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The Voice: Where Aren't They Now?

Hold on just another few days and we'll finally have a reason to live again - it's almost time for the return of The Voice Australia. It's no secret that a deep personal struggle is practically a condition of entry to the competition, so we took the opportunity to look back on some of the high-profile problems faced by previous contestants.

Harrison Craig

Harrison Craig won the competition and the nation's hearts last season - due in no small part to his openness about a debilitating condition which had hampered his confidence since childhood. Craig suffers from First Name / Surname Reversal, a condition which has been spreading exponentially for a generation, mystifying medical professionals. "First Name / Surname Reversal is still pretty rare," he says. "But it helps that Surname Repetition [having a surname in place of a first name] has been relatively familiar for a few years now, and there are many, many people around the world who are able to live normal lives with that condition [high-profile sufferers include Anderson Cooper and Taylor Swift]. "One of the Judges on The Voice, Ricky Martin, even suffers from First Name Repetition" [Martin was born Enrique Morales, and developed Type 2 First Name Repetition when he became Ricky Martin as a teenager]. "But the full First Name / Surname Reversal is still the most unusual form, and long-term effects are relatively unknown." The leading research comes from the USA, where the lion’s share of cases have been identified, but Craig bravely raised the profile of the condition in Australia last year, and credits his mentor Seal as a huge inspiration. "My parents always drilled into me that there's always someone worse off than you", he says. "I can complain all I want about my FN/SR, but then I look at Seal, who's managed to forge a patchy singing career for two decades without the benefit of either a real first name or a surname - it just goes to show that anything is possible."

Diana Rouvas

A crowd favourite from season one of The Voice Australia, Diana made no secret from the start that she was living with Signature High Belt. Well-known sufferers from this condition (which overwhelmingly affects women), include Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, and Kristin Chenoweth. “It’s disheartening,” Diana said at the time. “You look at that group of people and your first reaction is ‘Wow, what a bunch of total nut-cases.’ I’ve had to work hard to prove that I’m not like that.”

Diana even had to battle with suggestions on social media that she was faking her condition. “Signature High Belt is actually really over-diagnosed, especially in the entertainment industry. You meet a lot of people who will tell you they have Signature High Belt - but usually what they actually have is ITAOR [Inability To Ascertain Own Range], which is a much more common condition."

Rachael Leahcar

Another season one contestant with a high-profile disability was teenager Rachel Leahcar, who wowed the judges with her performance of 'La Vie En Rose'. "I knew that I would be fodder for all the wannabe comedians on Twitter, but I just had to ignore that and focus on the competition," she says now. "I've been a Palindrome for so many years now that you develop a sort of defence mechanism against negative reactions, and just move on with life. It's second nature to me now to hear people jokingly enquire if I'm from Glenelg, or for waiters to ask me 'Tuna roll or a nut?' After a while it just rolls off your back. I've now started a charity that offers help and support to fellow Palindromes, called 'Never Odd Or Even'. That's been really rewarding."

Kiyomi Vella

Kiyomi firmly believes that being Cookie Cutter Kooky has helped to get her where she is today. "Sure there's some negativity around it," she says. "When I was a kid, Björk was a superstar - so I was brought up to believe that I couldn't have a career because I didn't have an original bone in my body. But then a few years ago I started watching Zooey Deschanel movies, and I thought 'I can do this.'" Being Cookie Cutter Kooky may no longer be a barrier to a singing career, but sadly sufferers do still have a lower-than-average career expectancy. "It just teaches you to live each day to the full," Kiyomi told us on the phone from her dressing room at Campbelltown Catholic Club. "There are still plenty of people in the world who can't tell or don't care that my performance style is hopelessly derivative, and I've made it my aim to sell a ticket to each and every one of them."

The Voice Australia season three starts on Channel 9 this Sunday night.

