Notes: Saturday, February 12-Monday, February 14, 2011

1. More from Ms Horin on so-called gay marriage

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/next-step-down-the-aisle-is-plain-20110211-1aqil.html?skin=text-only

Labels: Adele Horin, G.L.B.T., marriage, morality

2. Dr. Cook on Prof. Singer's views on incest

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/peter-singer-the-jerry-springer-of-philosophy/

Labels: morality, Peter Singer

3. Two recent blog posts by Mr. Muehlenberg:

3.1 On Ms Hartland's views on the death penalty and abortion

http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2011/02/11/another-green-brain-drain/

With a good comment there by Dr. Kok:

If execution is state sanctioned murder, then imprisonment is state sanctioned kidnapping; fines are state sanctioned theft; impoundment of an illegally parked vehicle is state sanctioned grand theft auto!

Labels: abortion, Colleen Hartland, death penalty, morality

3.2 On Dr. Savulescu's views on eugenics

http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2011/02/13/let%e2%80%99s-create-a-master-race-%e2%80%93-again/

Labels: eugenics, Julian Savulescu, morality

4. Mr. Marr on moves against discrimination by religious organisations against certain classes of sinner

http://www.smh.com.au/national/faiths-rule-on-sex-from-staffroom-to-bedroom-20110214-1asj0.html?skin=text-only

Labels: David Marr, discrimination, G.L.B.T., morality

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Valentine, Priest, Martyr, A.D. 2011

Ms Horin on abortion, plus some comments by me

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/time-to-stop-dragging-our-heels-on-abortion-law-reform-20091009-gqom.html?skin=text-only

In her column in The Sydney Morning Herald last Saturday, Ms Adele Horin wrote that

Abortion supporters, on the other hand, can sound apologetic, as if abortion is a bit offensive, a sort of necessary evil. They can be more comfortable defending the abstract "right to choose" rather than abortion itself.
[my emphasis]

Unfortunately, by the time I got around to commenting at the on-line version of Ms Horin’s opinion piece the combox had closed; had it still been open, I would have submitted the following comment:

***

I was interested to see Ms Horin write that
"Abortion supporters, on the other hand, can sound apologetic, as if abortion is a bit offensive, a sort of necessary evil. They can be more comfortable defending the abstract "right to choose" rather than abortion itself."
Does that mean that we can dispense with the labels 'pro-choice' and 'anti-choice'? I have no problem identifying as anti-abortion; why are pro-abortion people so allergic to being called pro-abortion? The issue is abortion, so why can't we speak of 'pro-abortion' and 'anti-abortion', just as, if the issue were the death penalty, we would speak of 'pro-execution' and 'anti-execution'? There’s hardly an aspect of human life in which choice is not involved, so I don’t see why abortion gets to monopolise the term.
Reginaldvs Cantvar

***

Here are a couple of other comments, in rebuttal of what some of the pro-abortion commenters wrote there, which I would have liked to have submitted:

***

Katerina (October 10, 2009, 3:03PM), you wrote that
“A zygote, a fetus, is NOT a human being, biologically or legally, so an abortion is NOT murder!”
But if a zygote is not a human being, then which kind of being is he or she (‘he or she’ since sex is given at conception)? A D.N.A. analysis would surely confirm that he or she belongs to the human species, would it not? And clearly the zygote is not merely a part of another member of the human species, since if you make a clone from the zygote then you’ll produce a new, unique person, whereas if you make a clone from any other part of the mother you’ll produce a copy of the mother.
Nefertari (October 10, 2009, 3:58PM), you wrote that
“An early foetus is NOT equivalent to a living, breathing child which can sustain life outside of its mother. It's not conscious and in the early stages doesn't have a nervous system capable of perceiving pain.”
So you propose four criteria for a right to life: According to you, the subject of the right must be
1. Breathing: but that would disqualify anyone on life support.
2. Self-sustaining: but none of us is truly self-sustaining, since we all need air, food and a suitable environment in which to live.
3. Consciousness: but that would disqualify the sleeping and the comatose, some of whom (the comatose, that is) take longer to become conscious than a newly-conceived zygote takes.
4. Pain perception: but that is to espouse preference utilitarianism.
So your criteria are inappropriate. The only appropriate criterion is membership of the human species.

***

[N.B. The "Louise" to whom I address the first part of the following comment is not the Louise who comments at my blog.]

