November 03, 2004
moral values
It has been a nightmare this morning. The server has been down, the internet is slow and the spam attack has been heavy. It has been like this since 6am.
I presume that there is an extraordinary traffic level across the entire network. I presume that the servers have reached their limit. Even if these are temporary failures that are self-correcting as requests are processed by the servers, the connections on the most severely affected servers means that linkup requests from Australia are clogged up for hours on end.
This makes it difficult to try and make sense of the US election. So the post needs to be simple.
The voting in the US election was not as blind as Steve Bell makes out:
The social conservatives knew what they were doing about moral values---gay marriage and no to abortion. The marriage equality movement lost eleven out of eleven ballot measures this election. The anti-gay Ballot also passed in 11 states. They were instruments in a strategy designed to get the evangelicals out to vote for Bush.
Karl Rove, the key Republican political strategist, knew what he was doing. He used the issue of gay marriage, as a wedge issue because it would attract culturally conservative evangelical Democrats —"the rednecks" —to the Republicans. Give them the extra votes to get Bush over the line.
We have this kind of biopolitics happening in Australia too. The defenders of moral values are now talking about abortion, the culture of convenience and a ban on late-term abortions. A year or so back they were were talking about putting a stop to euthanasia.
Our bodies are not our own anymore. The conservative state wants a say in what we do with our bodies. Human rights is dismissed as 1970s style social engineering.
The culture of convenience. It refers to the idea of the idea of abortion being used as a back-up for failed contraception. Behind it sits a move by pro-life conservatives in federal parliament to move to amend the law on abortion.
Beware the moral crusaders. They have some old scores to settle with the 1968ers.