#The Voice #The Voice AU #the voice australia #kiyomi #harrison craig #Diana Rouvas #rachael leahcar #tv #australia

Why We Won't Shut Up About Gay Marriage

Compulsory voting is a strange quirk of the electoral system in Australia, but I've always thought it was a great idea. Contrary to its presumed aim, it doesn’t for a moment mean that the electorate are any more engaged with politics than elsewhere, but it does at least prevent them from framing their attitude towards their governments with the ‘nothing-to-do-with-me; don’t-vote-you’ll-only-encourage-them’ platitudes that have long been present in other democracies. Yes, it looks like the ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrat’ who was first on the ballot paper in New South Wales will now be heading to the Senate simply because it was 29 degrees on Saturday and a lot of people were in a hurry to get to the beach - but that’s a small price to pay for national collective responsibility. Plus it gives the mainstream parties something to aim for - if they can find ways to engage and enthuse more Australians in the political process, maybe they’ll inspire voters to take the time to move their pens a few inches further over the ballot paper before hopping in the Volvo to Bondi. Incidentally, I’ve always thought it was odd that we call it a ‘donkey vote’, seeing as donkeys are generally pretty slow, methodical creatures. It would surely be more appropriate to name it after an animal that’s always in a hurry and has a miniscule attention span. A goldfish vote, perhaps. Or a toddler vote. Maybe a coked-up-bonds-trader vote. I’ll workshop it.

If, as he claims, last weekend’s election gave Tony Abbott a mandate on the full gamut of whatever could be discerned of his policies, then it’s not good news for those of us who prefer our man-dates with a hypen. Hard though it is to believe that every Australian who voted for the LNP is also an opponent of gay marriage, it’s certainly true that the man who will be taking up residence in the Lodge is not going to be first in line for a GLAAD Ally award come 2014. That’s not to say that there’s no hope of seeing legal gay marriage in Australia in the next three years. Abbott has repeatedly stated his opposition to it, but throughout the campaign the Coalition’s policy on a parliamentary free vote has been ‘We’ll get back to you on that after the election’. That might seem cavalier, but it’s actually their standard answer on most issues, leaving gays in the esteemed company of other subjects such as foreign policy, climate change, and, you know, the economy.

The general underlying tone from Tone when questioned about gay marriage has been one of slight irritation and disinterest. ‘Why do these people keep banging on about their rights?’ he seems to want to say. ‘Is it all they can think about? We have some lovely policies on healthy living and better ageing, why don’t they ever ask me about those instead?’. This has long been a theme from opponents of gay marriage, and indeed of gay rights in general. Western societies spent centuries stigmatising and discriminating against gay people, and then started rolling their eyes when gay people finally attempted to speak in the public discourse as a group, and make people aware of the problems they faced. ‘Isn’t there more to you than being gay?’ they would ask as they handed out termination and eviction notices to anyone who was exposed as being in a same-sex relationship - ‘Why does everything have to be about that?’. Likewise, the constant demonisation of homosexuality - and its common confluence with paedophilia - caused such shame and self-loathing in generations of young gay people that symptoms such as high rates of drug use and casual sex were the inevitable result. ‘Well of course we have to keep them away from children’ was society’s reaction. ‘I mean, have you seen the levels of dangerous behaviour in that community?’

In which case, you might think that a complete 180-degree turn-around towards attempting to form nuclear families was exactly what might melt these stony hearts - but no, plenty of straight people still see gay marriage as a tiresome and distracting side-show that self-indulgent gay people won’t shut up about. In advance of election day, several of my gay friends posted angry Facebook statuses, asserting that the LNP’s policies were directly offensive and antagonistic towards them as individuals, and that any of their Facebook friends who were planning to vote for Abbott could just go ahead and delete them now. Invariably this unleashed a ferocious backlash from a small group of [usually] straight, white females, who were outraged at their own Right To Facebook Friends being violated. “I AM planning to vote Liberal” their comments would run, “and frankly babe I can’t BELIEVE you would delete someone just because of the way they voted. Have you ever heard of freedom of speech? You KNOW I have no problem with gay marriage, but in this election there’s just TOO much at stake. xx”. The confusion of ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘a right never to be disagreed with’ could fill a whole other essay, but the subtext was clear: ‘Jeez, with you gay people it’s all “my partner and I can’t live in the same country” this, or “my family haven‘t spoken to me for 20 years” that - why can’t you stop obsessing about your sexuality and just get on with your lives?’

