He has told Australians that if elected he would not let his personal views dictate policy; nor would he take instructions from Rome. He said these things because he is conscious of the apprehension among women and liberals that he would take Australia to a more conservative position than we now have on issues such as abortion and gay rights. So, the last thing he needs is to act in any way that causes women and liberals to doubt his word. Announcing that he did not want a conscience vote when his party members had dispersed is difficult to explain away. It looks deliberate. Even tricky.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary Shelley Argent and her comrades at Queensland PFLAG have produced the following TV ad, which will reportedly air from tonight.

“We are looking at an epidemic, and worse, an epidemic that society seems content to accept. There is little apparent concern that men underuse primary healthcare, and are consequently less likely to be referred to mental health services. With most psychiatric professionals accepting a causal link between suicide rates and socio-economic conditions, worklessness, poverty and insecure employment, prospects of these statistics improving in the near future look bleak.”

Ally Fogg, We tell boys not to cry, then wonder about male suicide, The Guardian 17.1.12.

“You can’t fire a rocket into the heart of real people’s lives from a lofty pulpit and expect them to sit idly by while you make them feel less than human.”

Julie Hosking, Anti-gay message inflicts pain, The West Australian 17.1.12

I woke up this morning to a text message from my husband suggesting I look at the news on same-sex marriage coming out of Canada. “They are a bit concerning,” he said.

Turns out he might not be my husband after all.

Lawyers representing the Canadian Department of Justice are arguing in a Court case that non-residents who married in Canada since 2004 are not legally married if they could not have been married in their country of residence.

Brent and I were married in British Columbia on 25 September 2004.

The case arises out of a peculiarity that those of us who were married in Canada have been aware of for some time: it’s easy enough to go to Canada and get married, but not so easy, when and if the time comes, to get divorced.

Canada’s divorce law carries a one-year residency requirement: to get divorced in Canada, one or both of the parties must have resided for at least 12 months in the province where the divorce is being sought. If you live outside Canada, you are supposed to get divorced in your home country. But that’s of little use if your home country doesn’t recognise your Canadian marriage. Australia, for example.

The case before the Court concerns an unidentified lesbian couple who married in Canada in 2005 and separated in 2009. One of the two lives in Florida, the other in the UK, both places where same-sex marriage is not explicitly recognised. They are seeking a divorce from the Canadian courts (the news reports don’t mention which court the matter is before) and the Canadian government is the respondent in the case.

A submission from the Department of Justice apparently argues that “in order for a marriage to be legally valid under Canadian law, the parties to the marriage must satisfy both the requirements of the place where the marriage is celebrated … and the requirements of the law of domicile of the couple with regard to their legal capacity to marry one another.”

In other words, if you can’t get married in your home country, you can’t get married in Canada either.

The couple are also seeking $30,000 in compensation from the provincial government, for negligent misrepresentation, in the case that their marriage is found to be invalid, which suggests that the government’s response didn’t entirely come out of the blue for their lawyer, like it did for the rest of us. They are reportedly represented by Martha McCarthy, a Canadian barrister who fought the Supreme Court case that legalised same-sex marriage across Canada in 2005.

McCarthy told the Globe and Mail:

It is offensive to their dignity and human rights to suggest they weren’t married or that they have something that is a nullity. It is appalling and outrageous that two levels of government would be taking this position without ever having raised it before, telling anybody it was an issue or doing anything pro-active about it,” she said. “All the while, they were handing out licences to perform marriages across the country to non-resident people.

The response to the news has been one of shock. US sex advice columnist Dan Savage was married in Vancouver in 2005. He has written an extensive blog post on the developments, and is quoted in the Globe and Mail as saying, “When I got out of bed, I was a married man and as soon as I got on my Twitter feed I realized I had been divorced overnight.”

It’s an odd position for the Canadian government to take. The conservatives are currently in power in Canada, but they have said – and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has reiterated today – that they have no plans to revisit the issue. I share Savage’s hopes that “Hopefully this is just one rogue lawyer or two and not policy of Canada’s Conservative government. If it is Canada’s Conservative government then the issue has definitely been re-opened.”

UPDATE, just before posting: Dan Savage has tweeted that the decision appears to have been reversed. No details yet but I’ll add them as they come in.

UPDATE, 06:30 on 14 January: The Canadian Justice Minister has said all same-sex marriages performed in Canada are legally recognised and the government is working to ensure foreign couples married in Canada have access to divorce.

Edited, 08:54 (added quote from Martha McCarthy)

The dynamic element on the political right across the west is giving up on the Enlightenment. No longer does it want to embrace tolerance, reason, democratic argument, progress and the drive for social betterment as cornerstones of society. Tolerance is dismissed as an indulgence and a lack of moral standards; progress is trashed as an opportunity for social engineering and a cloak to enhance state power and also as featherbedding the feckless, undeserving poor.

