As Helen Szoke finishes up as the head of the Victoria’s Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, she leaves us with some sage words on sexuality:
For the first time in years, I believe that, as a society, we are poised to recognise the enormous harm we do to same-sex-attracted people when we dismiss, deny or simply refuse to recognise their sexuality.
“Strides made to equality, but much is left undone”; The Age (Aug 4 2011)
This message is one that we must heed, otherwise we will increasingly realise the cost of ignoring it, measured in human suffering.
SOURCE ARTICLE
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/strides-made-to-equality-but-much-is-left-undone-20110803-1ibka.html
20110804-The-Age-Strides-made-to-equality-but-much-is-left-undone
I did find her to less than sage like in her approach and support for religious vilification laws, she stated Helen stated http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Religion/Pics/20050422.asp.html
“Freedom of speech is important, but it is not absolute. It does not mean you can say whatever you want, whenever you want. The Act is there to help us value our cultural diversity, The purpose of the Act is to ensure groups and individuals are able to reasonably debate religious differences. We are considering the most extreme point in the continuum of prejudice. A good way to think about vilification is as the promotion of hatred. This means that we are able to have robust debate about religion.”
There is no robust debate with Helen’s religious sniffer dogs probing under every church pew. Helen Szoke uses ridiculous examples to try and support her Commission’s role in this insanity, examples of Racial and religious hatred that can lead to acts of physical violence, the Catholic conflict in Ireland, the systematic annihilation of Jews in Nazi Germany, the war in Serbia or the burning of witches in the middle ages”. She neglects to mention that this Act would prohibit the ridicule of those burning witches, it would prohibit inciting hatred against Nazi Germany and any other group waging war including suicide bombers. Helen Szoke states that 16 of the 34 complaints made to the Commission this year have been declined as lacking in substance. Ergo, 18 cases were proceeded with by the Victorian Human Rights Commission against Victorians for vilifying a religion.
A petition signed by 27,000 people calling for the removal of the religious aspects from the act has also been arrogantly ignored.