This isn’t to say that gay people in Australia get zero appreciation from government. In February this year - to coincide with the Mardi Gras festival - Sydney’s gay community got a rainbow-coloured pedestrian crossing on Oxford Street for three whole weeks. Admittedly, once Roads Minister Duncan Gay [stop it] found out what was going on, he soon had it painted over. Outraged by the fact that this frivolous symbol of tolerance and solidarity had cost the rate-payers of Sydney up to $40,000, he rightly concluded that the only way to atone for this largesse was to spend another $30,000 blacking it out again. Say what you like about the continued homophobia in Australian society, but it’s a sign of how far we’ve come that politicians now have to take the initiative to hand out new assets to the gay community, in order to have something to take away from us at a later date. The other concern cited by Mr Gay was that the Rainbow Crossing would be a dangerous distraction for passing motorists. Perhaps the garish and unexpected sight could make drivers suddenly question why we can’t all just appreciate and celebrate each other’s differences while working together for the common good the world over - which in turn could cause them to inadvertently mount the pavement and take out somebody’s grandmother on her way out of day surgery at St Vincent’s. I take Mr Gay at his word, although this did make me wonder about the famous Coke Sign in Kings Cross - a 41-metre-long neon billboard overlooking a major junction. But the Coke Sign’s 88 bars of neon tubing and 1800 fluorescent light bulbs are necessary in order to gently put over its own message of commercialism and corporate dominance, which has got to be worth risking a few multi-car pile-ups for. We gays will have to work a bit harder if we want to be accorded the same sort of privilege.

#australia #australia election #gay marriage #marriage equality #same sex marriage #rainbow crossing #rainbow crosswalk #australian politics

Bob Katter's 'one-off' gay marriage conversation... keeps happening

Bob Katter doesn't like to talk about gay marriage. Famously he became irate when, as a guest on The Circle last year, the hosts tried to probe him on his position on marriage equality. He told them that he didn't spend any time thinking about the issue, as he didn't believe most Australians cared about it. He even said that only one person had ever asked him about gay marriage before, in his 39 years as an MP. The problem is, this seems to be Bob's stock answer - to the many people who ask him about gay marriage.

A few minutes on Google revealed at least four occasions [below] when Katter has responded to a question about gay marriage, by saying that he has only ever been asked about it once before. Perhaps Bob needs to start keeping count a little more closely.

16th March 2012 - Sunday Profile (ABC Radio)

I mean we're here talking about homosexual marriage, well I mean I'm forty years into it, only one person's ever raised that... I mean what are the burning questions?

http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/3455303.htm

7th June 2012 - The Circle (Channel Ten)

In 39 years as a Member of Parliament, and I would say in a year I would meet maybe 70 or 100 thousand people each year, for 39 years - I was a Minister for the best part of 10 years. That's how many people. One person - one person in 39 years - has raised that issue with me

http://youtu.be/TWBrHmlXxfI (from 6 min 45 secs)

8th February 2013 (Brisbane Times readers Q&A)

You can choose how you spend your time. 39 years, over a million representations to me, only one person has taken it up.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/brisbane-live/bob-katter-live-at-brisbane-times-20130208-2e2m5.html#ixzz2ZP2QIFBF

20th May 2013 (Sydney Writers Festival discussion with Kevin Rudd)

I'll answer your question this way - and I'm really not gonna take any more questions on it, because I'm gonna get very short-tempered on it. In 40 years as a Member of Parliament, one person - one person in 40 years - has raised that issue with me.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/katters-country/4033918 (from 29 mins 45 secs)

If you know of more examples when Katter has used this brush-off response, add it to the comments and I'll update this entry...

#gay marriage #marriage equality #australia #auspol

20022020

Some of my favourite titles

Fade To Black

This is an entry I wrote on my old blog on July 24th, 2011 - the day after Amy Winehouse died.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

When Frank was released in 2003, I was living in a shared house in south-east London, and working in a handbag shop in Greenwich marketplace, trying to find a way to break into television production. We would play the album in the shop during long shifts, congratulating ourselves on being into a 'jazz' artist, and relishing the beats and bad language that made the album feel contemporary. We played that CD (CD!) so many times you could see through it, but ultimately it was part of our cultural checking-in; our staked claim to be young and part of the music scene, and the album was always 'one of' those we liked - genuinely admired, but no more so than those by Scissor Sisters, Franz Ferdinand, Kanye West, or The Thrills.

