It is difficult to determine if the bizarre Minister for the Coal Industry, Matt Canavan1 is a religious nutter who actually believes he should control women’s bodies, or is just a foaming at the mouth conservative, who stands against anything that is even vaguely progressive. One would presume that because of his initial uncertainty over his Italian citizenship, against which he used the Shane Warne defence (‘It was my Mum’)1, he is a good catholic boy. That seems to be why he was among the protesters marching through the streets of Brisbane in opposition to the proposed changes to abortion laws2.
Currently, in Queensland it is a crime for a woman or other person to attempt to procure a miscarriage3. The ‘Termination of Pregnancy Bill 2018’ was introduced to the Queensland Parliament in August. Under this legislation, abortion would be available on request up to 22 weeks. After 22 weeks’ gestation, an abortion may only take place if the medical practitioner performing the abortion has consulted with a second medical practitioner and both agree the abortion should be performed. The circumstances under which this agreement would be forthcoming would include the woman’s current and future physical, psychological and social circumstances, as well as the professional standards and guidelines applying to medical practitioners. The bill also stipulates that an abortion may be performed after 22 weeks’ gestation if it is necessary to save the woman’s life or the life of another unborn child3.
Canavan addressed the protesters and spoke to reporters subsequently, stating that the proposed changes to the legislation “would be some of the most radical and extreme legislation of abortions in the world, and it would allow, effectively … unrestricted abortion after 22 weeks”. This was found by the RMIT-ABC Fact Check system to be what they politely call “baseless”3. This is what most people would call a lie.
The attitude of the religious that they deserve to be able to tell others how to live their lives, and indeed, end their lives, is bizarre in the extreme. It is something that is fortunately starting to dissipate, as people rebel against the straitjacket of religious bigotry and enforced conformity, whether it be via abortion law reform, voluntary euthanasia legislation, or same-sex marriage legislation. This jettisoning of all this superstructure of religious control will continue as the populace becomes more progressive and the knowledge of the depths of depravity to which the churches have sunk because of their unfettered power becomes more widespread. The reason this scares the bejesus out of the religious is that deep down, they know that religion is really about control, and that all this drivel about god and morality are just strategies to entrench that control. The sooner it ends, the better.
Sources
From the moment Constantine adopted christianity as his “faith” and decreed it to be the religion of the Roman Empire, this obscure sect leapt from the lunatic fringes of society to being inextricably linked to the brutal authoritarian power of the state.
As the Roman Empire crumbled, successive replacements of its authority realised they could harness the enormous power inherent in the religion of the regime they had usurped.
The priests had enslaved the populous in a way the government never could.
This power alliance persists today, even in “civilised” nations like the USA, a supposedly secular democracy.
I worked out the fact that religion was all about control of the population when I was 14.
(Mental & economic control, they wouldn’t encourage actual population control through contraception)
Fifty years later, I find it hard to understand why everyone else can’t reach the same conclusion, simply by reading history.
Maurice,
I often ask myself the same question. The fact that each religion has its own god or gods and they all ‘know’ that theirs are the only true gods and all the others are figments of the imagination, should immediately make anyone with a modicum of common sense suspicious. Couple that with the fact that almost universally, people adhere to the religion of their parents, and hence religion has an extremely high correlation with geography, and they should realise it is so much equine ordure. Unfortunately, as my old man used to say: Common sense is not that common.