I capture the family

I thought I had a personal policy of ignoring crazy conservatives. It drives me nuts that someone like Andrew Bolt gets so much attention for his illogical rantings. Not to mention Fred Nile, Alan Jones, Pauline Hanson or anyone else guaranteed to provide a controversial comment or two on request. But I have discovered it’s actually quite difficult to stick to this policy when writing about ‘gay issues’; even more so when writing about ‘gay FAMILY issues’. Just look at my last few posts. Who is featured? Bob Katter. Miranda Devine. Barnaby Joyce. Joh Bjelke-Peterson.

Why is it that every time an issue relating to marriage or families emerges on the political horizon, the extreme right are given so much airplay? Is it simply an effort to achieved balanced journalism? Or do loopy opinions just sell more papers? Or perhaps conservatives tend to have louder voices and deeper pockets?

Part of the problem is that the extreme right – and the Christian right – have been so successful in capturing ‘family values’ as their own. 'Family values’ is really a euphemism for white, Christian, heterosexual supremacy. Yet it seems that public figures who claim the protection of ‘family values’ as their raison d'être are consulted on EVERYTHING related to love, relationships and sex. For some crazy reason, self-identified defenders of the family are afforded expert status on matters relating to the private lives of gay people they have never met, lesbian mothers they have not once spoken to and transgendered folk who they chose to ignore. (Not to mention women who chose to have an abortion).

So why doesn’t the political left stake their own claim on ‘family values’?

The family closet: Bob Katter and his brother

Bob Katter is the new Sir Joh. A right wing nutter, most famous for his ludicrous conservative commentary. He is like Pauline Hanson or Wilson Tuckey on a good day, giving voice to the extreme conservatism which makes irresistible fodder for send up.

In some ways a person like Katter is less politically dangerous than savvier politicians -- those who publicly present as more moderate but are actually quite difficult to pin-down and challenge. At least Katter is often dismissed as just plain loopy.

But loopy or not, Katter has some pretty hurtful things to say about gay men and lesbians. Last week he made headlines for vitriolically encouraging people to "laugh at” and "ridicule" the concept of gay marriage. He also announced his campaign to reclaim the word ‘gay’; a perfectly “healthy adjective” that has become captive to the gay lobby. (Ok, that last bit was a bit ridiculous and funny as well as offensive.)

So it is interesting that this morning nearly every newspaper in the country seems to be carrying pictures of Carl Katter. Carl Katter is Bob Katter’s brother. And Carl is gay. On national TV last night, Carl commented on Katter’s expressed views about homosexuality, saying, ''It's hurtful, it's dangerous, it's damaging and it's really inappropriate”. He also said that should he meet the right man, he would like to get married, although Katter would be an expected no-show at the wedding.

So what is it about Bob Katter having a gay brother that excites the media? Part of me thinks it is just a fine opportunity to lampoon him. In one of Katter’s infamous quotes he stated that he would ''walk to Bourke backwards if the poof population of North Queensland is any more than 0.001 per cent''. Haha! Got you there Bob! That 0.001 percent was eating his cornflakes at your breakfast table.

But there is also something powerful about a family member of a public homophobe outing themselves. It reminds the world that no matter how much distance someone tries to create between themself and the scourge of gay humanity, every family has its closet.

Now we are three: donors, mothers and birth certificates

In a landmark case heard in the NSW courts earlier this week, a Sydney man has had his name removed from his child’s birth certificate to enable the child’s two mothers to be listed. The case is the first to test the 2008 amendments to the Status of Children Act, which allow a birth mother and her lesbian de facto partner to be legally registered as their child’s two parents. In this case, the child had been born prior to 2008, and the birth mother and donor had been listed on the birth certificate. However the two mothers separated in 2006, leading the birth mother’s ex-partner to petition for her name to be added to the birth certificate. She felt that this was the best way to protect her rights as a parent.

This case highlights the inadequacy of existing mechanisms to document parental relationships. Even the judge, NSW District Court Judge Stephen Walmsley, expressed discomfort with his decision and argued that birth certificates should have provisions for more than two parents.

This of course raises a more philosophical question about the role of birth certificates in history and society. Are they intended to document biological lineage or are they intended as working documents which individuals and families use to demonstrate legal guardianship of children? I have often wondered about this. My son’s birth certificate doesn’t list the name of his biological father, although this is noted on the donor registry kept by the Victorian department of Birth’s, Deaths and Marriages. If someone, somewhere in the future were tracing the history of my son’s father’s family, would my son be lost from this lineage? But equally, if non-biological mothers or fathers are not included on birth certificates, their children are similarly lost from their family history. So perhaps I just answered my own question; guardianship in an everyday sense, lineage and historical records are really one and the same.

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.”