Care Bear

The ... ahem ... Honorable Warren Entsch (pictured above) is, for a Liberal Party MP, quite radical when it comes to equal rights for homos.
Unfortunately for him, the notion of equal rights is kinda old hat and conservative, based, as this notion is, on the stupid idea of sameness (ie. black people are the same as white people, 'queers' as 'straights' and that this sameness holds within these groups too, as in homogeneity - all of which is fallacious).
One of my 3CR Radio Thursday Breakfast co-hosts, Emma, interviewed him this morning (the first time a Liberal Party MP has been on the station?) about his vocal stance on same sex couple's rights to marry and join the army, police force, other oppressive institutions, etc. etc., which stands in opposition to his fearless leader (John Howard) and the opposition leader (Kim Beazley)'s refusal to engage in any discussion about the existence of people who live queer sexualities (and, unlike Entsch, I'm not just talking gays and lesbians but bi, trans and intersex people too).
Apart from tooting his and the Liberal Party's trumpet, Entsch also used that tired old cliche about having gay friends who were quite nice, cooked him dinner, actually appeared to be somehow related to other humans, etc.
But the real inexcusable crime occured over and over when he kept referring to homos who have been in monogamous loving relationships for five, ten, twenty years.
What he's doing is normativising queer sexualities, which is another way of saying that he is validating queer relationships that more or less follow the pattern of heterosexual monogamous relationships.
This comes at the expense of delegitimating other kinds of relationships (both queer and straight) that choose other paths, such as polyamorous relationships or menages a trois, quatre, cinq, six etc., men who have sex with men, men who cruise beats and any other kinds of relationships and practices that exist and of which I am unaware and most of which are probably just as valid as a monogamous heterosexual marriage.
All for the sake of permitting homos to join the ranks of hetero married couples.
So-called Liberal people continue to find new minorities who have different forms of life from them upon which they can oppresively press their own world-views.
Their time and energy would be better spent by learning from those they want to assimilate, hopefully thus discovering that their own values often don't apply to people who lead quite different lives.
Talk about misguided!
Warren, keep your queer marriage proposals to yrself!
The interview with Emma hit its nadir when he sarcastically replied to Emma's question about whether or not John Howard's sway over his own party would limit the efficacy of Entsch's ill-informed stand against homophobia with this answer:
'Hah, Emma, we happen to live in this thing called a democracy!'
He's clearly graduated from the Bill Heffernan School of Etiquette and Tact (who, I might add, apart from publicly berating National Party politicians recently, also has a history of falsely accusing - under parliamentary privilege - openly homo [High Court] Justice Michael Kirby of using Comcars to cruise for rent boys).

I wuv you!