Stop Press! Blair does something vaguely progressive...

Finally the Blair government has done something that differentiates it from its 'coalition of the willing', religious tub-thumping friends the US and OZ, and reminded us that his is a (so-called) labour government after all.

He's refusing to allow (government funded) Catholic adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples wishing to adopt. Some of these agencies have declared that they would 'rather close' than adopt children out to gay couples. Don't abort your child, they say, and when you are forced instead to give it up for adoption, we'll decide who it goes to, based on bigotry rather than what might be good for the child and fair to everybody concerned. Talk about boxed in by ideology. But Tony's not having a bar of it. So, finally, (and with gritted teeth) good on you Tony!

Contrast that with that clown Abbott and his dogmatic, misogynistic agenda - denying teenage girls the pill on Medicare before the age of 18 (yep, that'll reduce the number of abortions), dithering on the provision of Gardasil (which would vaccinate girls against the virus that causes cervical cancer) on the PBS and, scandalously, awarding abortion counselling 'contracts' to churchy agencies willing to twist arms and use scare tactics to save the unborn at the expense of the living. Don't be fooled by these agencies - they rarely nail their colours to the mast. It's not a straight-forward matter of:

Agent: 'Don't abort your child please, it offends God'
Woman: 'I've considered all the options and I don't want to keep it, and anyway what business is it of yours?'
Agent: 'OK then'.

Like all sly viral marketing, which the churches are far from averse to employing to recruit unsuspecting punters (see Christian metal bands), this counselling will be cloaked in false impartiality and deceit. Most women I know are painfully aware of their reproductive health and looking after themselves. They are therefore vulnerable to suggestions that there might be any nasty damage to 'their bits' through a termination procedure. This is the jugular vein these vipers will go for to seal the (non-termination) deal.

The more I see and hear of organised religion, the more sickened I feel by it.