Reason, runs this argument, too often identifies problems that require collective rather than individual responses, amplifying the dread power of the state, and democracy means respecting opponents who have views you consider noxious. Away with the whole damn thought system! Altogether, Enlightenment values are not the reason why the west has advanced so far so fast for the last two centuries and more; rather, they are why the west’s economies are in crisis and its societies are fragmenting.

Read the full article.

And the common link? Senator Nick Xenophon, whose involvement in both stories suggests he has some explaining to do.

Or maybe Xenophon and the farmers’ lobby could just lay off the venereal metaphors.

On the day that I got my HIV diagnosis, Chris, my doctor never said I was going to die — but that’s what I heard. He said “This was a positive test.” It’s an odd choice of words, a bit clumsy and scientific, but of course medically precise. The diagnosis had to be confirmed with a second test, and backed up by a T-cell count. There was the possibility that the second test would show the first to be false, but he and I both knew that wasn’t really going to happen. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said.

The test was positive, and so was I.

In my head, “This was a positive test” became “You’re going to die.” I wanted to know what all people given this news want to know: when?

“How long have I got?” The words came out of my mouth like a line from a bad TV movie. Chris looked at me with sad eyes.

“We don’t know. Some people do better than others, but without treatment I think you would have between one and three years before you were very seriously ill. There is a treatment available — it’s called AZT — and with that you would probably double that, but better treatments are being worked on and new ones could come along in the future.

“You shouldn’t worry: you can expect to have another five to ten years with a bit of luck. And in that time, who knows — treatments might improve. Who knows? You could live for another 20 years.”

I knew he was trying to be upbeat, stretching the story as far as possible to make me feel better. But no-one lived that long with HIV, not in those days. I walked out of the surgery with a prescription for AZT and started taking it the same day.

That was twenty years ago, today. The 6th of August, 1991, when I was 27 years old and going to die.

I posted another story about the day of my diagnosis a few years ago: Hiroshima Day.

When I was in Europe there were people with dogs and cats on trains and trams all over. I didn’t see any issues there so I don’t understand why we’re so against it in Australia. Australia is such a nanny state – it’s good to see an example going the other way, and from a Coalition government, too.

Now to get rid of that silly compulsory bike helmet law…

UPDATE, 3PM: Well, that didn’t last long.

Remember, 100% of the proceeds will be used to buy celebratory beers to mark the Iron Lady’s interment into her final rusting place.

Just click the links to buy.

Version 1 (‘Dead’):
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Version 2 (three for the price of one!):
  

It’s not often that the Australian news media take this much interest in HIV issues at all, and when they do it’s typically bad news, so it was refreshing to see this much interest in a ‘good news’ story. The fact that the news release had the words ‘HIV’ and ‘cure’ in it probably helped (the last time the commercial TV news became interested in HIV science, that news release had the ‘C’ word in it too, so I’m seeing a pattern; from now on all my news releases will have ‘HIV cure’ in the headline).

So I scrubbed up, borrowed a clean shirt (thanks Nathan), and choofed off to WEHI to do my bit for the cause. Here’s the resulting ABC TV News item. Read on over the page for the horrifying truth.

(The Channel 10 version is also available, on YouTube, if you’re really keen.)

TV journalism is my least favourite form of the craft, but I find the process fascinating and I don’t mind doing these tasks when they occasionally come up. As Nöel Coward said, “Television is not for looking at; is for appearing on.”

It also takes a phenomenal amount of time to produce. The two-minute story above took an hour and a half to shoot, and who knows how much longer to edit and produce. Most of this time is consumed by shooting “cutaways” – the shots of researchers looking into microscopes and mucking about with petri dishes, pipettes and so on. All of this is staged, of course, and involves a lot of coloured water. The journos joked a lot about how clichéd these shots are, but I feel for them – what else are you going to do?

If you watched the clip above, you will have also seen lots of cute little white mice, their red eyes observing the camera with curious delight. The news crews asked if they could get some lab mice brought up to the lab so they could film them, and the WEHI people happily complied. It took a little while but eventually the little scamps arrived, in their perspex cage, from the mouse lab, or mouse farm, or mouse house, or wherever it is they keep the mice.

TV news person: Oh, the mice are here. Let’s get some shots of one of the lab assistants working with the mice.

[Lab assistant sits down and starts pulling mice out of, and putting back into the cage. Cameramen ask for the guy to hold the mouse in his hands, let it climb on his arm, etc. Lab assistant duly complies and I'm struck by how docile and compliant the little fellas are.]

Me: If he drops the mouse, will it make a run for it? That could result in some compelling news footage.

Researcher: No, these mice live their entire lives in those cages; they don’t know anything else. If you put them down on the floor, they just sit there, looking confused.

TV news person: OK, we’re just about done with the mice. They can go back to their home in a few minutes.

Researcher: Oh, they won’t be going back. Once they’re taken out of the mouse lab they are contaminated, so these mice will be euthanised this afternoon.

TV news person: [who has turned white with horror] Oh well, I didn’t realise that. But they died for the greater good.

Me: I don’t think the Channel 10 evening news qualifies as ‘the greater good.”