We thronged the streets of Melbourne - thousands of us, gathered in a peaceful joyful celebration of life.
Passers by wondered at the long procession, and with us being such a peaceful sea of happy faces, we received many kind greetings from those we ambled by.
We had almost finished our walk before I heard the first nay-sayer. I was suprised we got that far with only one, or at least only one I heard. "Go home!' was his intellectually-stimulating shout.
But as we progressed further along those last few hundred metres, I began to hear a rhythmic sound that felt strangely angry. Very angry.
It was confusing and hard to decipher at first. There was music playing - I vaguely recognised the song. But out of sync with the music, there was some other chant. I could not hear the words, but I could immediately feel : whatever it was, it felt wrong. On the inside.
It wasn't a chant of love, of gratitude or thanks. Whatever it was, it was angry.
Was it some of us, having walked so peacefully, now angrily yelling a pro-life message?
I would have been surprised. It seemed so out-of-character with the group and with the lovely spirit of the walk so far!
What then?
Aha! I see now.
Enter stage left: the Australian Sex Party, riding on a pink stallion!
Waving placards advertising themselves as the "Australian Sex Party", a small but angry mob (30 people?) were coordinating their efforts by chanting in unison.Did I mention they were angry?
Very angry.
And so they graced us as we peacefully gathered at our final meeting place.
We were there, representing those who died without a voice, without a choice.
Those whose lives and every chance of future hopes and choices was snatched from them, by cruel adults in a cruel world, emboldened by cruel legislation.
They were there to, well... it wasn't really that clear what they were there to do.
At one point during our proceedings, they chanted together :
"Not the Church,
"Not the State,
"WOMEN will decide their fate!"
Uh, really?
MORE than half of abortion victims are women.
So let's get this straight : that's a lot of women not getting to decide their fate.
In fact, the Australian Sex Party is anti-choice. If they believed in choice, they'd let the babies be born, and adopted by loving parents, and then let each baby grow up and decide for himself/herself whether they want to commit suicide or continue living.
Don't make that choice for them!
As soon as you choose for someone else that they will die, you are anti-choice.
In contrast, I am stridently _pro_-choice. Let the baby live, and make its own choices as it learns and grows.
On and on they chanted. "Not the Church, not the State. WOMEN will decide their fate!"
Such a ridiculous self-contradiction.
The only thing it seemed anything like was a monstrous four year old, furious at the world when things don't go their way.
What do you do when you're a spoiled brat and you want something to change? You throw a temper tantrum.
Yep - that's the ASP.
But evidently sensing that I detected a lack of intellectual integrity in that chant, they did eventually switch.
"No way, back to the backyard!
"No way, back to the backyard!
"No way, back to the backyard!"
On and on and on for minutes or maybe even tens of minutes.
If you want a political party that is able to coordinate the mindless yelling of short self-contradicatory slogans, the Australian Sex Party has definitely proven their prowess. I'd vote for them anyday. Highly intellectually stimulating.
But hang on a second - oh, yeah, I see.
It actually took me a minute or two before I could even understand their garbled chant - the "no way back to the backyard" one. Yeah, I was at a distance from them at that point.
But right, I get it now : they're saying that the legislative reform of two years past meant late-term abortions could move out of the backyard into the hospitals. You know - those places where the Hippocratic oath is held in reverence and lives are preserved by all possible means.
And they're saying that there is absolutely no way they will accept a re-criminalisation of abortion which would send abortions "back to the backyard".
Right... so now that I understand what they're saying, shall I bother tearing it to shreds?
No?
Ok, let's not bother. It is too pitifully stupid. It really is an insult to the intelligence of every person gathered there on the ASP platform.
I would love to have gone up and talked peacefully and quietly to one of them, and invited them to my house for a coffee. Clearly, when dripping with such extreme anger and seeming hatred towards "us" - "us", the much larger group who had peacefully gathered, and who were the only reason they too were present (i.e. to protest against our presence) - clearly, some of these poor folk had some pretty screwy ideas about "us" and the universe, to hate us so much. I thought a constructive conversation over a coffee - well, obviously we wouldn't leave united in opinion, but they might "discover the other" and feel the love and realise we're not quite as bad as they think...
But alas, perhaps a dozen police officers were standing twixt us and they (or perhaps a good thing? they were so angry - and without a cause - who knows, they would probably have thought themselves to be doing a good thing to physically assault us), and so I decided against visiting them on this occasion.
