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Keywords: Gay

  • RELIGION

    Religious freedom is negotiable

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 13 September 2012
    18 Comments

    Many conflicts over religious freedom are associated with discrimination: the freedom of schools to employ only Christian staff, or of ministers to conduct marriages only between a man and a woman. Many see these pressures to limit religious freedom as part of a concerted effort by secularist forces. They don't have to be seen that way.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bashing Queensland's revolting gay panic laws

    • Moira Rayner
    • 09 August 2012
    16 Comments

    My dad had just picked me up from the law library when we heard the screams. A chunky boy raced past, shirt tail flying, crying. Then I heard shouting, yelping and laughing, and three young men flew past in pursuit. This was to be my first experience of gay-bashing, and of the unofficial law-enforcement view of it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Across the purgatory sea to Botany Bay

    • Maria Takolander
    • 17 July 2012
    3 Comments

    Sophie, a Malagay slave in Mauritius, torched a barn housing a collection of leather straps — the flames soaring like the sounds of the black horses inside — and was packed off in a ship-sized crate to New South Wales.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Divorce, sexuality and the cult of self-improvement

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 July 2012
    2 Comments

    The therapist's office is a place where frankness is imperative, and self-examination an artform. Among the current batch of patients are a displaced Indian widower, and a gay teen with a self-destructive streak. The audience is left to ponder whether the doctor or the patient is the more deeply disturbed.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Politics in the pulpit

    • Aloysious Mowe
    • 09 July 2012
    35 Comments

    ‘I don’t think politics should be brought into the pulpit,’ said the gentleman who waited for me at the church door after all the other mass-goers at Sunday’s 8:30 am Mass had departed. ‘You upset my wife: she wanted to walk out during your homily.’

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    An uneasy conversation with Michael Kirby

    • Gordon Preece
    • 25 June 2012
    71 Comments

    The homosexuality debate in church and society is an uneasy and often destructive conversation that should not be entered into lightly. Both sides thus need to beware: ‘Conservatives’ if they slip from opposing homosexual acts to opposing homosexual people. The ‘liberals’ for frankly writing, as Michael Kirby admits, ‘very easy pieces’. Well before Malcolm Fraser, Jesus said (Christian) ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. Kirby, and the FUP authors, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, are cheapening grace.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Michael Kirby on sexuality and churches

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 15 June 2012

    'My partner Johan gives me a rough time. He says the church has always been horrible to gays; why do you have anything to do with it? But I don't want any old gent in frocks to take my religion from me.' Former High Court Justice Kirby is a practicing Christian and one of Australia's best known openly homosexual citizens. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sex, drugs and Patrick White

    • Patti Miller
    • 13 June 2012
    14 Comments

    I once received a postcard from White and his partner Manoly Lascaris. It responded to a note I had sent to White telling him we had named our new baby son Patrick Manoly. Our son is now a young man who occasionally wonders if he is the only bloke in Australia to be named after a gay couple.

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  • RELIGION

    Feminists and gay Christians who accept the Church

    • Kristina Keneally
    • 08 June 2012
    59 Comments

    Recently Catherine Deveny tweeted that my claim to be a Catholic and a feminist showed I was 'suffering serious cognitive dissonance'. Many gay Christians are confronted by a similar lack of understanding from non-believers who can't understand why they would embrace a Church that rejects them.

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  • RELIGION

    What gay parents are worth

    • Frank Brennan
    • 07 June 2012
    135 Comments

    When Joe Hockey said on Q&A that the 'very best circumstances' for a child entailed having 'a mother and a father', Penny Wong, who has a child with her partner Sophie Allouache, replied 'I know what my family is worth.' It was a galvanising moment in the same sex marriage debate, which is not going away.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Gay Christians' church trauma

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 April 2012
    23 Comments

    'God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,' quips the pastor from the pulpit. The congregation finds this hilarious, but not young gay Christian Ben, who feels secretly shamed. Later, when a string of Christian counselling programs fail to 'heal' his homosexuality, Ben takes to his wrists with a razor blade.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bob Carr's 'overlap of cultures' and the Victorian bishops on gay marriage

    • Michael Mullins
    • 02 April 2012
    28 Comments

    Foreign minister Carr used the phrase 'overlap of cultures' to describe people of different cultures living together. The bishops are entitled to expect the Government not to legislate to 'smash' the sacrament and religious institution of marriage. But tolerance of other cultures and faiths must be reciprocal.

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