Oh my goodness, it’s her again.

I’ll just ignore the irony of her headline (this isn’t a tweet), and I’ll take a look at what she’s trying to say.

Since when is Miranda Devine qualified to dictate what gays must do? She’s not even gay, or so she says. It doesn’t actually matter, she still wouldn’t be qualified. No one is.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman is a pioneer in the nascent field of neurolaw. He’s trialling an fMRI-based update of biofeedback cognitive training intended to strengthen the prefrontal cortices of criminals, to help them gain the conscious control necessary to suppress their antisocial impulses. Eagleman and his colleagues are hoping to minimize recidivism among those convicted of things like casually snatching old ladies’ bags and beating up gay people on a whim.

I propose that Miranda Devine submit herself to Dr. Eagleman’s trials. She’d make a very interesting subject. Her offences against social progress are simultaneously reactionary and calculated. She’s obviously a careful communicator, but she clearly neglects to account for the potential societal effects her articles might have.

This pattern is typical among violent offenders and social parasites – they plan right up until they’ve executed the deed, and largely ignore the consequences. Devine is careful not to break the law, but then I never said she was a bag snatcher. She’s worse precisely because she isn’t a criminal.

One could argue the wholesale abuse homophobes like Devine broadcast is more psychologically damaging to the gay community than a cut lip and a few bruises inflicted by an inarticulate cretin on Chapel St. I don’t see how that conjecture would be controversial.

These antisocial types invariably refuse to accept the consequences of their actions. Devine actually goes one further – she actively defends her fellow offenders in order to absolve herself of responsibility. Such is the way of the ‘nuclear family’ regressive movement.

I was extremely disappointed to hear Jeff Kennett – a widely respected advocate for mental health – speak out against the rights of homosexual couples to raise children. Kennet was promptly repudiated by sensible people everywhere. Then in her article, Devine despicably appropriated Kennett’s earnest attempt at rapprochement on Joy FM into her nasty agenda.

Now, she could be making progress on the foresight front. She did find an online analogue to plugging her ears and cacophonously doxologizing deafness. As a friend pointed out, her most recent manifestation of digital diarrhoea didn’t come with a comment box. Though that might have been the work of a fractionally less crude editor. (Update: there is now a comment box and the responses read like they were written by sock puppets.)

The big problem with Miranda Devine’s latest thesis is her claim that anyone who disagrees with her is simply intolerant. Phrased like that, you could say, well, fair enough. But Devine isn’t merely airing an opinion – she’s making claims that have facts bearing on them. As discussed elsewhere on this blog, opinions that run counter to facts are not opinions anyone is obliged to respect.

We simply know from numerous studies that children raised by gay parents are no more likely to be gay than their ‘traditionally raised’ peers. (And even if these children are more likely to be gay, so what?) The evidence also tells us that children raised by gay parents are no less well-adjusted than their ‘traditionally raised’ peers. These real-world facts leave her case against gay marriage decidedly flaccid. Miranda Devine is wrong when she pleads otherwise, and this is important to notice.

These sorts of factual slips are what got Andrew Bolt in trouble. Devine can claim ‘freedom of speech’ all she likes; but again, freedom of speech was intended to subvert propaganda, not to justify its perpetuation. If she honestly believes that she should be allowed to say what she likes, she’s not allowed to whine when she’s rebuked.

I’m yet to hear a compelling argument supporting the notion that allowing homosexuals to marry will somehow threaten the institution of heterosexual marriage. And whenever I hear conservatives say ‘homosexuality is a choice,’ I always think ‘well, maybe for you – but not for me,’ and I’d wager that other straight people feel exactly the same way. I’m also yet to meet a totally homosexual person who feels the converse, namely that ‘heterosexuality is a choice’. Honestly, if your sexuality is threatened by the right of someone else’s to theirs, you’re not comfortable with your own biology. There’s obviously something you’re not telling yourself.

Science tells us that homophobic men are much more aroused by gay porn than other men who identify as heterosexual. Suppression isn’t healthy – just look at what pastor Ted Haggard went through. There’s an echoing refrain here. Think about it, where does the motivation for homophobia – whether it’s expressed as self-loathing or pathological fear – come from? How often do you see homophobia aired today without somehow stemming from the doctrines of some primitive cult?

But it’s too easy to just blame religion. Regular readers and anyone who knows me will be aware that I think using religious convictions to justify anything is an act of intellectual high treason. Playing the God card appears to be nothing more than appealing to a socially accepted justification for inveterate bigotry. My mother identifies as a Catholic and she has a very strong moral sense, one that largely mirrors my own as an atheist. She justifies her morality with reason, not faith. And that’s a good thing too, because she quite reasonably believes most Catholic ‘moral’ teachings are antiquated and invidious.

Clearly then, being religious does not justify being intolerant; religion merely offers a feeble excuse for the atavistic bigotry it inculcated. It arguably reinforces it today too. Religion is always a crutch for the fearful and it too often serves as a vehicle for the wicked. It doesn’t matter which religious cult you want to identify with, nothing you say will ever be immune to scrutiny. The slaughter of sacred cows is the price of democracy and free speech.

