“The law can seem remote, arcane, the stuff of specialists. But it isn’t, because for those of us who live in democracies, the law begins with us,” says Shereen El-Feki, vice-chair of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, in this TED talk.
The talk is a very fine summary of the issues around HIV criminalisation and its unintended effects. The comments below the video, alas, show how far we have to go.
Queensland’s LGBT and HIV communities have been hit with a double whammy this morning, showing just how dangerous the new LNP government in that state is.
First came the news that the Queensland government is set to overturn the state’s civil union laws. With a new poll showing that 50% of Australians are in favour of marriage equality, and just 33% opposed, the reported LNP plans represent the opening of a new front in the war on queer civil rights in this country. But given the LNP’s opposition to the legislation when it was passed, it doesn’t come as a complete surprise.
Much more troubling is the announcement this morning that the government has, without warning, pulled all funding from Healthy Communities, the only LGBT health organisation in the state and the front line of Queensland’s HIV prevention effort. Formerly the Queensland AIDS Council, Healthy Communities has been continually funded by Queensland governments of all political stripes since 1988, and currently holds (or rather, held) government contracts valued at $2.6 million for HIV prevention and LGBT health work.
In a press release (PDF link) issued this morning, Healthy Communities has confirmed that 26 of their 35 staff will lose their jobs as a result of the defunding decision.
This is an appalling, short-sighted, ideologically driven decision that will hurt LGBT people in Queensland. Cutbacks in HIV prevention funding in Queensland and Victoria between 1998 and 2006 led to pronounced increases in HIV infections, and this will happen again now.
According to the Queensland health minister, Lawrence Springborg, Healthy Communities is being defunded because it has “lost its way” and that funding is “made available for health campaigns, not advocacy.” This shows just how out of touch the minister is – it displays a complete absence of understanding of the basic principles of health promotion and its smacks of an ideological approach.
Springborg says the LNP government will fund a new AIDS Council – there’s no detail on when that will happen or how, but we can expect it will be a timid, compliant body with no real attachment to the community it is supposed to serve.
Elsewhere: A thoughtful post on the decision on View from the Quarterdeck.
Why is Tony Abbott so scared of a conscience vote? As Amanda Vanstone writes in the Sydney Morning Herald today, his decision to announce there would be no conscience vote, after the parliament had wound up for 2011, goes against his stated position:
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.
Buggery.org will be participating in the internet blackout in protest over the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) tonight (Australian time). For 24 hours from 1600 AEDT (0500 UTC) the site will be online, but blacked out. More information.
“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
When Margaret Court and other homophobes say being gay is “a choice,” they actually mean coming out is a choice. It’s an argument designed to keep queer people in the closet.
I couldn’t believe nobody had already done this, so I did it. My contribution to the currently-fashionable “shit ____ say” meme.
The Pink Lady is a very fine eating apple. I should get myself a tree.
Video from Lamda Legal in the US highlighting some of the egregious garbage being spewed by hyperconservatives in that country.
Current occupants of the dam at Buggery Acres: two geese, four Muscovy ducklings, 17 wild ducks, several dozen golden and silver perch, and countless frogs.
I already shared this on Facebook and Twitter but it’s worth re-sharing on the blog. A short video showing the progress of the food garden here at Buggery Acres, from the overgrown wilderness we inherited when we bought the place to the orderly green oasis of today. Makes me happy, hope it’s good for you too.
Yes, the theme of the site has changed. The old one exploded so I’ve just used the default WordPress ‘twentyeleven’ theme for now.
Above: An event the Canadian government now says never took place.
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)
Will Hutton’s article in The Guardian on the rise of a morally vacant, anti-Enlightenment conservative polity, in Europe and the US:
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.
First it was ‘Pig AIDS‘, now Australia’s agricultural industries are under threat from ‘Apple Herpes‘. No matter where you look, increasingly our food has a sexually-transmitted infection.
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.
When someone tells you you’re going to die, it’s normal to have a few questions. Depending on the context, these might include “how?” and “why?”, but most importantly, “when?”
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.
Pets can now be taken on country train services in Victoria, as long as they’re muzzled and on a lead. A victory for common sense after V/Line banned all pets, even those in pet carriers, in 2008.
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.
Margaret Thatcher is not dead yet, but surely it can’t be long. While you wait, why not purchase one of these high quality commemorative garments from the Buggery Boutique on RedBubble?
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!):
XKCD’s massive timeline of “The future – according to Google search results” is the most wonderfulest thing I have seen in ages. Click the image to see the whole thing.
