Advance Australia Fair - Building Sustainability, Justice and Peace
Workshop - Women, GLBT and the rise of the Religious Right
Saturday 30th July 2005

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Cobina Crawford

Convenor, Victorian Pro-Choice Coalition

Well, this is great, it’s exactly what we’re not supposed to talk about at dinner parties - religion and politics. So we can get it all off our chests here.

These two speakers did a wonderful job and it’s a pretty hard act to follow. What I’m going to talk about, and what concerns me the most is the Pentecostals at this stage. They really are driving the politics in terms of abortion, which being part of the Pro-Choice Coalition one of my concerns is equitable access to reproductive choice. I guess we should really unpack that idea of the ‘culture of death’. That is the rhetoric that is used right across the Pentecostals, the Catholic church, the Pope had referred to and compared access to abortion as a holocaust. So they are pretty serious about this and it really is at the top of their agenda. They talk about the culture of death while at the same time, many of the politicians who support this line also supported the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ve all got shares in major military organisations. And yes, many also support the death penalty. It’s a bizarre double-think and intellectual gymnastics that they do to justify their bullshit.

We need to ask why this is back on the agenda. One of the questions we got when we were doing media during that barrage of headlines in the media about abortion, was “why? I thought this was all resolved”, and we did too. Part of the reason that it was back on the agenda at that stage was that it provided a distraction and a smokescreen for when they were bubbling away with their industrial relations stuff, and also to create a moral panic.

What the argument comes down to is personal choice, but it was to get people talking about what is happening in other peoples lives. I group all of the religious and other organisations who oppose abortion as “anti-choice” as a way of reframing the debate and taking it away from the talk about “life” which it’s not really about. There’s a variety of religious organisations including Catholics, Muslims, all the orthodox religions, the Jewish community is quite involved, the Pentecostals, even people in the punk community, from a range of straight edge communities who are rabidly anti-choice.

Why this has come up now is because it is part of them building their constituency. The Liberal Party is making noises about moving to voluntary voting, and this is one of the things that they might be looking at to campaign on in the next election. You could argue it’s in the Liberals’ interests to do this at the moment because they are then able to mobilise highly organised religious institutions as in the United States. That really does drive the American political discourse, these moral debates about abortion, pornography, gay marriage and all that sort of stuff.

For thirteen years the East Melbourne Clinic has had a group of protestors blockading the front of it continuously, for six days a week, so for them, it’s always been on the agenda. But it was only back on the media agenda after Tony Abbott, last year at an Adelaide university, came out and gave a speech where he referred to abortion as an unambiguous moral tragedy. That got a few headlines and kicked the whole thing along. In the reading material there’s quite a bit about the Lyons Forum in the Liberal Party so I won’t go into that, but suffice it to say that a few practicing Christians in the Liberal Party have this on their agenda and are building a constituency. It’s what they call a ‘dog-whistle’ issue, where they can talk about the ‘culture of life’ and the family and all that sort of stuff and there are certain sections of the electorate who will pay attention, it’s sub-sonic, a coded message. It’s designed to appeal to a certain set of staunch people in the electorate. It’s a technique that has been pioneered by the electoral consultants that work for the coalition, which they tried to export recently into the English elections and it didn’t quite work. What they do is get a group of people in a room and push-poll them asking them what issues would influence their vote. For some people it is the issue that decides who they vote for. They have been working away and it is gradually gaining popularity as an issue.

I’ve been doing a bit of research into the Pentecostals and they are pretty fascinating. I’m just wondering why they are gaining popularity, and no-one denies that they are, out in the mortgage belt. So I’ve started to go to some of these church services and it’s fascinating, contemporary Kum-Bay-Ah kind of stuff - lots of singing and hand clapping and talking about prosperity. It seems like the happy juncture between patriarchy and capitalism. They’re talking about how you can have prosperity for your family, earn this money, and Jesus rewards you if you’re faithful in a monetary sense. I’ve recently been doing some work, and my team leader who is a born again Christian keeps trying to convert me. I’ve kept pretty quite about my background. He keeps bringing around catalogues, many of them about pyramid selling. There’s a focus on developing business networks through the church. And that’s what it boils down to – the intersection of capitalism with religion.

I’m fascinated because a lot of these people are entering conservative politics and it would seem as though there would be some cognitive dissonance about the industrial relatoins reforms and the family. The Pentecostals have built an artificial community out of what is a really barren suburban wasteland.

I was about to get into the juicy topic of neo-liberalism and how they preach individual rights and so forth, and how on earth they are then able to concentrate on something as intrusive as telling a woman what to do with her body.

There’s an enormous contradiction there and it’s interesting to see how they reconcile it and the way that they do it is they see themselves as economic shepherds. There’s a lot of this rhetoric in the teachings, with the inference being that we are all sheep that need to be led. It’s a similar mentality when it comes to reproductive rights and choices, because women are obviously not able to think for ourselves and we need shepherding. I think that a lot of this rhetoric comes out of an intense hatred of women and the belief that women are unable to make their own choices and can’t be trusted. If politicians don’t feel that women can be entrusted with that choice of having a child, it makes you wonder how they feel we can be entrusted with the responsibility of raising a child.

I personally think that it’s not so much about protecting Gods’ little innocents because they would be out blockading military bases. What it is about is controlling women and their choices. They want us all to be quasi-incubators that run off to work and don’t complain, and are available at a moment’s notice, as we have seen in the ACTU commercials.

It’s interesting because this then gets into sticky territory with people like Family First. It seems like they are going in to bat on the IR stuff, but they are also rabidly anti-choice around reproductive rights and so forth.

I noticed in the reading as well that it touched on the topic of tax-free status and religious organisations. It’s something that I’ve been trying to nut out over the last few days because if you look there are a lot of religious organisations that have been doing good work. If you look at the Victorian Peace Network, they were magnificent in building the February 2003 rally, and there’s lots of progressive religious voices out there and I think that it’s terrible that these new measure are designed to silence them. But there are lots of religious groups lobbying around reproductive rights issues as well.

I think that one of the reasons the Pentecostals have been so successful is they generate what is essentially community. Let’s face it, the world now is a pretty bleak and horrible place where individualism means that you’re on your own. This sort of Pentecostalism is a way of placating people and providing some sort of sense of community.

The Left, and particularly the Union movement, provides a wonderful opportunity to break that individualism, to provide a sense of community and I think we should be doing it in a positive way.

I’ll finish with a little bit of what the Pro-Choice Coalition is doing because we’ve been a bit quiet recently. There is a national body called Reproductive Choice Australia, focussed on lobbying politicians. They are very well financed which I think is magnificent. The Victorian Pro-Choice Coalition is more grass-roots than that so we will concentrate on working through the grass roots networks, helping out providers on the ground.

It’s difficult to find something positive to focus on after hearing all these speeches, but just the fact that all these people are in this room and concerned about these issues, and the fact that we can start to be confident talking about religion and politics around the dinner table has got to be a good thing!

Thank you.

Reproductive Choice Australia

Children by Choice campaign web site

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