idea what their young girls have tucked under their mattresses, or hidden in closets and computers.

According to Winfield, these misguided young females are ‘all buzzing about Brokeback’, but:

None are buzzing more than the critics who are falling over themselves in trying to outdo one another in kissing this film’s ass.

‘Kissing this film’s ass’? I don’t recall reading that phrase in the Book of Common Prayer but perhaps one of the prophets uttered something like it in a moment of weakness. However, no sooner have we laid aside our smelling salts when Peter Stokes recommends that we also read Henry Makow’s Pokeback Mount’in: Hymn to Dysfunction.

‘Pokeback Mount’in’? How unedifying! Call around, Peter, so we can wash your mouth out with soap.

Filed in: Christian Right, Sexuality