Here’s What The New Deputy Prime Minister Once Said About Gay People
Michael McCormack has been elected the new leader of the Nationals Party — and therefore Deputy Prime Minister — after Barnaby Joyce resigned on Friday.
McCormack defeated George Christensen in a party room ballot, which isn’t surprising given Christensen called for the Nationals to end its coalition arrangement with the Liberal Party over the weekend.
With McCormack’s rise to the top, you can expect to hear a lot more about a newspaper column he wrote almost in 1993 when he the editor of a rural newspaper, in which he called gay people “sordid” and “unnatural”.
Rather than being accused of taking anything out of context, we’ll just re-publish the whole thing in full, courtesy of The Daily Advertiser:
“Dear readers,
A week never goes by anymore that homosexuals and their sordid behaviour don’t become further entrenched in society.
Unfortunately gays are here and, if the disease their unnatural acts helped spread doesn’t wipe out humanity, they’re here to stay.
On Monday hundreds of thousands of homosexuals marched through Washington in a demonstration intended to show their demands for equal rights and an end to discrimination should no longer be ignored or denied.
How can these people call for rights when they’re responsible for the greatest medical dilemma known to man – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome?
AIDS shows no discrimination.
It claims thousands upon thousands of innocent people’s lives every year.
On the very night of the homosexuals’ march that pompous critic Stuart Littlemore on Media Watch on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had the gall to criticise various newspaper editors across Australia for “gay bashing”.
He ridiculed them for showing some moral backbone and condemning homosexuality.
It’s just as well some newspapers are speaking up and acting as watchdogs on moral issues. If it was left up to the likes of Littlemore, heaven knows some of the all-embracing attitudes society would be told it was OK to accept.”
McCormack was 30 when he penned the column, and has since apologised for it on several occasions, saying his views have evolved over the years.
“I have grown and learnt not only to tolerate but to accept all people, regardless of their sexual orientation, or any other trait or feature which makes each of us different and unique,” he said in a statement last year ahead of the marriage equality postal survey.
Unsurprisingly, McCormack supported the No side in last year’s marriage equality postal survey.
So congrats to him I guess.