Louise (October 11, 2009, 12:10PM), you wrote that
“The presence of DNA doesn't make a human being. No consciousness, nerves or anything else viable in a blob of dividing cells.”
But viability is an arbitrary criterion, since no human’s life is viable outside a suitable environment. I can’t survive without adequate shelter, and neither can a foetus, but that’s no basis for denying a right to life.
Betty (October 11, 2009, 4:49PM), you wrote that
“If you chop off your finger and put it on the bench it dies.”
And if you leave it attached it, and the body to which it is attached, will eventually die anyway.
“It has human DNA in it, it has cells in it but if a person decides to just throw that finger away, chop it up into tiny bits, that's their choice. You might think it's "gross" or whatever but you aren't going to protest it's "right to life".”
I won’t protest its right to life because it’s only a part of a person, not a whole person, whereas a foetus is a whole human being at an early stage of development. (I will, however, protest against the finger self-amputee’s mutilation of his or her body.)
“This is just like a fetus in the womb. It contains living cells, it has human DNA, but it is not LIVING, it cannot sustain life by itself. It requires a mother to carry it, much like a host to a parasite, a body to a finger.”
Leaving aside your absurd notion that the foetus is “not LIVING”, the fact that he or she cannot sustain life by himself/herself is, as I said earlier, no reason to deny his or her right to life; you and I can’t sustain our respective lives by ourselves, either.

***

The last of the comments published at that web page provided a useful link to some information about the question of when human life begins:

http://abort73.com/abortion/medical_testimony

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Feast of St. Callistus I, Pope, Martyr, A.D. 2009

Ms Horin, in passing, on fatherhood

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/bookish-boys-grow-into-gentle-men-but-their-early-years-can-be-brutal-20090522-bi84.html?page=-1

In her Sydney Morning Herald column last Saturday, Ms Adele Horin wrote about the experiences of boys growing up after the feminist revolution, and I was surprised to read, in her second-last paragraph, what I’ve highlighted here in bold type:

But encouraging sensitivity and empathy in boys, and the softness every mother knows is at their core, is essential if men and women are to enjoy happy partnerships at work and home. I can't offer a prescription. I know fathers are integral through example and instruction. Anti-bullying and anti-homophobic policies, and playground policing are important. I know schools should extend their guest list of male role models beyond sporting heroes.
(my emphasis)

I was surprised to read this (for reasons which I’ll explain in a moment), and decided to record it for future reference because Ms Horin is sure to contradict herself on this point sooner or later. Because is Ms Horin not a supporter of same-sex parenting? And if so, then how does she expect boys being raised by ‘two mums’ (though really, same-sex parenting not only destroys the parenting role of the excluded sex, but also destroys the maternal or paternal role of the members of the same-sex couple by turning them into androgynous ‘co-parents’, so it’s absurd to speak of ‘two mums’ or ‘two dads’) to receive the kind of “example and instruction” in which she recognises fathers as “integral”? And presumably there will be symmetry for the case of ‘two dads’ raising a girl. And it’s interesting also how the particular attritubutes that Ms Horin focuses on here, namely “sensitivity and empathy”, are ones which, conventionally, one might suppose a mother would be able to foster. But of course, as Ms Horin implicitly recognises, a mother might be able to teach her son sensitivity and empathy, but she can’t very well teach him how to exhibit those characteristics in the manner befitting a man.

Now if confronted with this huge difficulty, Ms Horin might try to wriggle out of by saying something like ‘er, well, I suppose the ‘two mums’ will have to bring in male friends as role models’. But having recognised the necessity of the opposite sex, why would she then deny a child the kind of stable and enduring first-hand exposure to the opposite sex that only married mother-father parents can offer? Can a string of ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ with no avowed commitment to the child and no ongoing day-to-day domestic contact with him or her ever replace a father or a mother, respectively? Of course not.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Gregory VII, Pope, Confessor, A.D. 2009

Ms Horin on sexual ethics and sex education

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/sex-thugs-and-rotten-role-models-its-not-right-if-shes-not-enjoying-it-20090515-b606.html?page=-1

I’m getting round to this a bit late, but I thought that I’d better say something about Ms Adele Horin’s Sydney Morning Herald column of two Saturdays ago, especially since it seems to have gone unchallenged in the Herald’s letters pages of the days afterwards. In this opinion piece she discussed what she identified as the thitherto unmentioned aspect of public discourse on the N.R.L. ‘bunning’ scandal. What is that neglected dimension, you wonder? Until reading Ms Horin’s article I thought that the neglected dimension of the whole tawdry debate was sin—in particular, that in all the legalistic discussion over whether or not consent was given, little consideration was given to whether or not the act might have been intrinsically evil, evil regardless of consent (and where this possibility was raised it was usually dismissed, though Mrs. Devine had a good article from two Thursdays ago, redressing the imbalance). But it would seem that I was quite mistaken; silly me: you see, the missing dimension is actually pleasure. And so in an article containing much that was incredible (so much so that I wondered at several points whether Ms Horin was parodying her own libertarian inclinations), one reads the following particularly remarkable suggestion, which I’ve highlighted in bold type:

