Ruth Institute Blog

Way to go, PM! Way to voice your opinion even when it’s so horribly unpopular. . . and when you’re right.

Carolyn Moynihan

Horrors! The next prime minister of Australia might be a man who advocates virginity for young people.

Here is this week’s shock-horror story from Australia: the country’s next prime minister might be a man who advises his daughters not to throw their virginity away on just anyone. Fair go, that’s what he dared to say during an interview with a women’s magazine. You probably heard the resulting outcry in America, above the President’s State of the Union address, above the iPad hysteria: ‘What a chauvinist! What a pontificator! What a hypocrite!’ — to recite only the more flattering epithets.

The nicest thing any pundit had to say about Tony Abbott, newly elected leader of the opposition (conservative) Liberal Party, was that he was too honest for his own good.

And all because, when asked during an interview with the Women’s Weekly what advice he would give his three daughters on sex before marriage, he said: “I would say to my daughters, if they were to ask me this question… it is the greatest gift you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving, and don’t give it to someone lightly.”

Okay. Every politician knows that it is death by media frenzy to voice an opinion on a moral issue. Especially if the politico is a man; especially if the issue is sex; especially if, as Abbott freely acknowledges, he has not always lived up to his own standard; and most especially if he happens, like Abbott, to be a practising Catholic. Because we all know, don’t we, that Catholics are the most benighted as well as the most pontificating and hypocritical of people on the subject of sex, if nothing else.

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