Too Beautiful, the blog

Too Beautiful

| wishlist

Monday, February 09, 2009

Focus on the Fundies: Evangelist tries to profit from Australian fire disaster

An Australian fundamentalist is claiming that the Australian fire disaster is God's punishment for the state of Victoria allowing abortion.

Pastor Danny Nalliah says he had a dream that God's "conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb." Of course, this is exactly what American fundies said after Sept. 11 and after Katrina: that the disasters were holy retribution for New York or New Orleans allowing whatever it is they don't like. Of course, when floods hammer the Mississippi valley, or tornadoes decimate a Southern town, they don't have much to say.

It's always been like this: preachers said the same thing when San Francisco was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. After a distiller paid firefighters to save his warehouse, a local wag wrote:

If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over-frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down
And spare Hotaling's whiskey?

technorati: Australia, wildfires, abortion

Labels: abortion, Australia, Focus on the Fundies

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Oops, forgot about those rabbits

Australian wildlife managers decided to remove the feral cats from an island to protect the native bird population. Oopsy: without the predatory cats, the rabbit population exploded and consumed the island's vegetation where the birds lived. The result was "widespread ecosystem devastation, and decades of conservation effort compromised."

Those Australians are kind of famous for their brilliant decisions involving wildlife, aren't they? That decision to import rabbits in the first place worked out fabulously.

Labels: Australia, disasters

Sunday, July 06, 2008

Americans not the only ones freaked out by images of children

Jesse Helms may be dead, but his spirit lives on in Australia, of all places. There politicians are freaking out over a nude image of a child -- her mother is the artist -- on the cover of Art Monthly Australia. Foamers are threatening to cut support grants from the publication. Ironically, the issue contains an article exploring a previous controversy over images of children that were yanked, then restored, to a Sydney gallery after being declared "'G' or 'very mild.'"

It's no surprise that Australia is the only English-speaking country aside from the U.S. where right-wing evangelical Christianity has a foothold. Among the influential foamers down under is the Anglican bishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and other organizations like Family First and Catch the Fire Ministries, which attempt to duplicate the influence of U.S. groups like Focus on the Family.

technorati: art, censorship,Australia,fundamentalists, nudity

Labels: art, Australia, censorship, Focus on the Fundies