I stand up for gay rights because I know that Christopher Hitchens was right when he said that homosexuality isn’t just about sex, it’s about love. He said this when he was defending his friend Stephen Fry during a debate against a certain stridulous conservative British politician and a mendacious archbishop hailing from Nigeria. Both of these creeps represented Miranda Devine’s own Catholic church. The same church that has allowed AIDS to ravage Africa by perpetuating the odious lie that condoms spread HIV.

It’s ironic that the representatives of a superstitious Mafia claiming to preach love and tolerance readily proliferate so much hatred, suffering and death.

Miranda Devine and her priggish colleagues do not convey moral teachings that any decent human being should respect. They speak out against social justice and human rights. They seek to restrict the liberties of people they have no right to judge.

Attempting to feed vulnerable gay kids whose parents read this refuse and concerned ‘traditional’ parents of gay kids the notion that homosexual love is not as worthy of respect as heterosexual love is an act of unforgivable cruelty. Devine’s new column is the latest incarnation of a virulent cultural strain of surreptitious theocracy. It’s anti-democratic, it’s antisocial and it’s sub-criminal. It’s the cancer eating our discourse; a disease eroding decency.

But it is sort of welcome. We at least have some sort of metre by which to measure social progress, though admittedly the results themselves aren’t very encouraging. Devine clearly has the right to say and publish what she likes because she elucidates what the idiots are thinking. What she lacks is the right to avoid a good impugning. That’s freedom of speech in action, baby.

Telling people how to respond to criticism is not something Miranda Devine has any business doing. Like her, I’m comfortable waxing acerbic about things that irritate me; but unlike her I know what I’m doing and I’m proud of it. I don’t care who I offend, but I recognize the right of others to feel offended. I would never consider back-peddling or making excuses for my views. But I will change my views if the facts change. If she wants to know what it is to be vile, she should proofread her own text before she posts it.

If fMRI-based biofeedback isn’t available for public offenders like her, she at least needs to talk to a counsellor. Someone has to tell her that she can’t vitiate the malice behind her convictions by invoking Jesus.

Australian journalists rejoice! Standards and ethics are being snuck back into our noble profession. What a great week for free speech! And what a great few years for Andrew Bolt! What more could such a world class professional victim want?

Make no mistake, Bolt is a professional victim. He was never a polemicist. Christopher Hitchens is a polemicist. Polemicists always use facts to support their arguments. Andrew Bolt writes fiction starring him and his criminal friends in the Coalition as patriotic underdogs. Bolt is Australia’s ugly answer to Ann Coulter. He’s certainly not a journalist. Just because he wants to call what he does journalism doesn’t make it so – any more than waving a scarf makes you a football player, or something like that.

My Swinburne tutors often refer to Bolt’s trashy output to demonstrate what we should never do as journalists. His oeuvre is replete with logical fallacies, factual inaccuracies, defamation, self-contradiction, self-aggrandization and, well, stupid bullshit. He’s also a conservative shill, and he smells of faeces and kicks puppies. Maybe not the last two, but he’s definitely a conservative shill and he’s also a propagandist for bigotry. And nothing amuses me more than advocates for censorship like him crying foul when their warped definitions of ‘free expression’ are violated.

For Bolt to say that he’s been gagged, he’s right. He’s been gagged by the engorged organ of facts. Facts that he thought were inconsequential. Therefore he didn’t just express a stupid opinion, he lied to justify it. His opinion is only valid in the fantasy world he’s concocted. The adage of our age is: you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts. Apparently no one shared that with Andrew.

Don’t buy his guilt? He certainly doesn’t and he was right there, in the courtroom, hearing why first hand from the judge. But then, he is a moron, and he’s prone to missing the obvious. The court did an ABC’s Media Watch on the offending columns and here is a taste of what they turned up (read the rest under the “he lied” link, above):

BOLT: ”Take the most prominent Yorta Yorta leaders – Melbourne University academic Wayne Atkinson and Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group co-chair Graham Atkinson. Both are Aboriginal because their Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman.

”How can Graham Atkinson be co-chair of the Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group when his right to call himself Aboriginal rests on little more than the fact that his Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman?”

BROMBERG: ”The facts given by Mr Bolt and the comment made upon them are grossly incorrect. The Atkinsons’ parents are both Aboriginal as are all four of their grandparents and all of their great grandparents other than one who is the Indian great-grandfather that Mr Bolt referred to in the article.”

See? The take home message is that Bolt is a liar. Honestly, he’s lucky that climate scientists can’t/don’t sue for the persistent and grossly fraudulent misrepresentations of their data that graces Bolt’s widely-read screeds. (Thanks to my comrade Lev Lafayette over at Isocracy for that link.) If you like your schadenfreude delivered in a numbered and comprehensive manner, the honourable Justice Bromberg’s report makes for a fun read. You can find a very concise summary of exactly what happened in legal terms here (full disclosure: I’m technically a Crikey reporter, but only when I’m not posting things here.)

