SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
Sydney Morning Herald
October 17, 2017
By Anna Krien
In Senator Penny Wong’s much celebrated speech in the Senate opposing the Coalition’s postal plebiscite, she responded with contempt to Liberal senator Mathias Cormann’s comment that the plebiscite on marriage equality could be a “unifying moment”. “But I tell you,” she said in a steely voice, “have a read of some of the things which are said about us and our families and then come back here and tell us this is a unifying moment.”
She recalled the Australian Christian Lobby’s description of children brought up in same-sex family units as “the stolen generation”. “We love our children,” Wong said passionately.
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Ah, the children. The “yes” campaign needs only two words to respond to the ACL, the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and the other religious heavy-hitters’ concerns about the “children”.
If there is ever a moment in time when a vast spectrum of Australian religious institutions and their lobby groups should shut right up about the protection of children, it is now, in the wake of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
For four years now, since 2013, the royal commission has revealed institutionalised silence and cover-ups of children sexually abused within the framework of various churches. To date, thousands of horrific stories have been heard – of children being preyed upon, sexually abused, their families groomed, and most importantly of numerous religious authorities not only looking the other way but enabling the abuse to continue. That many of these same institutions even deign to utter the words “children” and “protection” in the current marriage equality debate is contemptuous.
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