QUEER-BASHING and CLIMATE DENIAL : related ?

Gay-friendly Tassie !

Australian politics perhaps shows best how closely related are the strident opposition to both Gay marriage and the reality of Global warming .


In that Antipodes nation, the right wing of the socialist party joins with the capitalist parties in opposing both : and that adds up to about 70% of the voters on Election Day, though polling on these issues alone shows a much more even split among the  population.

Electoral systems that favour the two biggest parties give the "paranoid" voter the final say on every thing.

Clearly the parties are well behind current public opinion. This is because both main parties need to get as many of the "paranoid" voters as possible, to form government in a distorted electoral system that wildly favours the two biggest parties - by design.

(The left wing of the socialists joins with the Greens in favouring gay marriage and the reality of climate change.)

At the federal level, the governing Labor (socialist) party is trying to straddle the fence, knowing it appeals to both queer-bashing Labor activists and gay-supporting Labor activists..

But in Tasmania, the governing Labor party will use a small loophole in the Australian constitution to allow gay marriage in the tiny island state - heartedly supported by most Greens but opposed by some Labor activists.

(By contrast, the Libertarian party and its rural and far right fellow travellers are undivided in roundly opposing gay marriage.)

Much the same for global warming ; the right denies it 100%, the Greens support it 100% and the centre-right socialists tries to have it both ways.

Switching to America , a life-long active Republican worker and professional denier for Big Tobacco and a host of other big rich unpopular industries, Frank Schubert , is leading the richly financed anti-gay marriage movement in the United States , further cementing the arguments that all denier movements are intimately connected......

Greens lead in Melbourne by-election because Australian socialists are to the right of Canada's Stephen Harper

Socialists unite with Libertarians to defeat Greens, again

Australia's PM Julia Gillard is from the Labor Party  (Labor = NDP in Canadian terms, supposedly) and she is opposed to gay marriage.

So she says, in public. Has to say in public (or get slaughtered by enough of the voters to render her party practically seatless).

In a state-level by-election today in inner city Melbourne, the Greens lead the pack at 38% - winning the seat in Canadian FPP terms.

But in Australia, it is proportional voting and so the Green candidate will lose on second round preferences.

The Libertarian opposition coalition is not running a candidate and told all their voters to vote Labor --- they may different sometimes on some economic issues but they are both equally death on gay rights.

The Aussie Greens do well because the local left wingers are almost as right wing, well almost as right wing,  as the Nova Scotia left wingers.

Nova Scotia Greens fail to seize "green opportunity"

But in Nova Scotia, the Greens have totally failed to seize this opportunity opening up for them as the NDP here shed many long time supporters.

Dead skunks in the middle of road would get more votes than the Greens in Nova Scotia , if an election was held right now.

I might add that the Green national leader is from Nova Scotia but still no lift under the local Greens sails ---- even the combo of Darrell Dexter and Elizabeth May can't Viagratize the flaccid Green members....