But we already knew that Bolt is a Monckton-loving liar. The coarse excretions he gleefully deposits down the eager quivering throats of uncritical Herald Sun readers everywhere are incisive, cutting-edge commentaries on the fantasy world that only denizens of the far right would want to live in. (Wouldn’t you take global warming over arse-kissing Tony Abbott and nuke-toting Sarah Palin?) The problem is that hacks who trifle with the facts and print it in news media like him don’t usually carry warning labels. They’re sold as journalists, when really they’re low-grade conspiracy fiction pornographers. The Bolt case is something to celebrate because for once, his leaked piss trail of deceit and bigotry was found to cross territory it can’t legally cross.

Now we come to my humble contribution to this discussion.

What’s this I’m hearing about ‘political correctness gone mad’? Are all our right wing commentators retarded? (I’m truly sorry, that’s an insult to retarded people everywhere.) I’m a major contender for the regional championship of political incorrectness. Even my patron saint is Bill Maher. (It’s important that, as an atheist, my patron saint is still alive.) Let me school you on the subject of subverting political correctness…

The far right’s abuse of the concept ‘political correctness’ is, to say the least, pathetic and telling. Political correctness isn’t about censoring hate speech, it’s about affording sacred cows undue respect. To illustrate: it’s politically incorrect to say that Catholicism and Islam are evil religions, but it’s hate speech to say that Muslims and Catholics are evil people (not least because the latter assertion is so palpably false it merits no further discussion). Why? Because people aren’t born with religious identities, and anyone who says otherwise would be damning infants to a lifetime of mental serfdom. But people are born with what we call an ethnic background, and those ethnicities we ethnically pale-types can distinguish as not-quite-white are vilified by some of our less-sophisticated brethren, which is clearly wrong. It’s also scientifically invalid, but that’s a story for another post. Does it even make sense to single someone out because their genes dictate that they’re less likely than you to get skin cancer? To return to my illustration of the stark difference between spreading hate and validly defying political correctness: the racism of the far right is laid bare when many of them would agree with me on the evilness of Islam (Muslims tend to be a different colour) but not Catholicism (because the Catholics they know tend to be white) – despite the fact that the ethical doctrines espoused in each creed’s holy texts are virtually indistinguishable.

So no, Bolt and the rest of his brand can’t cry ‘political correctness gone mad’. They don’t even know what ‘political correctness’ is and why it should be attacked. He also can’t say that his right to ‘free expression’ is being stifled unless he finally admits that all along he’s been trying to construct a dull, convoluted fictional narrative that features the suspect relationship dynamics between himself and Tony Abbott.

Of course, The Age are having a field day, and who could blame them? And happily, so is John Birmingham – reified wonderfully in one of his best columns ever.

I should close with a couple of points.

Freedom of speech is precious. It’s the lifeblood of journalism and, by extension, democracy. It exists to protect truth-tellers; not liars. Freedom of expression provides the same protection to artists working under the auspices of declared fiction. Yes, we should challenge orthodoxy when it doesn’t gel with the facts, feelings be damned. But that’s not what Bolt did. He didn’t contribute anything to our discourse other than malicious vitriol. What’s worse, he admitted that he was careless with the facts; and in doing so, he systematically undermined freedom of speech.

Justice Bromberg was right when he said, quoting a phrase from the Privy Case: “The public deserve to be protected against irresponsible journalism.” If not, what’s the point of journalism? When you write a column, you’re supposed to be giving an opinion on news (‘newly received or noteworthy information, esp. about recent or important events’ from Google) – not on something you’ve pulled out of your arse. And the ‘free expression’ deal only applies if what you’re doing is sold as fiction – it doesn’t mean you get creative license with the truth. To call Andrew Bolt’s columns the work of an artist is about as accurate as calling them the work of a journalist.

Protagoras considered public debate an essential component of democracy – so that ideas could compete with one another. The theory was that this was the way for ideas to converge on a consensus that better reflects the truth. Our discourse is not a popularity contest. It’s not some free market of ideas. In an age where we can glance the structure of the atom, our discourse really should be a meritocracy of ideas – the merit of ideas should be graded by how cogent they are with the facts. Bolt routinely lies and misrepresents the facts to give false credence to the pus he oozes all over his keyboard and shares with Australia, and it’s about time someone cleaned that mess up. It smells rotten and no one should be forced to look at it.

So journalists should be happy, we remain free to report the facts. Bolt gets to whine about the poor reception to his bad fiction. Really, nothing has changed. I’m just having some fun at Bolt’s expense. I’m not sadistic enough to refuse a masochist his beating.

Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from responsibility, and it especially doesn’t free you from the burden of the facts. If you vilify somebody in the media based on demonstrably bogus claims, you’re fair game. And we’re coming for you.