I remember specifically the first time I heard Rehab. Three years later, and Amy Winehouse had more or less dropped off the radar. I was sitting at my computer in my flat in London Bridge, with my back to the television, on which was playing one of the free-to-air digital music video channels - probably The Hits. I was concentrating hard on what I was doing, and the constant music had faded into the back of my mind - but this song wormed its way in within a few lines and grabbed my attention. The smokey voice was familiar - who was that, Lauryn Hill? Turning round to the TV and seeing the singer in the video, I still couldn't work it out. The skinny girl in the beehive didn't look like anyone I recognised. One thing I did know was that the song was amazing. That hook; those beats, those horns. No-one was doing anything like this. As the song ended, the caption came up on screen: 'Rehab, Amy Winehouse'. Amy Winehouse?! The jazz singer? It didn't look or sound anything like her. But no time for that. The next evening I went over to my friend Debbie's house, and thrust my ipod earphones into her hands: "You have to listen to this song, you'll love it". All over London people were asking each other "Have you heard that new Amy Winehouse song?" "Amy Winehouse? Hmm I don't like all that jazz stuff." "No seriously, you really, really have to listen to it..." Clearly my own personal campaign was unnecessary - within weeks the song was massive, and so was the album, Back to Black (Winehouse's profile was so low at the time, the album had been quietly put out before any singles were released).

When you're young and an artist you love goes stratospheric, it's often the cue to cool your affections. The Scissor Sisters were my FAVOURITE BAND IN THE WORLD after I tagged along with my friend Jon to see them at the Astoria in early 2004, not knowing anything about them. But a few years later when they were playing arenas - well, I still liked them, but I didn't go on about it. But Winehouse was different. Me and my friends were obsessed with her. The previous year, we'd all had the Zutons' Valerie on our ipods, but when Winehouse re-recorded it with Mark Ronson, it became an essential track, never leaving the radio for months, played at every party. Out on the town with my friends Nick, Hayley and Liz, we would never get tired of requesting and dancing to her music, and would incessantly quote not just her song lyrics (was there a tragic outfit, a bizarre news story, or an unopenable jar in early 2007 that wasn't met with "what kind of fuckery is this?"), but also her appearances on television shows - repeatedly accessible to us thanks to the emerging website YouTube. She was already a notorious drinker (although the hard drugs - or at least public knowledge about them - didn't come for a few more months), but her wit and vivacity was clear to see. We adored her, and constantly spouted nonsense about having a 'billboard time!', or how we would 'rather have cat aids' than do X - always in a rolling approximation of Amy's harsh north London accent (she was from Barnet, the same place I had been born, and where I had lived until I was seven). It was no doubt irritating to casual observers, but we were bonding over a shared passion, an artist who was not just exciting, but who really felt 'ours'. I guess we were just the right age, and living in the right city.

The music conquered America with ease, but due to drug-related visa issues around the time of the Grammys, she had to perform and accept her five awards via satellite link from London. Like all great stars, somehow she made this awkward situation feel like an advantage. She was an outsider - staying put in the town that made her, despite the laurels Hollywood was throwing at her. As she took trophy after trophy - Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best New Artist... - she made reference to the freak fire that was at that moment raging through the pubs and market in her beloved Camden. Her success always came hand-in-hand with drama in bizarre forms.

Nick and I snapped up tickets to see Winehouse perform live at Brixton Academy, but (within a year of Back To Black's release) the tour was abruptly cancelled part-way through, as the tabloids detailed Amy's spiralling drug addiction, shambolic performances, and devastation at the imprisonment of her husband Blake. Strange as it seems, from the moment she hit the big-time, she never put out another album.

