A feeding frenzy is afoot over the review of Safe Schools. This minimally funded public program is designed to prevent bullying in schools, which is notoriously severe for kids whose sexual orientation or identity makes them easy meat for sorting out hierarchies of informal power in the playground.
We learn that the PM caved in when a 'concerned Christian' MP started reading out detailed from a non-Safe School website about genital tucking, representing the program as perversely sexual propaganda.
Clammy hands are already at work on the completely unrelated plebiscite on same sex marriage after the expected Coalition win in this year's federal election.
Last Monday's Q&A revealed how spokesmen for Christians feel that both are insidious challenges to the family, mother-baby bonding, and the appalling liberalisation of anti-homosexual and discriminatory criminal and civil laws.
Coincidentally poor old George Pell is under attack for failing to observe that his Ballarat colleagues were prolifically enabling Ridsdale and other pedophiles to sexually abuse little boys — though it seems Bishop Mulkearn thought it was about 'homosexuality', not pederasty.
The prurient desire to control the sexual interests of others on the one hand, and on the other the gross failures by institutions to protect vulnerable children in their care, are sadly linked to an unwillingness to face the truth about human sexuality. It's easier to judge, than to seek to understand.
The Bible can easily be read to find a self-serving interpretation. That's why we study it properly, as well as reading and meditating upon it.
It is enriched by its context at the time of writing and the time of reading. No 'originalist' imagination can limit its meaning to that of the 'founding fathers', as Justice Scalia tried to insist was the only way to approach the American Constitution. Context and relationships among people at the time of creation and as we continue to be created in our relationships with others are integral parts.
Our 2016 context is a secular society which has become far more sensitive to the varieties of religious experience, human sexuality and the expression of both.
We are wounded by a royal commission into the self-appointed leaders of morality who turned a blind eye and failed to listen to the screams and complaints of abused children, because they were not particularly 'interesting'. Let alone powerful. That was the Catholic Church, until right now.
We were then, and are even more today, informed about sexual exploitation of children and