The Australian who has shouldered the biggest burden of defending natural marriage is former SAS commander and now head of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), Jim Wallace. Watching the intellectual pigmies of politics and media spitting at him yesterday was a disgusting sight - disgusting, in that public discourse on the greatest moral issue of our day (yes, the real one) has been so degraded.
Be amazed at the frenzied indignation of the ABC TV interviewer HERE, and listen to the self-indulgent abuse from one of our federal MPs, Warren Entsch, on ABC radio at the same site. Where are the adults? Don't, however, be amazed that the Greens (whose leader, Christine Milne, was Wallace's opponent at the university debate on Tuesday which gave gave the pretext for this mob attack) have run straight to the Thought Police to lodge a 'Human Rights' complaint about Wallace - after all, these 'Human Rights' Commissions largely exist to enable the Left to intimidate Christian and conservative opinion.
Be ashamed that our Prime Minster would attempt to humiliate as respected a public figure as Brigadier General (ret) Jim Wallace AM, a soldier honoured for his services to counter-terrorism, by publicly reneging on her promise to address the ACL federal conference next month - a conference for which tickets have been sold based upon her attendance. And that she leapt to this oh-so-PC condemnation based on muddled media reporting of an off-the-cuff response to a student's question at a public forum, without having the basic courtsey to clarify the context with the ACL office! How unjust and unprofessional - in fact, downright rude.
Ms Gillard preferred the pleasure of pontification to the duty of clarification, even though the clarification was available the same morning as her lofty condemnation of "heartless, wrong, unacceptable". As the more even-handed elements of the media, more open to nuance, reported:
Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) head Jim Wallace has denied he compared homosexuality with smoking in a debate on same-sex marriage...
"What I was saying is that on one hand we are vocal on our discouragement of people to smoke and on the other we are suppressing public dialogue about the health risks associated with homosexuality."
Gay rights activists responded by saying Mr Wallace's figures were based on a decades-old survey of obituaries in San Francisco newspapers.
But Mr Wallace says that information is wrong and comments from Canadian gay activists in 2009 and a NSW report into HIV in 2011 support his position.
"2011 is about as up to date as you can get," he said in a statement.
"If we warn against smoking because it carries health dangers, we should also be warning young people in particular about activity which clearly carries health risks."
Wallace has made the valid point that there are various activities that carry grave health risks - and the examples of smoking and homosexual copulation are certainly risky - but for some reason we do not warn our young people about the risks of same-sex behaviour in the way we warn them about smoking. Strangely, he made exactly the same point in an opinion piece in The Australian in December 2011 ("If our schools are concerned about discouraging smoking for its 7-10 year shortening of life, how can we in all honesty encourage a lifestyle for men that shortens it on average by double that?") but nobody leapt up and down back then - so what exactly makes it such a big deal now? Could it be that we are within days or weeks of the vote on gay marriage and the cynical politicians like Milne and Entsch simply want to fling mud, unsubstantiated mud, at their political opponents?
And if our legislators are about to vote on whether to include homosexual relationships in exactly the same "package" as heterosexual marriage, then surely it is relevant to consider that homosexual acts, by their very nature, are not the same as natural intercourse, and carry the most grave of health risks.
For example, as Wallace points out in the ABC interview, there has been no reduction in the grim fact that over 80% of all new cases of AIDS in Australia are in the category 'men who have sex with men'; and he is correct in noting that the figures on reduced life expectancy for male homosexuals are not ACL research but were referenced by a major homosexual lobby group as recently as 2009, in a formal submssion to the Canadian human rights commission.
Further to this question of the shortening of life expectancy associated with homosexual behaviour: as authoritative a medical journal as the Lancet, as recently as 2008, concluded that young men with HIV/AIDS will on average lose 17 years of life expectancy compared to their non-HIV peers, even with the very best antiviral treatment. (Pay wall: see summary of the findings at "Medical News Today").
So Wallace's points are entirely valid, as steps in a logical argument:
- We know that HIV/AIDS is a very serious disease, and that over 80% of all new cases of HIV/AIDS in Australia occur in 'men who have sex with men'.
- We also know from a major study in the medical journal The Lancet as recently as 2008, that even with the most expensive antiviral treatment, a 20 year old man who contracts HIV/AIDS has 17 years less life expectancy compared to one of his peers who does not contract HIV/AIDS.
- These are facts: AIDS is closely linked to homosexual activity in Australia, and AIDS leads to a loss of about 17 years loss of life expectancy for a young man.
- QED
So where is the 'adult' anywhere in the media who will do justice to these valid points, not just join in journalistic fondling of the dominant group-think paradigm? And what grounds has Ms Gillard got for her accusation that Wallace's comments were "untrue", let alone "unacceptable"?
The PC lynch mob has met its match in Wallace; the structure of mind of an SAS commander and counter-terrorist is not likely to crumble before a few petulant journos or cheap-shot politicians.
Read the next post for our AMF Media Release in support of Wallace.
UPDATE
Archbishop Peter Jensen supports Jim Wallace on Q&A: see coverage including the excerpt from Q&A HERE
Last night on the ABC program Q&A, Dr Jensen was asked by a member of the studio audience if he supported Mr Wallace's views.
He replied that while he did not agree with everything ACL leaders said, he was "generally supportive" of the lobby.
"It's very hard to get to the facts here because we don't want to talk about it and in this country censorship is alive and well," he said.
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