… if the aim of mutual sexual pleasure cannot be a legal standard, surely we can work towards making it a social norm. It's time to give pleasure its due, in our school sex education programs and in public discussion, in homes and in cheap hotels, and in whatever exotic or sleazy locale sex takes place.

Though it seems inordinately difficult for some men to get to the first hurdle and understand the concept of consent, that should not deter us for having higher expectations of men: that pleasuring a woman should also be uppermost in their mind, not simply using her.

School education programs, where they exist, generally do a good job on biology, on contraception, on disease and on relationships, and even on understanding the importance of consent. Condoms are rolled over fake penises. A terror of AIDS and STDs is drilled into young minds. But when I once asked an educator whether sexual pleasure was discussed in class, especially girls' pleasure, she looked aghast. It would be too controversial for Australia, though not, apparently for schools in Europe. But this is where a conversation about sexual pleasure has to start - in schools. Consent should not be the start and end point of a boy's sex education. This approach is selling girls short. […]
(my emphasis, and please do read the whole article in case you fear I might be taking her out of context)

So there you have it: as if parents shirking their duty (a duty which I and, if I recall correctly, Church teaching regard as virtually inalienable) to educate their own children in conjugal matters is not bad enough, Ms Horin wants to go that one step further and immerse youngsters—or should that be drown them—completely in hedonism (as if our culture hasn’t already saturated them with it by the time that they reach high school) by imparting that education from a pleasure-attentive perspective. Thus we see the last traces of a natural-law understanding of sexual ethics expunged and replaced with crude preference utilitarianism. (Unfortunately Ms Horin seems not to be sophisticated enough a preference utilitarian to recognise that the correct word for someone of her school of thought to be using is ‘preference’, not ‘pleasure’—because some people, namely sadists and masochists, prefer pain to pleasure, especially in these matters. No doubt the ‘BDSM’ crowd is deeply offended at Ms Horin’s hedonormative, algophobic bigotry!)

I see this article of Ms Horin’s as a sort of small milestone for Australian culture. I have seen this sort of thing advocated in mainstream newspaper letters pages, but until Ms Horin’s article I had never seen a mainstream media commentator advance such indecent suggestions. But that’s Ms Horin for you, ever the ‘early adopter’. What a sicko.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Gregory VII, Pope, Confessor, A.D. 2009

Ms Horin on the unintended consequences of achieving 'gay rights'

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/gay-couples-to-face-new-era-of-financial-discrimination/2008/12/05/1228257316542.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Ms Adele Horin had an opinion piece in last Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herod on what I regard as a piece of poetic justice: namely, the fact that, as a result of “the recent passage of historic legislation to remove discrimination against gay and lesbian couples from dozens of laws”, so-called same-sex de facto married couples will incur the penalty of having their welfare benefits reduced from two times a single person’s benefit to one times a couple’s benefits (where the sum of two singles’ benefits exceeds a couple’s benefit, thus putting them at a relative disadvantage). Ms Horin reports that

The Government's much-lauded same-sex reforms, ironically, have continued the tradition of treating gays differently from heterosexuals. Every significant change to social security laws passed in the last 15 years has included a "grandfather" clause to minimise harsh consequences for those already in the system. Legal changes arising from the recognition of women's equality, for example, were introduced in a way that protected an older generation.

The changes to the age pension that raised the qualifying age for women from 60 to 65 were introduced gradually over a period of 20 years. The wife pension, which enabled younger women married to pensioners to also qualify for a pension, was abolished in 1995 but recipients of the time were protected. Changes to the widow pension and other entitlements were grandfathered. But no grandfather clause has been included in the social security changes that extend equal treatment to gay couples.

As a result, human rights progress for many gays and lesbians will come at a cost to those who can ill afford to bear financial losses - those whose retirement plans, and very relationships, were predicated on certain long-term expectations.

