Shame on the rash tweets

AUSTRALIAN Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace should have known better than to tweet the following on Anzac Day (please excuse the broken syntax as well as his imputations): "Just hope that as we remember the Australia they fought for - wasn't gay marriage and Islamic."

Wallace quickly issued a media release clarifying that he was talking only about "the nature of the Australia" Diggers such as his father fought for, rather than pushing a homophobic or racist line. Phew, here I was thinking Wallace was being insulting. It is easy to understand why some jumped to that conclusion.

The tweet showed especially poor judgment, coming just weeks after the public outcry that followed Larissa Behrendt's disgraceful tweet about Aboriginal activist Bess Price's comments in support of the Northern Territory intervention on ABC1's Q&A: "I watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and I'm sure it was less offensive than Bess Price."

Funny? No. Highly offensive? You bet.

The broader point when these tweets are looked at side by side is that the ideological hard Right and Left in this country undermine their respective causes when they show disdain for people whose views don't conform with their own. In the case of Behrendt she singled out an individual. Wallace reserved his slurs for large quotients of the community who are gay (and may like to marry) or Islamic.

Behrendt is a NSW Australian of the Year who should have known better. Wallace is a member of the Order of Australia and former brigadier in the military who should also have known better.

In both cases, however, Twitter has unintentionally done the community a service. Where once upon a time we all would have gone on knowing only the public persona of the pair who have embarrassed themselves, we now know what they say when they aren't operating on script, on cue or on message. And the public can now judge whatever else they say fully cognisant of how cruel both are capable of being: not a good look for an Aboriginal rights campaigner or a lobbyist for the Christian movement.

The tweets by Wallace and Behrendt certainly highlight the dangers of using Twitter, especially for people in the public eye. It is instant, very public and doesn't give users the word space to contextualise their remarks. It is the social media equivalent of the Big Brother house. People who agreed to spend 12 weeks on the Ten Network series assumed they could hide their unpalatable inner selves from view for that length of time, but of course they couldn't.

On Twitter users like to think they will be able to control what they post, but of course stupidity regularly takes over.

Behrendt took days to adequately retract her remarks and didn't do so directly to the woman she insulted. That's why she suffered a more severe hammering in the media than did Wallace, who retracted his remarks within an hour of posting them (thank God for small mercies). Not quite unreservedly, mind you. He apologised to the Anzacs rather than the gay and lesbian community or the Islamic community. Given that Wallace's apology was so selective, it is worth burrowing into the implications of his tweet and his attempts to contextualise it.

Thousands of Australians who have fought (and some died) for their country would have been gay or held religious views different from Wallace. He admits as much, hence his attempt to contextualise the remarks as being about the "nature" of the Australia for which they fought. But World War I and II veterans fought for an Australia that didn't give Aborigines the right to vote, a nation that also discriminated against women in a way that is no longer acceptable.

They fought for a country that gave British courts the ultimate authority over our laws, which is now an antiquated notion. Women had voting rights in this country only a decade before World War I broke out. I could go on. The nature of Australia is very different today from the past.

Times change and I am sure most Diggers would be proud of that fact. Progress and reform -- whether social or economic -- contributes to ongoing prosperity. Wallace used Anzac Day to impose his selective notion of which parts of Australia were worth fighting for and which were not.

Gay marriage is a concept that may be embraced in the next decade or it may take longer to be enacted. Who knows? It may never happen.

But the idea that gay marriage should never be legalised because Diggers in the past have fought for a country where such unions were not allowed is ridiculous. It's like arguing that giving Aborigines the right to vote disrespects those who died in conflicts before indigenous suffrage was introduced.

Wallace may not like the logic of the above analogy, but it is self-evident. If his comment about Islam was meant to refer to concepts of a caliphate state, that's another matter entirely. Diggers have always fought to defend Australia's democratic institutions.

State religious authority, as occurs in caliphate structures, is anathema to our national institutions and always will be. Religious interference in our Westminster democratic polity is inappropriate no matter which religion we are talking about. Fundamental to Australia's political and religious culture is a separation between church and state.

I had the chance to sound Wallace out about his views and what led him to tweet what he did the day it happened. I have never met the man, but he sounded nice enough over the phone and was happy to engage with me in polite debate about these issues. A cynic might say I was afforded more tolerance because he could hear my children playing in the background, and a name such as van Onselen hardly signposts me as a natural adherent of the Koran.

The truth is perhaps much simpler. While our politicians won't legalise gay marriage, opinion polls clearly highlight that a majority of the public is relaxed about them doing so. The reason politicians won't is because the likes of Wallace are far more passionate in their opposition to gay marriage than the likes of myself are in advocating it. His tweet maintained the rage. In our political system loud (and sometimes sizeable) minorities often trump what the silent majority supports because the majority is apathetic about the issue.