Although years passed without her releasing any significant new material, she remained a massive star, and an object of our fascination. In June 2008 I was sitting around my kitchen table with friends drinking wine (shortly before moving to Australia) when Nick texted me: 'Turn on ITV'. It was Amy Winehouse in an unannounced performance at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert in Hyde Park. Bizarrely, she sang Free Nelson Mandela, and the performance was less than spectacular, but she'd still had the star power for Nick to instantly prompt someone in another city to make sure they didn't miss seeing her. The following day she performed at Glastonbury, but made the headlines mainly for punching a member of the crowd halfway through one of her songs.

Right up to her death (nearly five years after Back To Black's release), she remained present in our everyday consciousness. Last month, we programmed a parody show at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival called Amy Housewine. This Friday night at the pub, I was telling my friends to look up her appearance on Never Mind The Buzzcocks on YouTube. On Saturday, a friend referenced her version of Valerie when describing to me a track he'd just recorded. On Sunday morning I woke up to the news that she was dead.

Is it melodramatic or narcissistic to suggest that with Amy Winehouse dies a part of my youth? Her death couldn't seriously be described as totally unexpected, but it was still shocking. Like everyone else, I played her music as I went about my business today. Although we'd practically been carrying out drills for years on how we'd feel if and when Amy Winehouse OD'd, it felt not just strange that she was gone, but wrong. I didn't want her to be dead. The music was just toogood. Sympathy for the personal tragedy goes without saying, but it's also justifiable for us to consider her death in relation to our own lives. Eric Idle once said that when people told him they wanted to see a Monty Python reunion, what they meant was that they wanted to feel young again. Amy Winehouse's music was such a big part of my identity as someone in my late twenties. If there's no more of her music, then I'm not that same person anymore.

"Life is like a pipe, and I'm a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside."

Amy Winehouse, Back to Black

Visit Original Link

This audio of primary school kids singing while they do art (accompanied by their teacher, my sister, on ukelele) melts my stony heart.

tastefullyoffensive

[via]

Australian Spice Girls reunion! (this is how I’m spending my Saturday night)

#Spice Girls #Australia #Politics

Double Case, Double Standards

I've been following the discussions on the two gay marriage cases currently before the Supreme Court in America. It's surely only a matter of time before this question is settled in the affirmative (although possibly not on this occasion), but one of the things that irritated me the most about the hearings was the repeated suggestion, not just from the anti-gay marriage plaintiffs, but also from some of the Justices, that progress on marriage equality is moving too quickly, because society hasn't yet had enough time to discover the long-term consequences of gay marriage and adoption.

Justice Scalia commented:

If you redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, you must — you must permit adoption by same-sex couples, and there’s – there’s considerable disagreement among — among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a — in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not. Some States do not — do not permit adoption by same-sex couples for that reason.

Justice Alito asked:

"You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cellphones or the Internet? I mean, we do not have the ability to see the future,"

Justice Kennedy complained:

“We have five years of information [about same-sex marriage] to weigh against 2000 years of history or more... The problem with the case is that you’re really asking, particularly because of the sociological evidence you cite, for us to go into uncharted waters, and you can play with that metaphor, there’s a wonderful destination, it is a cliff,”

This may sound like the Supremes are being responsible in their caution, but the problem with all of this hesitation is that it puts the onus on gay people to prove they are capable of having relationships and raising children (without bringing the rest of society down around them), before their government will acknowledge that they are doing so. No other group is asked to prove their own merits in this way. The very basis of the US constitution is that people are guaranteed the opportunities of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, with the government only intervening if its citizens are harming each other. The Supremes seem to have this backward - musing that gay Americans should only be granted equal rights once they have proved extensively and exhaustively that this doesn't pose any danger to anyone else. The Supremes don't even posit any specific possible negative side effects; just the general (generally disproven) concern about same-sex parenting being 'harmful' to children.

Of course the irony is that while the Supreme Court seems to demand gays and lesbians jump through higher and higher hoops in order to prove they deserve the same treatment as heterosexuals, there are millions of people in the US getting on with their lives as gay couples and families - albeit without the support and recognition of their own government.

As the U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told the court:

"Waiting is not a neutral act. Waiting imposes real costs in the here and now."