Back to the... BACKYARD! HILARIOUS!
But wait - writing a blog has proven one thing to me, and that is :Most people don't think. Whatever is extremely obvious will still be missed by most people.
Need proof? (chuckle) I have loads of comments left by people on this blog, who made idiots of themselves by completely missing both the point and the obvious.
So - please forgive me and bear with me, those for whom this is obvious - please bear with me whilst I momentarily deconstruct the piercing insights of the Australian Sex Party, embodied in their insightful slogan, "No way, back to the backyard!".
For starters : where does crime belong? Does it not belong in the backyard, or elsewhere out of public eye? So, if abortion is a crime, should it not return exactly to that very place?
But abortion is not a crime, you say. Oh? By what standard?
By the standard of Victorian legislation?
Tell me : was abortion a crime 100 years ago?
What about late-term abortion - which was the subject of today's peaceful procession.
Was late-term abortion a crime three years ago?
Yes?
Did you advocate it nonetheless? i.e. was it morally right for a woman to have a late-term abortion, even though it was illegal?
See, the ASPers believe that abortion - at any age - is morally noble. A far better choice than - shock of shocks, horror of horrors - letting an unwanted child be adopted by loving would-be-parents.
So, to them, as far as they're concerned, abortion has always been legal, from a moral perspective. It's the morally right choice to let a woman choose to deny her baby choice.
And legislation is just a pesky thing standing in the way of what is morally right.
Thus sayeth the Australian Sex Party, and they must be right, 'coz no-one would be that angry if they didn't have an irrefutable lucid case to back up their stance... or not.
But hang on a second - the Australian Sex Party claims to be opposed to religion in politics.
But the very claim that a woman has a right to abort her baby - a right that transcends any legislation - is a religious claim.
Either law is determined entirely by humans - majority rule or whatever - or else law has some "transcendental" qualities.
ASP claims on the one hand they don't want religion in politics, and then on the other hand appeals to some nebulous undefined religious-sounding transcendental "right" of a woman to deny another woman the chance to be born and live.
Go figure.
So they're contradictory, once again.
So maybe they'll quickly back-pedal and say that no, abortion isn't "right" for any absolute reasons, but only because it is the will of the people.
Is it the will of the people?
There are plenty of stats that indicate otherwise. Like the flood of pro-life submissions - vastly outweighing the pro-death ones - sent to the Victorian Legislative Council when it proposed "legalising" late-term abortions a few years ago.
But let's grant for a microsecond that "the majority" want abortion to be legal, and let's suppose for a moment that there are no absolutes and the will of the majority makes things "right".
Even if so, what if the will of the people changes?
Clearly, a hundred years ago the "will of the people" was for abortion to be illegal.
In fact, homosexuality and marital infidelity too.
I don't suppose the Australian Sex Party would want that.
But to reject that, they either have to appeal to some indefensible notion of absolute women's rights - in which case they're taking a religious position themselves, the which they explicitly denounce - or they have to appeal to the will of the majority, in which case they have to concede that those laws were good and noble in their time.
And if so, then they also have to concede that if the will of the people is shown to be pro-life, or becomes pro-life in the future, then abortions should indeed go "back to the backyard".
And - yeah, sorry, I apologised in advance about labouring the point, but some people need everything to be shown step-by-step, so bear with me ...
The Australian Sex Party is engaged in lobbying designed to alter the "will of the people". If they think the will of the majority is the only rightful rule, and they think it's fine for them to try to alter the will of the people, then why are they so vehemently and spitefully opposed to us also seeking to alter the "will of the people" through careful research and education about the MANY bad outcomes inherently associated with abortion?
The only possible answer : they're hypocrites. Whatever promotes their cause is good; whatever opposes it is bad. There is no other morality to the ASP. They have a religious commitment to unfettered sex and unfettered murder.
They are a religion.
Their holy book is the ASP manifesto.
Their creed is mindless adherence to the belief that anything goes in sex or baby-killing, just because.
Or if they try to pin their credibility on Atheism and Humanism, they fall into the same trap once again : Atheism is an absolute belief in the absolute non-existence of any God, a belief that is simply unable to be substantiated via the scientific method. Atheism is thus inherently religious in nature, and in fact this is how Humanism has obtained income tax concessions - it is a registered religion.
So whichever way you slice the cake, the Australian Sex Party is full of religious zealots.
