Mr. Justice Kirby on the prospects for a government apology to sodomites (seriously)

The Hon. Michael Kirby A.C. C.M.G. has written some interesting things in a document whose intended audience is youngsters and which apparently was obtained by News Limited (it was reported in yesterday's Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun):

[...] "Openness about sexuality helps to destroy the foundation for prejudice and discrimination," he has written in a new collection of essays.

"One day there will be a big parliamentary apology . . . to gay people for the oppression that was forced on them and the inequalities that were maintained in the law well beyond their use-by date. Just like the delayed 2008 apology to the Aboriginal people of our country."

Justice Kirby, 71, has contributed to a collection of essays about justice issues, distributed to secondary schools and universities.

Future Justice is published by the Future Leaders initiative, with essays by Julian Burnside QC and Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty.

[...] "I also do not doubt that, in a comparatively short time, Australia will move towards same-sex civil unions and gay marriage," he writes.

"No one has satisfactorily explained how my 40-year loving relationship with my partner Johan in any way affects (still less undermines) heterosexual marriage.

"If Australians are now more homophobic than racist, as some recent public opinion polls suggest, this is because Australians have lacked good leadership on this issue."

He says that just as Australians overcame racism by "getting to know" people of different races, "we would all overcome homophobia more quickly if every gay person were open and felt able to say without fear of violence and discrimination: 'This is me. Get over it. It is no big deal!'." [...]
[my square-bracketed interpolations,
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/we-should-apologise-to-gays-says-former-justice-michael-kirby/story-e6freuy9-1225842095659]

So Mr. Justice Kirby says that

[n]o one has satisfactorily explained how [his] 40-year loving relationship with [his] partner Johan in any way affects (still less undermines) heterosexual marriage.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, Your Honour, but: It's the buggery. Love means willing the highest good for another, and the good is that which suits the nature of the thing desiring it. Buggery, or whatever you and your confederates do to each other, doesn't suit anyone's nature, and therefore can never be a true expression of love, which is the heart of a marriage. Buggery ain't pretty, and any institution associated with it is tarnished thereby. In these and other ways, same-sex pairings like yours undermine opposite-sex matrimony (which is the only kind of matrimony, of course). But of course, Mr. Justice Kirby will not acknowledge this, because evidently he subscribes to the Sodomites' League's overall strategy of diverting the public discourse on sodomites away from behaviour and towards identity--hence his talk of "'This is me. Get over it."

The Future Leaders website has a section devoted to Future Justice, and while the Publications section confirms that the document is targeted at youngsters ("A free copy available for every secondary school"), apparently it is not available to the wider community. Pity. I would have liked to see what other perverted notions of justice, in addition to those peddled by Mr. Justice Kirby, positivists are trying to inflict on impressionable schoolchildren.

Here are the choicest of the comments at the on-line versions of the News Limited articles:

From http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/we-should-apologise-to-gays-says-former-justice-michael-kirby/comments-e6freuy9-1225842095659:

john Posted at 9:05 AM March 18, 2010
why not just be sorry for being white hetrosexual tax paying christians, this way we've covered all bases..

Comment 5 of 17

JohhnyG of Sydney Posted at 9:38 AM March 18, 2010
If you were to say "Australians are homophobic" you would be racist.... right?

Comment 8 of 17

From http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/former-high-court-michael-kirby-predicts-public-apology-to-homosexuals/comments-e6frf7jo-1225842096421:

Paul of Melbourne Posted at 3:57 AM March 18, 2010
How can you compare people's not exceptance of homosexuals with racism? This article states that recent public opinion polls show people are not excepting of homosexual practices due to poor leadership. Wot the!!!! The poll shows exactly what it shows. The silent majority are saying they don"t accept homosexual behaviour, don' you get it!!!!!

Comment 2 of 49

Barry Jones of Balnarring Beach Posted at 5:45 AM March 18, 2010
I would have thought it more appropriate for gays to apologize for their part in inflicting aids on the hetrosexual community.

Comment 6 of 49

Sean Posted at 6:08 AM March 18, 2010
Gay people should receive an apology. Sooo, to all the gay people out there..."I'm sorry you are gay". I hope that makes everyone feel better, particulary those anti-homophobes...

Comment 9 of 49

Father of 4 Posted at 6:20 AM March 18, 2010
Sorry??? What for??? They chose that unhealthy, immoral lifestyle, it wasn't forced on them

Comment 10 of 49

tommy of melb Posted at 7:40 AM March 18, 2010
NO WAY

Comment 24 of 49

Rob of Melbourne Posted at 7:51 AM March 18, 2010
Justice Kirby is a fool. I will never apologise to sinners engaged in "unnatural" and depraved behaviour. Homosexuals need to apologise to God and repent of their sinful lifestyle.

Comment 29 of 49

William of Carlton Posted at 8:40 AM March 18, 2010
Sigh . . . looks like my time has come. I'm a middle-aged, white, Anglo-Celtic heterosexual male who has raised a family, works hard, eschews government welfare, tries to get on with everyone and sometimes attends a Christian church service. So all you perpetually aggrieved whingers, line up over there and I'll dispense my apologies as genuinely as possible.

Comment 43 of 49

Stevo of Yarrambat Posted at 8:40 AM March 18, 2010
Gays should be apologising to US for rubbing their sexuality in our faces!!! Get this idiot off the bench!!!!!

