Graeme

My personal view is that every abortion is a tragedy. That doesn't mean it's not appropriate at times, but I have a dislike for using it as a form of birth control.

I've seen other blog sites being reported and it's due to one or more suspect ads. The sites don't control the advertising and while malicious ads are usually withdrawn fairly fast, sometimes it takes a bit of time before the ad is identified and removed by the people controlling the ads.

I've just checked and it's on my story page...but at my laptop's screen resolution it's off the right-hand side and not immediately visible. Check for a horizontal scroll bar to see the rest of the stories

It's unclear from the article if Disney is the company doing this. There is a single paragraph near the end about a company, HCL America, that doesn't make sense unless you assume that they are the ones who actually employee these people and that they're the ones replacing the staff with people from overseas. If that's true, then that implies the entire article has been slanted to attack Disney for the actions of a third party. Boycotting Disney for the actions of a company who won the contract to do the work three years ago doesn't seem too effective. An online petition to the Disney executives would be much more effective, I think. That way they will hopefully look at alternatives when the contract with HCL America expires. EDIT TO ADD: The NY Times article on the subject makes it clearer that it is the outsourcing company that is doing this, not Disney directly, though the implication from the Disney executives is that they have approved it. They state that they have also created new jobs as well as making others redundant, and claim a net 70 job increase. Being cynical, and given comments in that article, I suspect those extra 70 jobs are lower-skilled and lower-paying than the positions being made redundant. But, if those figures are correct, then they're employing more Americans than before -- just less skilled ones...

The latest opinions I've seen is that the Liberal Party will submit their own proposal in August, after the Winter break, with voting on that bill sometime late in the year. I'm not holding my breath.

Items 2 and 3 are, I believe, built into the forum software and are not configurable. I don't know about item 1, but I don't usually do a lot of searches.

Damn. That video's not available from New Zealand. I'm going to have to wait until I get home before I can watch it

A referendum isn't needed. The High Court of Australia has already ruled that the existing constitution doesn't prevent same-sex marriage. It's purely a legislative issue. The current legislation was changed around 10 years ago to explicitly state that marriage was between one man and one woman. All that's needed is to reverse that change, though changing it to explicitly allow same-sex couples would be even better because it would remove any ambiguity.

That makes three. Besides this one and the Greens, there's another one that was withdrawn earlier this year because the Liberal Party wasn't allowing a conscience vote on the subject (Liberal Democratic senator David Leyonhjelm put it on hold because of the Liberal Party position). Unless the Liberal Party allows a conscience vote, this is just political grandstanding. Hopefully, this will put enough pressure on the Liberals that they do so. For those not from Australia, voting is almost always along party lines. That means that if the party position is to vote no on something, all members are expected (and generally will) vote no. A conscience vote is where the party members are told that they can 'vote their conscience' with no fear of reprisal from the party (Labor Party members can be expelled from the party if they vote against the party position. The Liberal Party are not as draconian, but there is usual some sort of party disciplinary action taken if a member votes against the party position). Currently, the Labor Party has a party position in favour of allowing same-sex marriage, but they allow a conscience vote. The Liberal Party has a party position opposing same-sex marriage, and they're not currently allowing a conscience vote. The Prime Minister said before the last election that whether to allow a conscience vote would be decided by the party after the election -- something that hasn't happened yet (it's not been discussed). Recent polling of the members of parliament has indicated that there is possibly a one vote majority in favour of same-sex marriage in the senate, and that it is within 2-4 votes of passing in the House of Representatives. However, there was also a number of members of parliament who didn't indicate how they would vote, so there is some uncertainty there.

Congratulations to the happy couple!

Cheesy at the start, but a great ending and a strong message. Thanks, James!

Thanks, Colin! Now that's one politician that I think I could like :) By the way, the Nationals (the party of the member making the speech) are the conservative party in New Zealand, so that also goes to show (as does the Irish referendum) that conservatives are not automatically anti-gay.

Australia was largely settled by Europeans, originally British, but with a big influx of Italians and Greeks after WW2. I doubt Guy Sebastian (the Australian entry) will win, mainly because of the way the voting is set up. There are groups of nations that tend to work together in the voting and that will work against Australia.

Congratulations to Ireland! I woke up this morning to the news that the yes vote won with 62% of the vote. That makes them the first nation in the world to legalise same-sex marriage through a national vote.

The pre-polls showed an almost 2-to-1 majority in favour, but we learnt from Proposition 8 that pre-polling on this subject can be misleading. People will say one thing in response to the poll because they don't want to be accused of bigotry, but vote differently in private. I'm hopeful for a majority, but I will be pleasantly surprised if it's close to a 66% (2-to-1 in favour).

I think last year was dropping the objection to gay scouts. This is about allowing gay scout leaders.

Grasshopper wrote an essay for The Mail Crew along a similar line. I wonder if someone at Beyond Blue read that and was inspired to make that video? Anyway, I was really impressed that not only was the video made, but that it was being screened in cinemas as part of the pre-show advertisements for a mainstream movie.

It used to be called IDAHO -- I'm not sure when it became IDAHOT though a quick search shows that it was labelled as IDAHOT last year as well. As per this article (about the Australian Football League Players Association campaign against homophobia), the date corresponds to the date when homosexuality was removed from the International Classification of Diseases by the World Health Organisation.

I was at the cinema yesterday with the family when this ad was one shown before the movie: I thought I'd share it

To me, the father had a problem with explaining what he was doing. The money for donations that he took from his son he called "taxes". That was giving the wrong impression to the young boy and if that's how he explained other things, I'm not surprised that the son didn't understand. The father said that giving was more important, but when it came to money he took from his son rather than encouraging his son to give. The son eventually understood the message, but it was after his father had died.

Field of Tainted Dreams There's a radio broadcast on homophobia in sports this coming weekend. This is an intro article that talks about some of the issues.

That is so wonderful...thank you for posting it!

Intriguing. Rather than speculate, though, I'm going to wait for chapter 2...and then wait for chapter 3...and then...

Mason I've heard before. Rock could be named after Rock Hudson. Eriko is, as already pointed out, a variant of Erika (some parents do things like that). Kedon could be a variant of Keidan. Rand can be short for Randall (as per the USA politician Rand Paul). Many years ago, someone told me that names such as these were more likely in certain cultural groups. In that particular case, they were referring to African-Americans in southern USA. If that's true, then the names are implying that these kids are not from your typical white anglo-saxon population. If so, it's a subtle point that wouldn't be obvious to those outside the USA.

Just because I can.... Vampire Squid's Secret Sex Life Revealed