So the question is: were these couples justified in having these expectations? And the answer is a resounding: no, of course not, since these expectations involved the presumption of a financial benefit over and above that payed to the very couples whose status they craved and have been striving for some thirty years to obtain. The examples that Ms Horin adduces are, in fact, invalid comparisons because they involve a category mistake—they are comparisons of apples and oranges. That is, the case, say, of raising a woman’s pension age from sixty to sixty-five without ‘grandfathering’ would involve a transition from a position of mere sufficiency (i.e. enjoying a welfare benefit that is calculated to cover a modest standard of living) to a position of absolute disadvantage (no longer being able to afford that standard of living). On the other hand, the case of two sodomites living as (or rather, impersonating) a married couple involves a transition from a position of both absolute and relative advantage (since they are receiving benefits whose total exceeds the level that the government calculates is necessary to support a couple) to a position of sufficiency. If anything, these sodomites ought to be grateful that the government does not try to recoup the differential between two singles’ benefits and one couple’s benefits that the sodomites had been claiming all those years. Instead they have the gall to complain about being put on the same financial level as the de facto married couples with which they were so stridently demanding equality! The sheer cynicism of the Sodomites’ League and its contempt for others is simply stunning.

The weakness of Ms Horin’s case is implicit in the emotionally-charged case studies that she offers. In the first one we have

A pioneer in the gay liberation movement, she had stayed at the school for 30 years despite the low pay, believing a mainstream school would have sacked her over her political activism. Her partner had been dismissed after having "come out" to her religious employer. The dismissal was lawful because of the religious exemption to the anti-discrimination laws.

But what does her involvement in the ‘gay liberation’ (!!!!!!) movement have to do with anything? And what does the grounds for the other woman’s dismissal have to do with anything either?

Then in the second case study we have

Another woman, with her children, had left a violent husband and had lived with her female partner for 30 years.

What does a violent husband have to do with anything? All this is nothing but an appeal to emotion by Ms Horin when logic and justice are against her.

Then Ms Horin notes that

If couples desist, Centrelink may come sniffing around. Among the questions to be asked of couples in their 70s and 80s is whether they have sex. It is part of the battery used to determine whether people are living as an interdependent couple but claiming benefits as singles. Couples don't have to be having sex or sharing a bedroom - or to have lived together for two years - to be considered de factos. Centrelink has a record for zealous, even brutal, investigations of suspected "marriage-like" relationships among elderly heterosexuals. Now the Welfare Rights Centre is gearing up for a barrage of distressed and offended callers from the gay community.

So the gay couples are being treated exactly the same as heterosexual couples, and they find this ‘distressing’ and ‘offensive’?! Perhaps the ‘gay liberation’ movement needs to evaluate whether ‘gay liberation’ was such a good idea after all.

And I found Ms Horin’s second-last paragraph quite rich:

As the drawbacks filter through, many in the gay community are angry, calling those who lobbied so heavily for the changes "bourgeois" and uncaring of the impact on the most disadvantaged.

I for one think that it’s high time we re-popularised the use of the word ‘bourgeois’ as an insult! Let’s all go around speaking like university students from 1968! Sodomites of all nations, unite! Continuing with this Marxist terminology, though, I might recommend that the gay ‘proletariet’ keep a closer eye on the gay ‘intelligentsia’; what with friends like these reducing their financial benefits it hardly needs enemies.

And as a little footnote I might add that in Professor John S. Croucher’s ‘NumberCrunch’ column in the same day’s Herald’s Good Weekend magazine he writes:

Number of same-sex de facto couples in Australia: about 27,000; as a proportion of all de facto couples: about 3.4 per cent

And of course if we keep in mind the fact that formally married couples would greatly exceed the number of de facto married couples it would not surprise me if the proportion of so-called same-sex de facto married couples in the total combined de jure and de facto married couples figure was not even one per cent.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
9.XII.2008 A.D.

How to write an article on a matter of justice without examining too closely whether justice has been served

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/judge-rules-youths-be-taken-out-of-adult-jail/2008/09/19/1221331207054.html

Ms Adele Horin shows us the way. In an article in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herod she reported the following:

IN A victory for prisoner rehabilitation, a Supreme Court judge has ordered three young offenders be removed from adult jails and returned to juvenile detention centres by Monday to complete their sentences.

