Cory Bernardi’s comments last week, suggesting a slippery slope spiraling from gay marriage to bestiality, polygamy and paedophilia, set off a storm of media responses and led to his sacking by Tony Abbott. While it’s clear that many were offended, it’s not so clear that we really know why. In the outrage following his spray, have we gotten any closer to the heart of the matter? Or are we so caught up in pointing the finger that we’ve lost the point?
It’s easy to jump on the condemnation bandwagon when it comes to Cory Bernardi. He has a picture of Margaret Thatcher on the wall! He’s linked gay marriage to sex with animals! His own party and the international conservative movement have rejected him!
Even his wife says he’s self-obsessed!
You’d think from the media coverage of Bernardi over the last couple of weeks that he was an alien recently landed from a galaxy far, far away and not the close relative of Tea Party supporters and right-wing misogynists and homophobes around the globe. By dressing Bernardi up as some kind of crazy conservative clown, we seek to look sane and thoughtful by comparison.
Jean Baudrillard, one of the more irritating postmodern philosophers, once said that Disneyland is presented as fake to make the rest of America appear to be real. We do a kind of terrible over or under-imagining here in our responses to Bernardi’s contribution to the ongoing debate about marriage equality. As Guy Rundle pointed out recently, we are not even bothering to refute the simple ignorance of the slippery slope claims Bernardi is making. Instead, we get offended or we call for discipline. We attempt to distance ourselves from what we argue is a fringe dweller, rather than engaging in responsible debate.
Mohamad Tabbaa wrote recently about the need for Muslims to answer the constant demands to condemn terrorism, with responses that serve to defend the legal and human rights of their community, rather than knee jerk reactions that divide people and polarise our understandings. When the only welcome answer to violence or hatred is outrage at the act and a distancing of ourselves from the actors, we have moved as far away from both freedom of speech and resolution as it is humanly possible to be.