It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, but here’s one last Fred, ibid., ‘Focus on Parliament’ section, 2:

[Question in the NSW Legislative Council regarding the cervical cancer vaccine]: Is there a danger that females aged from 10 to 26 who have been vaccinated will believe they are now free to engage in sexual promiscuity?

[Fred mournfully reports that the Minister for Health 'merely smiled and stated "I will take the question on notice."']

Family World News ‘Prayer Focus’, ibid., 8:

Please pray for lasting fruit from the report which made Egyptian TV news of the miraculous survival [of] two small girls found after being buried alive for 15 days … [T]he girls relate [that] a man fitting the description of Jesus appeared to them each day and looked after them.

['A man fitting the description of Jesus', indeed. Fascinating.]

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Filed in: Their Own Mouths

Christian Right groups throughout Australia are usually very vocal about anything concerning the overlap between religion and politics. Abortion, therapeutic cloning, IVF, homosexual rights, censorship, euthanasia - you name it, they’re all over it.

So why are they all so quiet about recent revelations - Separate Lives, ABC Four Corners, 25 Sep 2006 - involving the Exclusive Brethren (EB)? I mean, here you have this nice, quiet Christian church, very ‘pro-family values’, anti-abortion (even anti-contraception!), outspokenly opposed to queer rights, perhaps just a little weak on the grog question, but running a beaut patriarchal show and being appallingly persecuted by those awful pagan Greens.

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Filed in: Christian Right, Politics

Dying of some loathsome disease? Want to know a very effective and pain-free way of ending your own life? Well, don’t ask me, I’m just a simple, law-abiding weblogger and too scared of being thrown into jail if I tell you.

But what you might do is get hold of the fundamentalist Salt Shakers Journal of July 2004. Now turn to page 7. Look at the article headed ‘Suspended sentence for killing mother’. First paragraph, second sentence.

See? I can’t tell you. But Salt Shakers can. And Derek Humphry could hardly have done a better job.

Filed in: Voluntary Euthanasia

A group of conservative Christian bodies has just formed an umbrella organisation aimed at defeating the proposed decriminalisation of abortion in Victoria. Abortion law reform will probably become a public issue no matter who wins the November 25 state election.

The new body is called CADOA - the Coalition Against Decriminalisation of Abortion - and is comprised of all the usual suspects plus some (mainly Pentecostal) hangers-on. Salt Shakers are giving CADOA a bit of a push, not to mention the Australian Christian Lobby, the Australian Family Association, Babette Francis’s Endeavour Forum, the Fatherhood Foundation and the hoary old Right to Life Association.

It’s always worth keeping an eye on these ad hoc lobbies but you won’t get too depressed if you remember two things. First, most of them sink without trace. And second, one of the biggest ’silent’ political movements in this country is the pro-choice lobby - normally almost invisible, but when its interests are seriously threatened, watch out!

Filed in: Abortion, Politics

This is a story about wheels within wheels.

Canadian Dr Darrell Furgason, a regular visitor to these shores, works with Christian Right leader David Noebel’s Summit Ministries in America. Furgason is as much to blame as anybody for the epidemic of ‘Christian worldview’ seminars currently on offer around Australia. His line is that everyone has to operate on the basis of some coherent ideology, most of which are very bad news:

If you’re not learning a biblical worldview, you’re learning another one, be it humanist, Marxist, Islamic or whatever. And that will affect your whole life, how you live your life. (Quoted in Carl Wieland and David Catchpoole’s interview with Furgason, ‘Islam and worldview: the big picture’, Creation (Creation Ministries International), Sept.-Nov. 2006, 52)

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Filed in: Christian Right, Creationism, People

Bill Muehlenberg (ex-Australian Family Association, current Secretary of the minuscule Family Council of Victoria) has a Christian right take on just about everything. I knew he was a creationist and had assumed he subscribed to the virulent version known as Young Earth Creationism (YEC) whereby the Christian god directly created the world about 6,000 years ago.

But writing recently about the global warming controversy Muehlenberg approvingly quoted a writer named William Kininmonth as follows:

For the past 10,000 years, the Earth has been near peak warmth in the climatic roller-coaster that has characterised the past million years. Yet only 20,000 years ago, great ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe …

A true YEC believer might just cope with the ‘10,000 years’, but definitely not the 20,000, and as for the million years - forget it! Pity that so many of Muehlenberg’s strong supporters are YECs, such as Tas Walker of Creation Ministries International, for instance. It’ll take a snowstorm of emails to sort this one out.

Filed in: Creationism, People

Even in the United States the powerful Christian right lobby doesn’t always get its own way. US government regulators recently authorised over-the-counter sales to adults of the ‘morning after’ contraceptive pill. Under-18s will still have to get a prescription, but something tells me that a girl who really needs this medication won’t have too much trouble getting hold of it. (Melbourne Age, 26 Aug. 2006)

Conservative Catholics and evangelicals in Australia kicked up a hell of a row when the morning after pill became easily available in Australia. Notice how the sun still rises in the mornings? Funny about that.

Filed in: Sexuality

Over the years, many anti-abortion ‘pregnancy counselling centres’ have conned women into continuing with unwanted pregnancies. Democrats’ Senator Natasha Stott Despoja wants to make it an offence for individuals or corporations to advertise pregnancy counselling without declaring any anti-choice stance or automatic refusal to refer clients for abortion.

This has sent the National Civic Council’s News Weekly into a frenzy. Stott Despoja and her allies are conducting an ‘obscene modern-day witch-hunt’ as part of ‘a concerted campaign to overturn social conservative values and influence at all levels in the community’:

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Filed in: Abortion

Around the beginning of this year, Bill Muehlenberg started up his own website, calling it Culturewatch. Bill arrived in Australia from the USA (via Holland) back in 1989 and has since spent most of his time trying to straighten out our ideas about religion, morality and a few other small matters. He’s worked for more Christian right organisations than you could shake a stick at - Australian Family Association, Focus on the Family Australia and Salt Shakers among them - but is currently between gigs.

Bill wants to see a Christian revival sweep across Australia. What would a ‘revived’ Australia be like?

… The police report that jails are emptying out, streets are quiet and little police work is necessary … Many police devote their time to singing in choirs or helping out at church services…

Many of the large sporting facilities like the MCG or the Gabba sit empty, partly due to lack of interest and partly due to so many athletes converting to Christ. People like Wayne Carey, Kieren Perkins, Cathy Freeman, Shane Warne and Andrew Gaze now spend most of their time holding evangelistic crusades and attending prayer meetings. (’Revival in Australia’, Salt Shakers Newsletter, May 1998, 3-4)

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

There have been many attempts to discover whether praying to the Christian god has any effect. During the last few years, some studies have been conducted in which groups of Christians and others have prayed for certain types of hospital patients. But apart from obvious methodological problems e.g. how do you exclude the effects of prayers by a patient’s family members and others outside the assigned group of supplicants, none of the scientific studies has demonstrated significant effects.

Richard Hole of Tolga in Queensland has a much more far-reaching idea and placed this ad in a recent issue of New Life evangelical magazine (’Does prayer make a noticeable difference?’, 10 Aug. 2006):

We are seeking people to help us to search for those who are obviously led and helped by God … If we can find divinely led people the benefits would be enormous, as they would be able to help, encourage and pray for us.

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Filed in: Fundamentalism, People