"Get religion out of politics" they say, but what they mean is "we will tolerate no religion except our own!".
Their religion, they tell us, must set all the rules, and all other religions must be banished. Hello? That seems fair... lol.
The most striking thing about this lovely day out with the Australian Sex Party was their absolute, total lack of rationality.
Slogans, yes. Anger, yes. Religious fervour and commitment, yes.
We have stats, we have research, we have interviews, we have personal stories, and we have a cogent worldview in which our position makes sense.
But them? All zeal. All unbridled anger. But no substance. Not a single intelligent comment from them, all day. Not that I was privy to.
Self-contradiction - yeah, loads of that. Truckloads.
But sense? Look elsewhere! :o)
But, I haven't finished : "back to the backyard". Bear with me whilst I deconstruct it just a little longer...
Already back in the backyard!
The ASP are hypocrites still further. "No way [will we let abortion go] back to the backyard!"They yelled it over and over and over again.
But actually, they're already doing that.
The RU486 abortion pill is taken at home. A "backyard abortion" if you will.
And a new phenomenon in the USA, starting here in Australia too, is the abortion-via-internet. Skype or whatever to a trained professional who will guide you through the process of killing that pesky little baby inside.
In fact, it was not the legalisation of abortions and hence access to medical facilities that starting "saving women's lives" through "safe abortions", but the availability of antibiotics.
And do I need to point out the bleeding obvious once again, that when one in two patients die, an abortion can hardly ever be called "safe", and when a woman kills her female baby, it can hardly be called supporting women's choices when that woman-to-be never got a chance.
But I digress.
All I really mean to say is that abortion is already back in the backyard.
So much for "no way, back to the backyard!". Intellectual stimulation to the max, these ASPers. Maybe they really do only think with their genitals?
But hey, I'm sure they're all lovely people, deeeeep down, beneath thick layers of anger and other nasties. Somewhere in there. Surely.
I really would like to meet some of them, one-on-one in person in casual conversation around a coffee.
If they manage to climb out of their self-imposed prison of hate, they might just discover an interesting world of different opinions that aren't quite as wacky - nor quite as screwy - as they clearly believe.
And hey - we can always part friends, even if our ideologies never align. I don't mind having friends who are self-confessed murderers. Murder is wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that murderers are precious people who I can love and genuinely care about.
I'm not so sure it goes in the reverse - believing in moral absolutes different to their own is such a hideous crime, I doubt many of them could displace their own prejudices long enough to really get to know me. But hey - their loss.
And so, it was an interesting day, and made all the more interesting by the Australian Sex Party.
Until today, I thought they were weird but I knew little about them.
But thanks to their efforts, I am now much better informed : they are self-contradictory all the way, intellectually destitute and driven by blind anger. Maybe even rage. Kudos, ASP. Kudos.
The better way to argue
In contrast to the total lack of anything intelligent heard from the ASP today, I will end with this :"Trees aren't the only things worth saving."
That is an intelligent banner - one of many in today's procession.
It leaves open the question : what else is worth saving? Are babies worth saving? It doesn't directly answer the question. It invites intelligent discussion.
ASP, if you want to be taken seriously, you need to grow up beyond your four-year-old temper tantrums and invite discussion around intelligent questions, instead of making your list of hostile demands.
Thanks for a fun day, and hey - if you can bear to put your prejudice aside, let's have a coffee.
Oh - and mindless rants in the comments doesn't exactly constitute a coffee. Thought I'd better throw that one in... :o)
Concluding remarks
If late-term abortion was actually a crime here in the state of Victoria, just three years ago, then re-criminalisation could occur just as soon. If morality is determined by the will of the people, what's wrong with re-criminalising the murder of unprotected babies, if that is the will of the people? And if you can't answer that question, ASPer, you really are as intellectually bankrupt as today made you seem. That's alright - failing to think is not a crime, but your life will be better if you think well instead of not at all. I promise. :o)But the reality, ASPer, is that you believe abortion is right, not because it is the will of the people, but because it is morally right in some transcendant absolute sense of the word. But you're too much of a coward to attempt to argue it, because you realise that as soon as you start trying to argue for moral absolutes, you're in a losing battle against some pretty strong arguments in favour of theistic morality.
And hence today's demonstration : why engage the intellect if you know you'll lose? And why abandon an indefensible position? Best thing to do is yell and shout angrily and hope people ignore the problems in your beliefs!
