People say the darndest things...

In her weekly column for the Sun Herald last week Miranda Devine somehow managed to link Penny Wong’s baby with the London Riots. How did she get there?
Penny Wong and her partner are having a baby = supporters of same-sex marriage are happy for her and wonder if Wong and partner would like to marry = gay marriage will undermine the traditional nuclear family, the “last bastion of bourgeois morality” = fatherless families = “You only had to see the burning streets of London last week to see the manifestation of a fatherless society”.

Get it? Perfectly logical equation.

It made me think of some other bizarre associations people in public places have made.

In 2006, former Federal Member of Parliament, Danna Vale used an eloquent leap of logic to connect the ‘race-debate’ in Australia with the RU486 abortion pill. She claimed Australia would become a Muslim nation within 50 years because we (‘we white-faced-Christians’) are aborting ourselves out of history. I suspect this comment may have been a little off-the-cuff and she probably paid for it with a temporarily eggy face. But with logic like this you gotta wonder why she was elected to the team of people who RUN THE COUNTRY!

Senator Barnaby Joyce is of course always ripe for a corker. He recently explained that he is against gay marriage because it would adversely affect his four daughters. Says Barnaby, "We know that the best protection for those girls is that they get themselves into a secure relationship with a loving husband, and I want that to happen for them. I don't want any legislator to take that right away from me."

So I accept this logic is perhaps slightly more stable than Danna Vale’s. But it is still a bit wobbly. No-one is suggesting Barnaby’s daughters can’t get married are they? As Alyssa Betts wrote in the NT Times yesterday, “It is not known if he was trying to say his daughters were all lesbians, or if, instead, their prospective male partners would rather marry men if given the option.”