If You Care About Gay Rights, Vote Below The Line In The Tas Senate …

If You Care About Gay Rights, Vote Below The Line In The Tas Senate

And no, I don’t just mean same-sex marriage. This goes way beyond just that.

If you care about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights even to the smallest degree, and are considering your vote in the Tasmanian Senate, then I have the following strong advice:

Vote below the line and direct your own preferences

Why am I suggesting voting below the line, even though this means numbering 54 boxes instead of one? Because a vote above the line for any party except [the Pirate Party or the Sex Party] could potentially help elect anti-gay-rights extremist Peter Madden of the Family First Party – who has a very strong above-the-line ticket flow – ahead of at least one of Labor, Liberal, or the Greens. Yes, even if you vote Labor or Green above the line in the Tasmanian Senate, it is possible for your vote to elect Peter Madden! If you vote below the line you can put him 51, 52, 53 or 54, and still support your chosen party. Let’s forget all the silly sparring between the big three about how a vote for Labor is a vote for the Greens or whatever – the bigger problem is that a vote for any of them above the line is potentially a vote for Peter Madden. A vote for almost anyone above the line in Tasmania is potentially a vote for him.

[..]

Peter Madden’s views on gay rights are so extreme that on Twitter a few months ago, he candidly supported Russia’s recently introduced anti-gay laws [..] The laws referred to in the top tweet (which Madden retweeted) go far beyond just controlling leading innocent youth astray. According to the link Madden retweeted, and then stated his absolute support and endorsement for, the laws in question ban the holding of gay and lesbian rights rallies. And, again according to the link, the laws in question ban promotion of “social equality of traditional and non-traditional relation” (ie promotion of gay and straight relationships as equal, including even campaigning for same-sex marriage). The laws, according to that link, also increase penalties for “insulting people’s religious feelings in public.”

[..]

A quick browse of his Twitter stream shows that Madden has approvingly retweeted articles suggesting SSM may lead to the normalisation of paedophilia. He believes that “a large %” of same-sex attracted people were molested by people of the same sex as a child, which he refers to as “the pederast aspect of homosexual causation” (he goes on about this theory quite a bit.) He opposes same-sex adoption because of “the pedophile factor”. He’s quite happy to take leaves out of the Cory Bernardi copybook in linking same-sex marriage to paedophilia and bestiality:

[..]

He credits Christianity with his difficult overcoming of the problem caused by his earlier experience. I would have more sympathy for that if Madden did not now so clearly believe in imposing aspects of the solution he found for his own problems on people who do not experience their own GLBT identity, or their own sexual liberty, as problems at all and are not looking for solutions to them – just fair treatment under the law. Far from solving problems for such people, Madden’s ideology creates them. It’s a bit like recovering from appendicitis then spending the rest of your life trying to rip everybody else’s appendix out.

Read more, comment here: http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/if-you-care-about-gay-rights-vote-below.html

Article includes advice on voting below the line and links to sites to help you do it.

If you have a question or comment for Dr Bonham you can post it on his site. You will need to have (or to create) a Google/Blogger account, LiveJournal profile, WordPress account, AIM profile, TypePad account or OpenID to comment. The link includes an email address for questions about voting below the line