Kate Burley of Sky News can’t open her mouth on any subject (such as, this morning, London transport) without fuming about the homophobic and misogynist Tony Abbott.
His views, according to Burley, her interviewees and just about every progressive person, disqualify him from holding any public job this side of Nazi Germany. Hence, uncountable progressive knickers got in a twist when Abbott was nevertheless appointed advisor to the UK Board of Trade.
The underlying assumption is that holding any other than woke views on any subject places a man outside the pale. Whether or not such views have anything to do with his prospective job is immaterial.
Now, I’ve never been considered for any public job and neither have I ever sought one. But sometimes one likes to indulge in hypothetical speculations, along the lines of “what if…”
What if I were a candidate for a job in some sort of advisory capacity or perhaps as proverbial dog catcher? Would I be able to run the vetting gauntlet of ‘public opinion’ (made up of about 50 politicians, a hundred media personages and about as many academics)?
The best way to decide is to compare my views with Mr Abbott’s. Since I don’t have his name recognition, for me to stand any chance I’d have to be more acceptable than him. Alas, I have to admit with some chagrin that the opposite is the case.
Mr Abbott is a Catholic, but one doesn’t have to be a Christian to oppose homomarriage, as we both do. In 2017, he led the campaign against it in an Australian referendum.
By broadening marriage, he said, homomarriage weakens it – and he is absolutely right. I’d go even further though. This abomination effectively destroys the vital institution of marriage by disengaging it from the millennia of Western tradition.
Rather than being a sacred union essential to creating families, the building blocks of society, marriage becomes an affirmation of some nebulous – and in this case downright perverse – human rights. It loses not just sacramental significance, but also any other.
If two homosexuals choose to live together, that’s their business. But conferring an official status on such unions is the business of society at large. By doing so, society agrees to redefine marriage so broadly that it becomes undefinable.
That was demonstrated by the late Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, who married his cat and bequeathed much of his fortune to her. That was followed by a spate of similar ‘marriages’ all over the world, especially in the more fashionable states of America. And why not? If any marriage is a human right, regardless of the parties involved, then any objection to interspecies marriage becomes invalid.
In the same vein, Abbott is opposed to homosexual adoptions. He called marriage “the basis of family”, adding that “it is not homophobic to maintain that, ideally, children should have both a mother and a father”.
That’s another example of Christian doctrine overlapping with common sense. Every study I’ve ever seen shows that any other than the traditional family spells a recipe for disaster, social, psychological and economic.
Having two daddies who from one day to the next may decide to be two mummies, or else alternate in those roles, is perverse in every moral, aesthetic and intellectual sense. A child reared in such an environment has next to no chance of growing up a normal, well-balanced individual.
Mr Abbott also put homomarriage, rightly, into a broader context. “If you’re worried about religious freedom and freedom of speech, vote no,” he said. “And if you don’t like political correctness, vote no because voting no will help to stop political correctness in its tracks.”
Political correctness, I’d add, is a battering ram of the cultural revolution aiming to crash through every certitude of Western polity and indeed civilisation. At its extreme, it’s unadulterated fascism, different only in the scale and extent of violence from the nightmare of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.
An ability to see what appears to be an isolated problem as but a strand in the rich fabric of life is rare, and Mr Abbott ought to be commended, not castigated, for possessing it.
Then there’s the misogyny chestnut the likes of Kate Burley are trying to shove down our throats. To wit, when talking about the cost of electricity in 2011, Mr Abbott said: “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing…” He needn’t have said anything else.
Housewives?!? Ironing?!?!? There’s a woman hater if the Kates of this world have ever seen one. Doesn’t that vermin know that the only differences between men and women are physiological or, given the advances in medical science, not even that?
Well, call me a troglodyte, but I’ve never handled an iron in my life. This job is always done by my wife, although I let the men’s side down by doing all the cooking.
Mr Abbott seems to believe, as I do, that, rather than being shameful and demeaning, housewifery is a vital social occupation, deeply rooted in human nature. If pressed, he’d probably invoke suitable biblical passages to that effect, but that’s unnecessary.
When both parents go to work every day and then share household duties, one such duty usually falls by the wayside: bringing up children. I could cite numerous examples to that effect, some from my own family, though I wish I couldn’t.
Agree or disagree, such remarks fall far short of misogyny. As does another statement Mr Abbott made, that men are better at exerting authority. That’s a truth flying in the face of totalitarian woke lies.
Exerting authority involves an aggressive personality, and aggressiveness is directly linked to testosterone. That’s basic physiology, confirmed by any number of clinical studies, and we don’t even have to go deep into sociology or indeed history to prove it.
It’s true that some women are more authoritative than some, or even most, men. Elizabeth I, Catherine II or, closer to our own time, Margaret Thatcher spring to mind. But statistical averages over the seven billion people inhabiting the globe would doubtless vindicate Mr Abbott’s statement by a wide margin.
What else? Mr Abbott has misgivings about climate change, although, unlike me, he acknowledges both its existence and anthropogenic nature. He only objects to some economically ruinous policies aimed at counteracting it.
He is also opposed to euthanasia, which is probably linked to his Catholicism. Yet one doesn’t have to be a Catholic to construct a strong and, to me, irrefutable argument in favour of the sanctity of every human life and therefore against the arbitrary taking of it.
I also go further than Mr Abbott in opposing abortion. He’d like to limit the number of terminations, while accepting that women have a right to have them. I disagree – on the same grounds as my opposition to euthanasia.
Since it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment during gestation when a human life begins, conception is the only indisputable point. And, if any doubt exists, it must decently be interpreted in favour of saving, rather than taking, a life.
When he was Australia’s PM, Mr Abbott secured many advantageous trade deals with China, Japan and others. That makes him qualified for the advisory job he has got – and any disqualifications exist only in the agued minds of our aspiring totalitarians.
In the unlikely, nay impossible, event that any government department is thinking of offering me a job, my message is a resounding don’t. I’d be buried under an avalanche of black balls, and I wouldn’t have the strength of Mr Abbott’s credentials to extricate myself.