Keywords: Gender Equality
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 18 September 2012
'The common law leaves a gap between the mandates of the law and the conduct that we choose to engage in according to our individual moral standards. We call that gap 'freedom'. The challenge is determining the width of that gap for groups bound by religious faith which differs from the Australian majority.' Frank Brennan launches Carolyn Evans' Legal Protection of Religious Freedom in Australia. Full text
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AUSTRALIA
- Madeleine Hamilton
- 31 August 2012
15 Comments
The post-war migration policy favoured single men as labour for the burgeoning heavy industries. By the mid-1950s thousands of lonely male migrants populated the cities, and many local women found them threatening. Like those women, Slutwalk participants defend their right to walk the streets wearing what they want without being harassed.
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AUSTRALIA
- Fatima Measham
- 01 August 2012
16 Comments
The games are an escapist spectacle, where the flags of Iran, Palestine and Syria flutter without irony alongside those of the US, Israel and Turkey, and delegates from Spain and Greece wave as if their nation's economies have not fractured the Eurozone. The dissonance between the games and reality has become hard to ignore.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Gordon Preece
- 25 June 2012
71 Comments
The homosexuality debate in church and society is an uneasy and often destructive conversation that should not be entered into lightly. Both sides thus need to beware: ‘Conservatives’ if they slip from opposing homosexual acts to opposing homosexual people. The ‘liberals’ for frankly writing, as Michael Kirby admits, ‘very easy pieces’. Well before Malcolm Fraser, Jesus said (Christian) ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. Kirby, and the FUP authors, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, are cheapening grace.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Ellena Savage
- 16 March 2012
In high school, I'd hack my hair into asymmetrical experiments, dye it impossible colours, and layer myself with kitsch op-shop garments. I was another precocious teenager who wore her individuality on the outside. Right now in Iraq, teenagers like I was are being murdered as 'homosexuals'.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 13 September 2011
5 Comments
The Church of the 21st century should be the exemplar of due process, natural justice and transparency. While there can be little useful critique of the final decision of Pope Benedict to force the early retirement of Bishop Bill Morris, there is plenty of scope to review the processes leading up to it.
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AUSTRALIA
New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan said recently that sanctioning gay marriage could lead to demands for the legalisation of polygamy. US author Sidney Callahan argues that, gay or straight, we all strive for 'pair bonding that contributes to equality and unity'.
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AUSTRALIA
- Ellena Savage
- 22 July 2011
3 Comments
The Census won't recognise the fact that some people in Australia don't identify as either female or male, and that such people have specific needs. One advocacy group is urging intersex people to list their religion as 'Intersex' in order that their gender is recognised.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 18 July 2011
5 Comments
When I appeared on Q&A with Christopher Hitchens, a young man asked whether we can 'ever hope to live in a truly secular society' while the religious continue to 'affect political discourse and decision making' on euthanasia, same-sex unions and abortion. Hitchens was simpaticao. I was dumbstruck.
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MEDIA
British sociologist Gail Dines argues that porn shapes young people's expectations of how sex should be, at the cost of healthy intimacy. Positive erotic portrayals can inspire and guide us by enhancing our perceptions and extending our narrow world view.
Dines argues that the hardcore porn industry promotes a damaging view of sex that shapes young men's (and women's) fantasies and expectations of how sex should be, at the cost of healthy intimacy.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 09 March 2011
53 Comments
There are homosexual persons who enter into loving, faithful and committed relationships. It is difficult to characterise a law that gives non-discriminatory protection to such couples as 'so harmful to the common good as to be gravely immoral' as Benedict has previously done.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Jasmine-Kim Westendorf
- 14 January 2011
1 Comment
Some say that not only is The Female Enuch of little relevance today: it never was relevant. Such arguments are often based more on attacks on Greer personally, and feminism generally, than considered critiques of the value of the feminist agenda set out in the book.
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