Keysar Trad on polygamy

Keysar Trad is an interesting fellow. He's mainly been in the news as an apologist for the controversial former (Sunni) Grand Mufti of Australia, Taj El Din al-Hilaly and currently occupies the president's position in the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

Trad was in the news recently after writing this article for Crikey where he discusses opening a dialogue to begin the long road towards polygamous marriages.

This blogger notes that Trad is on the record as having discussed such a union with his wife. Of course, the question that doesn't appear to have been posed by the media to date is about the extent of the conversation that took place.

After thinking about this, I have to conclude that Trad does have a point. What consenting married couples do is really not society's place to say. People should, if they want and if their existing and/or prospective spouse(s) consent, be able to have multiple spouses.

I can really only think of a few reasons as to why such unions shouldn't be permitted:

1. Taxation

Our current tax laws cater, rightly or wrongly, towards singles and married couples, not married trios, quartets and other combinations. This is a potential minefield of confusion that needs to be sorted out before we can consider taxation of polygamous unions. But I don't think that it's insurmountable.

2. Social Security

Likewise welfare laws are not really friendly towards polygamous unions. I think that this may be harder than taxation to sort out, but again, I don't think that this is beyond repair.

3. Estate planning

If memory serves me correctly, estate planning has nasty little bits in it where, for example, wills get rendered null and void by marriage, in most states and territories, anyway. This would be the same for remarriage as well, I suppose, but take this example: A wife has a will in place, but then the husband marries another woman. Does this render the first wife's will ineffective?

4. Divorce

I think that this could be the messiest of the lot. Imagine that in our above example, the wife then divorces her husband. Does this mean that the second wife also has to divorce him? If not, then is the second wife divorcing the first wife? And after sorting this out, how do the property and child custody arrangements work?

5. Superannuation

This has complications as well. I thought of family law splits and contribution splitting, but these seem a dodder compared to spouse superannuation offsets and what happens in the event of a member dying who just happens to be in a polygamous relationship.

---

Anyway, these are just a few of the issues that need to be thought of before polygamy can be allowed. I don't believe that these are the kinds of thing that we can't fix, but it should be pointed out that there would be a whole stack of work involved in them.

The easiest thing to do would be to abolish marriage outright, and just lock everything under the laws covering de facto relationships that exist in each state and territory, but this is probably not an option.

The absolute last reason that we should be considering is religious considerations for or against marriage, which have been discussed to death.

So the question that the media have not asked Trad regarding his wife's position is this: What was Trad's answer when his wife asked him if he was comfortable with her having multiple husbands?

It's difficult to take Trad seriously when you know that he is most certainly not comfortable. Or even that such a question might not have been posed by Mrs Trad. Does anyone know if Trad is on the record regarding this very question?

Style guide decree #1

Looks like I can now call Richard Branson, multi-billionaire and Virgin supremo a colleague.

News.com.au reports that the newly ordained minister of the Universal Life Church officiated at his first wedding on a Virgin America flight between Frisco and Vegas recently, which was also Virgin America's maiden flight between these two cities.

This probably makes Branson the highest profile minister within the church. Good oh.

One of these days, I'll do a Style Guide for this blog. Until then:

Branson will be henceforth known as "My colleague, Rev Sir Richard Branson" in the first instance.

Whenever I mention him, that is. Not that I'm likely to mention him again.

A Slight Case of Overbombing – Why people do not choose to be gay.

I’ve just finished the third part of A Slight Case of Overbombing.

And yes. It is named after the Sisters of Mercy best-of.

Enjoy.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

A Slight Case of Overbombing Part 2 – Why people do not choose to be gay.

This is part 2.

Part one is here.

So we had two questions hanging over our heads.

1. Who chooses to be gay? And
2. What reason would one have to choose a gay lifestyle?

Let’s look at the first one.

We’ve seen that you need to be gay, bi, asexual or sexually unusual in order to choose to be straight.

But what would you be in order to be gay?

Obviously, then, it stands to reason that if you choose to be gay, you must therefore be straight, bi, asexual, or something else again. But you would not be gay?

The conjecture from idiots who support the concept of “sexual choice” over “sexual hardwiring” believe that we are all wired the same way and that we choose our sexuality.

Leaving aside the conundrum that straight people such as myself did not choose to be straight (I’m just not into blokes, that’s all), this site shows the two views, which it refers to as the extremes.

Personally, I think that these are the only two views – I don’t see much room for a grey area in between, which should give you all an idea how ridiculous this whole thing is.

Anyway, as you can see, homosexual behaviour is viewed by hardliners as being akin to alcoholism or drug addiction – something to be de-toxed out of.

Now this makes me mad.

The viewpoint of most reasonable people is that alcoholism and drug addiction require you to actually have tried the narcotic, first.

Then there’s a period of time that your body builds up a physical dependency.

When I first started lusting after females, I had not had a single intimate, let alone erotic encounter. Hardly comparable to a narcotics addiction, then is it?

OK then. So we’ll assume for argument purposes that someone (God, Gods, aliens, FSM, etc) hardwired us all as “straight”.

(For those of you who are gay and reading this, please do not get outraged. I have only ever read my mind, and thus it is the only assumption I can reasonably make. I know that it is not the case.)

This still leaves our second question – which may be paraphrased as, “What reason would a straight bloke have to choose to be gay?”

First of all – he would have to put up with the gay stigma.

