I wonder if Eric Abetz is psychic? Or maybe he watches my YouTube channel. Less than a week ago, I said I didn’t hate him like I do some other members of the government. Maybe he felt left out because since then he’s done some phenomenally stupid things that seem designed to make reasonable people take a disliking to him. Or maybe he’s just stupid.
There’s a bunch of horrible people in Melbourne at the moment calling themselves The World Congress of Families. These ultra-right wing Christians have a very narrow view of what constitutes a family (let alone family “values”) and are pretty hostile to things like science and evidence. Many conservative Australian politicians have eagerly embraced these wackos despite the fact their view reflect only a tiny lunatic fringe of religious conservatives. During a TV interview, Abetz repeated the utterly absurd and totally discredited views of one of the speakers, namely, that there’s a link between breast cancer and abortion.
That would have been bad enough but the next day Abetz decides to sink into the depths of stupidity. First he straight up denies he said it. The interview was “heavily edited”. Later changed to “they cut me off”. Actual video of the interview makes all of his denials and excuses look ridiculous. Then he cops to the whole “abortion cause breast cancer” not being true. But in the most shit eating way you can imagine. Instead of making a simple, clear statement “abortion does not cause breast cancer” he vomits out an endless stream of weasel words.
He says because he isn’t a medical expert he isn’t qualified to judge personally but he accepts that the majority of medical opinion says this is rubbish. Then he goes on to talk in glowing terms about the speaker who is pushing this rubbish, American surgeon Dr Angela Lanfranchi. She’s a surgeon. She does breast cancer surgery. She’s awesome. The truth is, she is a liar. She is spreading blatant lies and abusing her position as a surgeon to give false credibility to her absolutely ridiculous, religiously motivated lies.
Abetz rounds off his weasel drivel by saying Lanfranchi has “the right to express her views” – yes, it’s all about free speech, people. If you want to stop someone from influencing public policy and actually endangering the health of others with LIES, you oppose free speech. Here’s the thing: believing abortion is wrong because your magical sky fairy says so (or for any other reason) is a point of view and I would never say people don’t have the right to that opinion. What is happening here fails the classic “shouting FIRE in a crowded theatre” test. This is the deliberate spreading of a lie that has the capacity to cause injury to people.
It’s inexcusable and Abetz isn’t just wrong, he’s also a liar and a coward.
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I wrote this little rant thinking about TFU Friday and it made its way into the video here:
Angry 365 Days a Year 