Australian Christian Lobby

From today's Crikey email:



Greens turn their back on a moralising Christ. Greens win

David MacCormack writes:



Another week, another bout of common sense from the Greens. This is becoming disturbing. The influential Australian Christian Lobby sent a list of 25 questions to political parties demanding to know their stance on various issues, and today garnered some publicity for the responses.

The ACL is committed to seeing "Christian principles and ethics accepted and influencing the way we are governed". When Muslims talk like that, of course, there are dark mutterings about "Sharia Law". All the major, and a few minor, parties replied to the ACL survey. But the Greens told them to get stuffed.

On environmental issues, the ACL and the Greens are actually not that far apart. "What policies and /or targets will you put in place to reduce Australia's greenhouse pollution and make the switch to clean energy?" ACL asked, focussing not merely on the environmental impact of climate change, but the effect on the world's poor.

But a quick check of the rest of the survey shows why the Greens were right to have nothing to do with it. What is the big issue of the 2007 election campaign? The economy? Industrial relations? Tax reform? Education? The worm?

Wrong. For the ACL, it's s-x. Eleven of the ACL's 25 questions are about s-x or reproduction, including the usual religious fixations with controlling women's bodies, homos-xuality and p-rnography. No wonder ACL likes the Family First Party, which in recent days has taken its obsession with p-rn to new, erm, lengths.

The survey actively pushes the concept that only "unreasonable discrimination" against gays should be addressed (although, credit where it's due, even this places the ACL in a more reasonable position than the Howard Government). The survey also proposes that single women should be discriminated against in IVF, adoption and surrogacy.

Actual real world issues are not totally absent, but ACL offers its own devout take on them. Industrial relations is confined to the issue of whether WorkChoices affects Sunday as a "day of rest". The survey asks candidates whether they support a specific refugee program for Christians, and how to stop foreign aid being used for abortions. As for declining Parliamentary oversight of government – well, the ACL is focussed on the only oversight that matters: they want the Lord's Prayer retained before each day's Parliamentary sittings.

The Greens could have taken the approach of the rugged individualists at the Liberty and Democracy Party, who used the survey to fire back a pithy libertarian response stating that religious faith was irrelevant. Instead, correctly, they refused.

The ACL survey isn't some neutral list of political positions to help those with monotheistic delusions to make up their minds how to vote.

Instead, it pushes a nasty agenda focussed on s-x and discrimination.

The Greens are the only party to see it for what it is - or to have the moral courage to act accordingly.