Now I have worked with gay blokes and chicks over the years. One of my best mates is a gay bloke. One thing that they all have in common is that they all get massively discriminated against.

Or threatened. Abused. Bashed, even.

Why, I say why. Would someone who wasn’t gay, put themselves through this?

I cannot give an answer to that. Maybe someone else will.

Conservative Christians are one such group who believe that being gay is temptation from Satan, but we’re all really straight.

Tell this to my gay friends who claim to have never been attracted to the opposite sex in their life.

Anyway, you supposedly do a gay lifestyle in the same way that you do drugs or alcohol. Big deal, they say. You can change.

One group who believes that you choose your own sexuality is called Exodus International. Exodus believe that through the power of Christ, one can return to the straight life that God gave them.

What Exodus won’t tell you is that one of their founders ran off with a staffer in 1979, and are now “committed” in that awful, gay way where we can’t say “married”.

(In addition, their chairman was recently forced to resign over claims that he allegedly was in a gay bar flirting with patrons, recently)

Lets just use our sixth sense (common sense, natch) here and say, “Nup.”

So we know that no one chooses to be gay, and that there is no reason why anyone would choose to do so. That I can think of anyway.

So this brings us back to our original point:

What is the federal government’s problem with gay marriage?

We’ll look at this in our next post.

A Slight Case of Overbombing Part 1 – Why people do not choose to be gay.

This one is an absolutely crazy mad one. It will probably run to 3 parts, but I don’t know yet.

Our federal government just gets more and more reactionary. And eventually they get to that point where you have to ask, “What is the deal?”

Readers will know that over the past two years, there has been a move by several jurisdictions around the world to have gay marriage legalised.

Most people would, of course, say, “Why not? What’s wrong with that?”

This writer is about to get married, and so this rings a bell with him. That is, myself.

(My word, this talking about oneself in the third person can get confusing).

The point that I have steered away from, is that the Australian federal government, has for those of you who don’t know, shored up the legislation regarding marriage so that it specifically refers to marriage as being a Union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others.

Mmm. Now if this isn’t homophobic discrimination, I don’t know what is.

First of all, let’s look at the underlying issue. Gay men and women would like to get married to each other.

In some bizarre conclusion, the federal government, headed up by the socially progressive PM John Howard and his equally small-l liberal Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock have concluded that gay marriage is “anti-family”.

Anti-family?? What drugs are they smoking?? And where can I get some??

The whole thing about gay marriage that I thought would appeal to the increasingly conservative Einsteins in Canberra, is that marriage is supposed to encourage a monogamous family unit, which is about as family as you can get.

OK. So we can safely say that the anti-family line is outright bullshit. The government is certainly pandering to groups that claim to be “pro-family”, however, the family issue with regards to this is clearly a red herring.

This position is unacceptable to gay Australia, and quite rightly so. But I don’t think that the government fully comprehends the implications of what they’ve done.

Take a hypothetical gay couple who have decided that they wish to get married. We’ll call them Chuck and Randy. They now do not have that choice, unless they marry someone from the opposite sex. This is unacceptable to them, as they are in love with each other.

If they have a civil “commitment ceremony”, this is not considered, in the eyes of the law, anyway, to be the same as a wedding between a man and a woman. This leads to all sorts of problems with regards to things like estate planning, child adoption, tax, superannuation, name changing etc.

Chuck and Randy are pretty much screwed, unless they can do some tricky legal manoeuvring.

And all because they are pre-disposed towards members of the same sex.

Now it is generally agreed these days that most of the evidence suggests that gay humans are genetically blueprinted to be gay.

There are still idiots out there who believe that one chooses their sexual preference.

Let’s run with this.

Do you remember when YOU chose your sexual preference?

I don’t remember. I don’t remember because I DIDN’T GET TO CHOOSE. I WAS ALWAYS ATTRACTED TO WOMEN, AND I WAS NEVER ATTRACTED TO MEN.

This speaks volumes for the minority of people who believe that one’s sexuality is a matter of choice. Logic dictates that anyone who chose to be straight falls into one of the following camps (an unintentional pun, but I think I’ll let that one slide, hee hee):

1. The obvious conclusion is that they are clearly bisexual. This is just common sense – if you are mentally saying, “I will only chase chicks, and not blokes, even though I am also attracted to them,” well, you bat for both teams, sunshine. There is no other conclusion that you can arrive at.

2. On closer inspection, however, another possibility presents itself. Once upon a time, people who were gay were heavily discriminated against. Oh, wait a minute, they still are. Anyway, if you were a chick who was into chicks, and you were terrified that you would be marginalised (which sadly still happens), you might make a conscious decision to pursue a relationship with a bloke. In other words, you are gay and you are choosing to be straight.

3. Lastly there are a few people out there for whom options A or B do not present themselves. Given the logical impossibility of a straight person choosing to be straight, let’s say that you don’t harbour a sexual attraction to either men, or women. For simplicity’s (and countless other’s) sake, we’ll also assume that you aren’t into animals, kiddies, ashtrays, fire hydrants, etc. By choosing to pursue a trans-Platonic relationship with someone from the opposite sex, you are pretty much denying the fact that you are asexual, bub.

So, those who chose to be straight are clearly gay, bi or “a”.

Which begs the question – what must you be if you choose to be gay?

And given that people usually choose to be straight in order to avoid harassment, persecution, violence, bigotry, stigma, etc, what reason would one have to choose a gay lifestyle?

We’ll look into these in our next instalment.