buggery.org

Tim from Road to Surfdom points out this informative Reuters article about the status of gays in newly-liberated Iraq. “You probably aren’t surprised to learn that homosexuality was a crime in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” writes Tim. “Changing that doesn’t seem to have been a high priority of the new government.”

Saddam Hussein’s government outlawed homosexual acts in 2001, the Reuters article explains, along with prostitution, incest and rape, all of them punishable by death, presumably to appease Islamic conservatives. That law is still on the books, and while Iraq’s new constitution has protections against discrimination based on “a variety of grounds, including sex, religion, belief, opinion and social and economic status, [it] fails to explicitly mention homosexuality.”

Like Tim, I’m hardly surprised that the flowering of freedom and democracy in Iraq doesn’t go so far as to protect Iraqi gays, and I share his alarm at the account in the Reuters article of so-called ‘honour killings’, under which relatives of gays (or those supposed to be gay) are free to carry out the ultimate sentence themselves:

Article 111 of the Iraqi Penal Code exempts from prosecution and punishment men who kill other men or female relatives in defence of their family’s honour.

“He who discovers his wife, one of his female relatives committing adultery or a male relative engaged in sodomy and kills, wounds or injures one of them, is exempted from any penalty,” the law states.

The article includes an interview with a man who killed his own son, by hanging him in front of his own house, and spent a month in prison.

“Iraqis are showing their courage every day, and we are proud to be their allies in the cause of freedom,” said George Bush in the State of the Union address this year. Freedom. Democracy. Liberty. Justice. Do they even mean anything at all?

The loss of Liberal preselection by an openly-gay Liberal MP, Andrew Olexander, has provided a sharp focus on the homophobia simmering just below the surface in the Victorian state Liberal Party.

The Liberals are desperately on the nose in the state they once regarded as the “jewel in the [Tory] crown”. A recent opinion poll has the Libs going backwards. Their leader is a pompous ass who appears to have little public support in or outside his party. Offered a free kick to back Doyle on TV the other day, Peter Costello could only manage a weak “as far as I’m aware there’s no-one who wants to challenge him.” It’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

So with the leader looking like Piggy Malone and the party looking increasingly lost, what to do? Time for a good old-fashioned Liberal witch-hunt.

I can’t say I’m a supporter of Andrew Olexander’s, and of course it is true that he had a rather unfortunate encounter with a bottle of whisky and an automobile not so long ago, but it’s emblematic of the conservative side of politics to do this sort of stuff.

Olexander’s claims that he is the victim of a culture of bigotry have of course been denied by the Liberal powerbrokers, but does anyone believe them? Of course they are homophobic — we’re talking about the Liberal Party here.

The war of words has now escalated to the point where Doyle and Olexander will go head-to-head in a partyroom vote next Tuesday. Doyle will try to have the already-disendorsed Olexander booted out of the parliamentary party. If that fails, Doyle will be dead in the water and the state Liberals will be looking for a new leader with less than a year to go before the next election. The party, says David Broadbent in The Age, is at war with itself.

Meanwhile, The Age has provided a couple of on-the-record statements by current and former Liberal state MPs to give an sense of the attitude towards mattress-munchers that prevails in the party.

A 1995 comment from the now shadow treasurer, Robert Clark:

I believe homosexual practices form a destructive way of life, destructive to the individual and destructive also to other individuals who are brought into that way of life. I suppose it is most readily demonstrable at a physical level; it is a physical fact that the human body is not designed for many homosexual practices and it is clear that physical problems follow from those practices.

More recently, Clark claimed he was expressing a personal view and said: “I do not believe the Liberal Party is bigoted or prejudiced against people because of their sexual beliefs.” Yeah, right.

David Perrin, a former Liberal backbencher who also happens to be national president of that happy bunch of troglodytes, the Australian Family Association, reckons he has accumulated considerable amount of evidence of the “homosexual agenda”:

“The medical professions have a view that homosexuality is a disease,” Mr Perrin said, and that the “homosexual lobby” had infiltrated psychiatric associations in the United States and changed the view that homosexuality was a treatable illness.

“The homosexual lobby has been very cunning in the way it has turned the debate around 180 degrees” so that today it was people opposed to homosexuality who were regarded as ill.