Michael McCormack may be our next deputy PM - wrote extreme anti gay article 1993 (video)

*Update: McCormick has been elected leader of the National party and with be our new deputy prime minister.

This man is tipped to become the leader of the National party. He has form for being extremely homophobic, penning an article in 1993 as the editor of a newspaper. To his credit he has apologised for it but you know how these things go; they only apologise when they're told to. No doubt in my mind that someone who would go to the lengths of writing a piece like that and having it published as the lead, thought he was fine doing it with little or no concept of how the wider community felt about gays even back then.

Here's the article in full. It resurfaced last year with the postal survey as he was the overseer of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) which ran the postal survey.

Dear readers,

 A week never goes by anymore that homosexuals and their sordid behaviour don’t become further entrenched in society.

 Unfortunately gays are here and, if the disease their unnatural acts helped spread doesn’t wipe out humanity, they’re here to stay.

 On Monday hundreds of thousands of homosexuals marched through Washington in a demonstration intended to show their demands for equal rights and an end to discrimination should no longer be ignored or denied.

 How can these people call for rights when they’re responsible for the greatest medical dilemma known to man – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome?

 AIDS shows no discrimination.

 It claims thousands upon thousands of innocent people’s lives every year.

 On the very night of the homosexuals’ march that pompous critic Stuart Littlemore on Media Watch on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had the gall to criticise various newspaper editors across Australia for “gay bashing”.

 He ridiculed them for showing some moral backbone and condemning homosexuality.

 It’s just as well some newspapers are speaking up and acting as watchdogs on moral issues. If it was left up to the likes of Littlemore, heaven knows some of the all-embracing attitudes society would be told it was OK to accept. The Courier

Charming. 

He's half right on one point, that HIV doesn't discriminate (the fact that he uses "AIDS" that you can't catch instead of "HIV" shows how ignorant he was of the subject, but that didn't stop him preaching about it). No, HIV doesn't discriminate, people do. People like him. Then he goes on about "innocent" people dying of AIDS, the inference being that gays weren't innocent but bought the plague to the innocent. The fact is that everyone, no matter who they are, are "innocent" when it comes to HIV. Including gays.

 I guess this is the sort of thing that the Australian Christian Lobby wanted to say during the postal survey, but couldn't because of our anti-discrimination laws. They even wanted to have those discrimination laws suspended during the survey, prompting questions from all, like What do you want to say that you can't say now? Indeed much of what they said even with the laws left in place were lies and suppositions.

Not that I was expecting anything less from the National party, well known for it's homophobia.