Judgements are expected on the two cases in June.

tomsharah

If you loved Disney the way I did growing up, you need to check this out. I had never thought about the age dynamics between our most loved princes and princesses. I don’t know what’s more unsettling - the fact that most of the princes are unidentified in age, or the fact that the one that is was 27 when he got together with a 12 YEAR OLD. Pocahontas …. gurrl …. you need to bounce baby out the door.

tomsharah

Hi y’all,

So I have decided to join Tumblr.

Be gentle, it’s my first time …. OK, mind out of the gutter please peeps. I mean that quite literally. I am very uneducated when it comes to this as a practice, so I shall be taking baby steps. But I am guessing, like every other form of social...

catbushandludicrous

The Beach Boys gave me unrealistic expectations of Love

So Mike Love kicked Brian Wilson out of The Beach Boys again last week. As one Twitter wag noted, this is a bit like Mitt Romney kicking Abraham Lincoln out of the Republican party. Except if Mitt and Abe were cousins, and if Romney had done it several times before and then repeatedly invited a naive and trusting Lincoln back when it was economically expedient. OK, the metaphor doesn't stretch that far, but the point is - Mike Love is a terrible human being.

Terrible human being

For those not familiar with the history of The Beach Boys (which - let me make clear at this point - I consider to be the greatest band in the history of popular music, bar none) - a crammer: brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson started the band as teenagers with their cousin (Love) and their friend Al Jardine. There have been many line-up changes over the years, but the main principle is this: Brian Wilson = The Beach Boys. Brian is the ethereal, effervescent virtuoso who created the unmistakeable Beach Boys sound, and wrote and produced all of their best material. Love is credited as a co-writer on many of their songs, but anyone who knows anything about the Beach Boys knows that it is Brian who is the heart and soul and genius of the group. It was Brian who in 1966 (pre-Sgt Pepper) created a 'pocket symphony' that ricocheted between acid-influenced theremin and other-worldly falsetto harmonies and still sold a million copies (Good Vibrations); and it was down to Brian that the same year, the same band recorded a pop single that had 'God' in the title and opened with the sound of French horns (God Only Knows). Mike Love, incidentally, fought each of Brian's pioneering ideas every step of the way - fearing that the band might lose its audience, whom he believed only wanted to hear songs about cars, girls and the carefree lifestyle of California teenagers.

"Why can't you just write another song about surfing, Brian?"

Brian has had many, many mental problems over the years (partly stemming from his excessive drug use in the 60s and 70s), but has never lost his unique musical abilities (just listen to his most recent original solo album That Lucky Old Sun from 2008). The charming Mr Love has taken full advantage of this situation - kicking Brian out of the band on numerous occasions, and securing exclusive touring rights to the Beach Boys name in a farcical boardroom meeting with an almost comatose Brian in the 1980s. He has also attempted to sue Brian on several occasions for daring to suggest on his own marketing materials that he may have once had something to do with a band called The Beach Boys.

And so the 2012 50th-anniversary album and reunion tour turns out to have been not the re-birth of a group that is still capable of creating sublime music, but a mere interlude - yet another cynical opportunity for Mike Love to cash in on Brian Wilson's genius and then ditch him again once he's served his purpose (Love will take full advantage of the renewed interest in The Beach Boys by continuing to tour with his own version of the band into 2013).

The consolation for the rest of us is that Brian is still capable of touring with his own (excellent) band, so we will hopefully still have the opportunity to hear those masterful songs performed by the man who created them. But this is another nail in the coffin of Mike Love's reputation. And if I still haven't persuaded you on that point - take a look at this video of Love's jaw-droppingly ungracious speech at The Beach Boys' induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. Has ever a man been so inappropriately surnamed..?

#Beach Boys #Brian Wilson #Mike Love

Q: How many practising gays does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: "As far as I can see, by trying to get to the facts, it seems to be significantly more than ordinary - so-called - heterosexual men. That seems to be the case."