Comment 44 of 49

There was no editorial on the matter in The Daily Telegraph, but apparently there was one in The Herald Sun, with this at its website:

No more sorries

From: Herald Sun March 18, 2010 12:00AM

FORMER High Court judge Michael Kirby believes there will be "a big parliamentary apology" to gay people.

But the question is, should there be?

As reported in the Herald Sun, Justice Kirby has contributed to a collection of essays on justice issues to be sent to secondary schools and universities.

He says Australians "are now more homophobic than racist" and likens a gay apology to prime Minister Kevin Rudd's "sorry" in 2008 to Aborigines.

But many Australians will question Justice Kirby's analogy.

It represents a collective guilt to which most of us would plead innocence.

How many times are we to say "sorry" and for how many injustices, real or perceived?

What is more important is to recognise discrimination and remove it, not seek to lay blame.
[http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/editorials/no-more-sorries/story-e6frfhqo-1225842055438]

Disappointing. It's good that The Herald Sun doesn't support Mr. Justice Kirby's mooted apology, but that newspaper fails to discriminate between just and unjust discrimination. I am not aware of any official unjust discrimination against sodomites in Australia at any time between colonisation and the present, though of course there has been plenty of just discrimination. Mind you, some laws regarded as discriminating against 'G.L.B.T.' folk did nothing of the sort; the matter of so-called anti-homosexuality laws, for instance, was acts, not orientations, and applied to sodomites regardless of whether they were homosexual or heterosexual and to catamites regardless of whether they were male or female.

So, with a Parlimentary apology to the so-called gay community (properly the gay contingent, since the members of a community, by definition, strive after a common good, not after vice) in the not-too-distant future, one wonders: Will Australia's gay precincts start to hold Welcome to Queer Country ceremonies at events like Sydney's annual Sodomites' Parade?! Stay tuned, though for all I know something of the sort happens already!

Reginaldvs Cantvar

Feast of St. Joseph, Spouse of The Blessed Virgin Mary, Confessor, A.D. 2010.

The clock is ticking: the rush to end the latest ‘injustice’

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/judges-urge-coalition-to-pass-samesex-bill/2008/09/13/1220857873114.html

I see that

[s]enior judiciary members have urged the Coalition not to block or delay Government legislation that will give same-sex couples the same financial rights as heterosexual de facto couples

And the impetus for this? The imminent retirement of the Hon. Mr. Justice Michael Kirby A.C. C.M.G.:

Justice Kirby has become the public face of the proposed legislation. As the law stands, his partner of almost 40 years, Johan van Vloten, would be ineligible to receive part of his pension should he die first. If Justice Kirby was female, Mr van Vloten would receive the part pension.

This discrimination exists in more than 100 areas of Commonwealth law, which Labor has sought to end with two bills.

The question is: is this discrimination unjust? I say: no, it is not, since even a lawful spouse is not ‘owed’, in justice, a part-pension or other entitlements. One could make a tenuous argument, I suppose, that since a wife makes sacrifices for her husband, she should enjoy some of the benefits that he reaps from these. But this would ignore the fact that these sacrifices are part of a mother’s vocation. Also, the law has an educative function, and any discouragement of homosexual activity is a good thing. And the notion that a sinner should be rewarded for the longevity of his state of sin is quite repugnant.

But since the question of human rights and discrimination has come up again, I might make a few more remarks on the topic. We know, or should know, that a right is implied by and dependent on a duty. Now a Christian can point to the Ten Commandments as the source of his or her rights, since they lay down the corresponding duties. For instance, a duty not to kill implies a right to life, a duty not to steal implies a right to private property, and a duty to worship God implies a right to hear Mass offered according to the rubrics. Christians don’t (or shouldn’t) claim too many rights that have no basis in God’s ordinances.

Or, to look at the matter from another angle: each of us has an indestructible ontological dignity, an orientation towards a transcendent goal. We have certain rights in order that we can pursue this goal.

So it is perplexing when one hears secularists like Ms Elizabeth Broderick asserting that “[t]here is no question that legislated paid maternity leave is a basic human right” or the Sodomites League’s calls for same-sex ‘marriage’. What are the new-found duties that evoke these absurd demands?

Or even when a Catholic like Rev. Fr. John T. Zuhlsdorf refers to a right to vote as though it were “written into our being”. How can this be, when no-one contests the State’s denial of voting rights to the insane and to convicts, whose ontological dignity is no less than anyone else’s?

But at least with Catholics we know what ‘human dignity’ means. What do the secularists mean, though, when, unable to show the duty from which their asserted rights were inferred, they make some vague appeal to human dignity? If any secularists are visiting here (or anyone who understands the secularist world-view), please let me know!

In Iota Unum, Professor Romano Amerio links such claims to abstract rights without corresponding duties to the conflation of human nature and the human person. But then there are secularists like Professor Peter Singer, who explicitly separate out the two in their scheme of ‘human non-persons’ and ‘non-human persons’. And then one hears the likes of Mr. Paul Keating calling for a society based on the innate dignity of man according to a vague humanist conception. But when man has no goal beyond this world, ‘human dignity’ becomes a very shaky foundation indeed.

Reginaldvs Cantvar