Now here’s a quick concordance for you: the word rehabilitation appears seven times in the article, while the word justice appears six times, but only ever as part of a name, such as the Department of Juvenile Justice or when referring to Mr. Justice Johnson, the judge in question. The word punishment appears only once, and also only as part of a name (‘punishment cell’). So Ms Horin’s focus is exclusively on rehabilitation, which is distinct from and subordinate to strict legal justice. No doubt she adheres to the notion of ‘restorative justice’, which usually ends up being no kind of justice at all, and would have been foreign to not only the Catholic authors but also the great figures of pagan antiquity and the more clear-thinking luminaries of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, such as Kant. And yet this mangled conception of justice has infested the judiciary in Australia and presumably much of the West.

Ms Horin also uses at least one dodgy journalistic technique. Early in the piece she says that the youngsters in question (all of whom were eighteen or over)

were transferred to adult jails in April despite court orders they serve their sentences in a juvenile facility until age 21 because of special circumstances that can include developmental delay, mental health issues, and rehabilitation prospects.
(my emphasis)

Presumably she lists them in this order so as to elicit our sympathy. Yet Ms Horin leaves the reader to infer from the following point:

[Mr. Justice Johnson] said consideration had not been given to the circumstances of the three, in particular, "the powerful body" of evidence that pointed to their progress in rehabilitation, and education and training, in the detention centre.

that in fact rehabilitation prospects were just about the only circumstances considered and that there was no question of psychological problems (which is surprising, given how liberally ‘psychological problems’ are invoked these days, especially with regard to the grounds for abortion). This is especially likely given that presumably Ms Horin would have specified any such circumstances if there had been any, in order to heighten the reader’s sympathy.

(And, predictably, Ms Horin managed to smuggle a purported ‘human rights breach’ into the article, when she quotes a psychoanalyst saying that

it appeared young offenders' rights had been compromised due to management putting pressure on psychologists to change their reports.

Someone who is not afraid to ask the hard questions of justice, however, is Dr. David van Gend in yesterday’s Sydney Catholic Weekly.

http://www.catholicweekly.com.au/article.php?classID=3&subclassID=44&articleID=4929&class=Features&subclass=Feature%20articles

In connection with the imminent Victorian abortion free-for-all, he wonders

[b]y what wild superstition do legislators believe that a 24-week baby is a citizen deserving of all protection when wrapped in hospital blankets, but mere human waste when wrapped in the womb? I have held a baby born at 24 weeks, and if somebody attempted to assault her I would defend her. By what principle of justice do legislators conclude that there should be no restraint on adults who would assault the same baby when trapped in the womb?

I wonder whether the abortionist who was trying one minute to kill Miss Gianna Jessen and then signing her birth certificate the next (http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2008/09/09/on-burning-babies-alive/) asked himself these questions?

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Your taxes hard at work: the human rights mafia’s latest pre-occupation

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/love-triumphs-across-the-line/2008/09/05/1220121526785.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Also in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herod was a totally bewildering article by Ms Adele Horin, in which she reports on how “the Australian Human Rights Commission has undertaken a project to investigate human rights issues affecting the transgender community.” In one of those bitter ironies that this age throws up from time to time, it seems that ‘transgender’ folk are a bulwark against the dissolubility of marriage; they are aggravated that they must divorce their respective spouses in order to, in Ms. Horin’s pompous and verbose terms, “have the sex on all their documentation reflect their lived reality.”

But as far as I can tell, what these poor, sick people have might be described better as a ‘lived fantasy’. At the instant of conception, each of us has either XX or XY chromosomes, and though I am aware that one might suffer from anatomical or hormonal defects, one is either a man or a woman. Gender confusion of the sort from which these people suffer is a grave disorder. I have sympathy for them, but I have nothing but contempt for the false compassion of physicians and the G.L.B.T. intelligentsia who would co-operate in voluntary mutilation rather than advising intensive counselling. (It is another great irony that while depression, anxiety and obsessive tendencies have been elevated to recognition as psychiatric disorders, the delusion that one is trapped in the wrong sex’s body is treated as perfectly reasonable.) Furthermore, what impact do these procedures have on life expectancy? Given that there is a correlation between other amputations and reduced life expectancy, what is the effect of these bizarre procedures?

I note also that Ms Horin is well-known as a feminist. But why, then, is she so completely uncritical of a lifestyle that amounts to identifying a woman as nothing more than a castrated, œstrogen-injected version of a man? Isn’t this transgender ideology nothing but a regression to the notion of a woman as masculus occasionatus (a defective man)?

Ms Horin concludes by saying that

The commission has set up a "sex and gender diversity forum" on its website to canvass a range of views, and [Human Rights Commissioner Mr.] Innes will formulate his recommendations by the end of the year.

I can hardly wait. And I shudder to think what might be in store after that.

Reginaldvs Cantvar