Posts by Andre Alessi
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Emma Hart,
I’ll use my “Turns Thomas the Tank Engine into Porn” voice.
Only for the bits with direct quotes of Murray McCully, I hope.
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to BenWilson,
I wonder what advice they’d have for gays.
"The priesthood has many opportunities to express your love for your fellow man...."
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Idiot Savant,
(In practice, I expect this not to come up. After all, who wants to be married by a celebrant who doesn’t want to marry them. But there’s an important principle here, and when the day comes, I’ll be hounding bigots off the celebrant rolls).
Thanks for the link, reading now. I do think this will come up from time to time-even if just in symbolic protests. And quite frankly, I think it's entirely appropriate-if you're the sort of person that believes in the spiritual authority of an organisation, you should have the right to demand that they treat you the way they would treat any other human being.
To put it politely, fuck them. We didn’t let old racists stop us from becoming a better society on the racial front, and we shouldn’t let old bigots stop us from becoming a better society wrt sexual orientation.
I agree completely. I don't see any reason not go ahead with updating the marriage act to reflect that gender shouldn't be a restriction on who marries. The status quo is inherently unjust.
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Angus Robertson,
This sort of reluctant leader schtick polls real well among the Right. There are quite a few GOP representatives who owe long careers to their promising to have short ones.
There was a highly amusing (in hindsight, anyway) article about ten years ago in The Economist about Rogernomics and Ruth Richardson that claimed Douglas, Prebble, Richardson, etc were not career politicians, but rather "citizen agitators" who "got in, made radical changes, and got out" and that this was the preferred modus operandi of neoliberalism.
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Hard News: Gaying Out, in reply to Idiot Savant,
And in NZ law, marriage has nothing to do with invisible sky faeries. Its entirely civil. What matters is not whether there is a church and a priest, but whether you fill out the paperwork and make an appropriate statutory declaration before a government official.
Although the authorised person that officiates at the ceremony is traditionally a religious official of some sort. It's important not to ignore the context laws actually operate in, rather than just what's written down in our laws.
Which leads me to wonder: hypothetically speaking, if the Marriage Act was updated to be gender-neutral, and two men wanted to get married in a church whose congregation they both belonged to, what would their legal options be in forcing the church to allow the ceremony? Could churches be required to supply a minister of the faith to officiate? This is the dream for some people, and I think it's also why some older religious conservatives object to legal recognition of gay marriage as marriage.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Sacha,
that’s a powerful argument :)
I'm not even going to talk about it.
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Muse: TV Review: Good Gods Almighty!, in reply to B Jones,
Outside of American Gods, I can't think of another pop culture appearance of the Norse pantheon off the top of my head.
The Norse gods (or their stand-ins) play a fairly major role in the Stargate continuity.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to andin,
I like how one of the commenters defends Key by saying, "Well, at least he's not as bad as Berlusconi!"
I'm so grateful to live in a country with such low expectations of its elected officials.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Of course Mr Homes, it's all about the Economy eh?
I found it funny that Nicola Lamb in the Herald also tried this approach. "Egypt's unemployment rate is 9.7%, of course there's rioting in the streets!"
As of December, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 9.4%. And I wouldn't exactly call the Tea Party a "riot".
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Meanwhile, another Tory gets the jail.
At first I didn't really see that story as being a particularly big deal-I thought it was just another rich white dude thinking he didn't have to treat the courts with respect, but the details of the case are genuinely scary.
A New Zealander designs what is basically the Predator drone 2.0, which has explicitly been flagged as as a possible dual-use threat (as in, it could be turned into a cruise missile), gets told to shut down his business instead of trying to sell it overseas, then claims to have destroyed all the plans but then gets busted trying to hock the plans overseas again. About the only thing missing from this story is "unnamed Pakistani sources" claiming to have been involved in buying the designs.