Don't blame me bitch, I read it in a book

Oh kaaaaaay, let's do this. I mean, it seems superfluous, right? The man is a mental midget; a public figure who attacks an entire community based on hearsay, and yet confuses the concepts of 'censorship' and 'being disagreed with'. A man who talks about finding "a compassionate and objective way" to solve the problem of gay people's existence. And yet we do have to address Peter Jensen's hazy fuckwittery on Q&A last night, because astonishing as it may seem, these are views that won't die. Here in the future - where we now live - we carry tiny computers in our pockets, we have those Star Trek automatic sliding doors in every office building, and a black man battles a Mormon for the US presidency, and yet, like puke in a bucket, these sorts of ignorant canards stubbornly refuse to evaporate away. So let's lay it out as briefly as possible.

Anglican Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen's morbid ABC musings were a response to a claim by the Australian Christian Lobby's Chief Prick Jim Wallace that "the unfortunate levels of suicide, the unfortunate levels of excessive drug use [in the gay community] (are) because of the nature of the lifestyle", and that therefore children should be warned off homosexuality, just as they are warned off smoking. The ACL are world leaders in the highly competitive field of Seeing How Hateful, Ignorant, And Downright Deranged You Can Sound And Still Get Away With It Because You Have The Word 'Christian' In Your Name, so this nonsense was essentially greeted with a collective eye-roll and a swift Prime-Ministerial boycott. But the Archbishop of Sydney? You could barely get more establishment. And what was so face-palmingly painful about Jensen's verbal wanderings was that he blithely and in passing accepted that his own brand of religious dumbo jumbo was contributing to the high rates of suicide and drug use among young gay people ("Some people say it's because of the things I say, and the position I take. And that creates, for example, a spate of suicides. That may be true, but how can we get at the facts if we're not willing to talk about it?").

Peter Jensen marginally shortening his own life-span

This was a theme - Jensen repeatedly claimed that his freedom of speech was being trampled on, and painted Australia as a dark atheistic landscape where any expression of Christian views is suppressed violently and without mercy (a kind of Mad Max but with a holy water shortage instead of oil, or with gays instead of bikies - I don't know, I haven't actually seen Mad Max). Bitch, you've been invited on the country's most prominent discussion program and specifically asked to share your views on the subject, so that dog don't really hunt. If the Q&A live feed had blacked out in response to your remarks and the ABC had swiftly cut to a brisk and prosaic song about the continuing accomplishments of Julia Gillard, that would be censorship. If you'd received a dawn visit this morning from two men in black coats and sunglasses who strongly suggested you refrain from dissing the gays again or they couldn't guarantee your safety, that would be censorship. But when a large number of your fellow citizens get on Twitter of their own accord and point out that your views as expressed are fifty shades of batshit crazy, that's not censorship. In fact, it's kind of the opposite of censorship.

It's LGBT..Q you asshole!

It's funny how things that are meant to be one thing can actually turn out to be the exact opposite of that very thing. For instance, Christianity is supposed to be about loving all mankind with no judgement or discrimination. Church leaders are supposed to be learned elder statesmen who dispense thoughtful and measured nuggets of wisdom to enrich their communities. And apparently gay men are supposed to be dead by the age of 40, and yet Alan Jones rolls on and on.

I'll have to end there. I've recently been informed that I don't have long to live and so I'm off to make the most of the sunshine. At least I'll always have my Sundays free.

#Q&A #Peter Jensen #Archbishop of Sydney #Gay #Gay marriage #ABC #ACL #Australian Christian lobby #Jim Wallace

The Lord's Prayer

Arj Barker, who Art Garfunkel

Cecil B. DeMille

Sean Kingston come, Fred Willard done

On Cher, as F. Scott Fitzgerald

Augustus Gloop our Hayley Mills

Anne Boleyn G. K. Chesterton

As Will Ferrell those who Caster Semenya

Annie Leibovitz not into Len Deighton

Justin Bieber us Sam Siegel

For thine Alex Kingston

Jack Bauer Jackanory

For Hannah Montana

Carmen

elons

How to begin this review? Few countries that debuted in the 1700s have been as controversial or long running (it’s into its 236th season now) as America. It may not have the staying power of perennial favorites such as China or the credibility of indie darlings such as Finland, but America...

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