Miranda Devine labels equality campaign “totalitarian, frightening, intolerant”
By Samuel Leighton-Dore
She’s the female who hates feminism. The divorcee who champions traditional marriage. The privileged ex-Kirribilli student who scathingly blames welfare-dependent wives for their own domestic abuse. The conservative journalist professionally dependent on her overt prejudice, white privilege, and desire to polarize.
When it comes to hateful, damaging and discriminative rhetoric in the Australian media, there’s simply no looking past The Daily Telegraph’s Miranda Devine.
Accompanying today’s typically bewildering rant (titled “Totalitarian Tolerance”) is a fun illustration of a police officer draped in rainbows and welding a baseball bat. Of course, the article is another of Devine’s absurd attempts at painting the LGBTIQ community as a pack of violent bullies out for Christian blood.
She even goes so far as to evoke dramatic, Hitler-esque imagery (“Everyone has to be seen as marching merrily in lock-step towards the mandated redefinition of our foundational social institution”) while describing the recent outrage over Telstra’s revoked support of marriage equality and their subsequent (and admittedly confusing) backflip. This obviously makes a whole bunch of sense given we all know how much the Nazis loved the gays – and how savagely the NSW police force fight in our defense.
“This is just one example of the totalitarian overreach of the same sex marriage lobby. Everywhere, there are signs of a frightening and escalating intolerance before the plebiscite.” She writes, assumedly while cackling into a full glass of top-shelf chardonnay. She conveniently ignores the frightening intolerance and discrimination our community has faced historically – and continues to face today – while gleefully cherry-picking quotes and statistics to reinforce a one-track-minded argument designed to polarize readers and make already marginalized people feel even crappier about themselves.
Devine’s inflammatory use of the word “totalitarian” in today’s article is especially curious, given how historically engrained totalitarianism is in Roman Catholicism (Devine is a devout Roman Catholic). In line with her ridiculous knack for self-serving references, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that in 395AD Church leaders of the Roman state unleashed a totalitarian reign that would spark the beginning of the long-lasting anti-Semitic ideology. Laws were passed that enshrined Christianity as the sole religion of the Roman Empire – with the practitioners of outlawed religions severely punished or killed. Not only that, but, if we’re going by the same definition, isn’t Catholicism itself more totalitarian than any equality-supporting Australian law could ever be? The Bible is filled to the brim with genocide, slavery and infanticide performed out of duty to a totalitarian God. Jesus himself pushed the ultimate totalitarian notion of eternal punishment for thought-crime – if you don’t believe and obey you will burn in everlasting fire.
And yet, Devine would have you believe that the Catholic Church is David, defiantly battling tooth-and-nail against the LGBTIQ community’s Goliath. You only have to shift your eyes slightly to the right in today’s paper to see another column of Devine’s (titled “Who Will Care for Christian Refugees?”) to read her view that “Christians are the most persecuted people on Earth” who are “bullied, harassed and assaulted by Muslim bigots”.
So yeah, basically I reckon she and George Pell probably catch up for bingo and tanqueray-tonics at the nonexistent Vaucluse RSL.
The problem isn’t how or why a woman so blinded by her own thinly veiled prejudices maintains an active/relevant voice in the Australian media, but how she manages to be so blatantly contradictory in the process. After all, the woman fighting so fiercely for the continuation of a Church-defined institution of marriage is recently divorced – a sin on-par with cross-dressing, infidelity and homosexuality according to Roman Catholicism.
But I suppose progress on some aspects of traditional marriage are okay, so long as they’re convenient. Which, for Devine, marriage equality is clearly not.