Strange Politics: Gays, aliens and the Stolen Generation

SOME days you just wish your tongue had become spontaneously inflamed and thwarted that harebrained thought being uttered.

SOME days you just wish your tongue had become spontaneously inflamed and thwarted that harebrained thought being uttered.

Shane Warne sounded dumber than a box of rocks on that I Used to be a Celebrity show when he decided humans were created by aliens experimenting on monkeys.

"If we've evolved from monkeys, then why haven't those ones evolved?" he posited like a stoned 14-year-old covered in chip crumbs on his nan's couch.

"Look at those pyramids, Bonnie. You couldn't do 'em."

Fair point. Could have happened. Evolution be damned. Cue X-Files theme song.

There is a difference between Australia's favourite meat pie chompin', beer guzzlin', durry smokin', sex textin' cricket legend declaring something cockeyed and, say, the Australian Christian Lobby.

Shane Warne is no evolutionary geneticist, but holy doolie have you seen how thick his hair is these days? Picture: Digitally altered

The ACL's managing director Lyle Shelton let loose one of the feeblest arguments against same sex marriage to date during a Sky News interview.

If blokes can tie the knot with blokes, he is knee-tremblingly terrified that someone might assume he is one of those dodgy chaps who meet for late-night romps in public dunnies.

"If the definition of marriage is changed, people will no longer assume I'm married to a woman," Shelton said.

"It affects me straight away. I'd have to explain myself."

Hellfire! Imagine that.

Surely there are better arguments against gay marriage than people not automatically thinking you're a god-fearing straight shooter with decidedly un-limp wrists?

Federal Nationals MP Andrew Broad gave it a crack, but creepily ended up comparing the issue to animal sex.

"I can put the rams in a paddock and they might mount one another but no lambs will come out," he told the Sunraysia Daily newspaper.

Unsurprisingly, proponents of marriage equality frowned on being compared to a couple of beasts going at it in a barnyard.

You can shoot up heroin in Kings Cross but you can't buy a bottle of chardonnay after 10pm

Alan Jones had his own tactless outburst as well, this time about the Stolen Generation.

But first he made one of the catchiest and most poignant arguments against Sydney's last-drinks laws, which are now set for mimicry in Queensland.

"You can shoot up heroin in Kings Cross but you can't buy a bottle of chardonnay after 10pm," he said.

"You and I can't be trusted to buy a bottle of wine on the way home from the theatre because we're likely to belt someone but we can fill our veins with an illegal substance and walk the streets like a zombie capable of God knows what."

A top-notch appraisal of a system that allows us to legally shoot smack in an injecting centre but bans the purchase of plonk after 10pm.

But then he went and said Australia needed more Stolen Generations to solve the issue of child neglect.

A media storm ensued, naturally, but the veteran shock jock later qualified his comments, saying he meant stolen generation in the metaphorical sense.

"By that I mean the courts seem frightened to direct children away from dysfunctional homes because they would be accused of creating a stolen generation and, as a result, children are the losers," he said.

"Now this is not about black children, nor is it about white children, it's about children."

Which, I have to say, seems fair enough. -APN NEWSDESK

STRANGE POLITICS with Chris Calcino

Originally published as Strange Politics: Gays, aliens and the Stolen Generation