Catholic Online Forum

In his Media Watch Dog blog over the past two weeks, Gerard Henderson has blogged on what he sees as the hostility against the Catholic Church of journalist David Marr. Most recently, he has questioned what he sees to be Marr’s assumption that Christians are the only force behind opposition to same-sex marriage.

He might like to consider why Julia Gillard, an atheist, opposed the legislation in the House of Representatives on Wednesday. He might also want to travel to Sydney’s suburbs, a long way from his inner-city abode, and check out what Muslims think about same sex marriage or even homosexuality. Or he might check what Hindus think about same sex marriage. Or Marr might like to ask himself why Labor MP Ed Husic, the only Muslim member of the House of Representatives, voted with the Catholic Tony Abbott and the atheist Julia Gillard and the Christian Kevin Rudd and the atheist Chris Bowen against same sex marriage.

The fact is that David Marr, the author of The High Price of Heaven (Allen & Unwin, 1999), is an obsessive opponent of Christianity and an anti-Catholic sectarian to boot. ... Consequently he tends to blame “all” Christians for life’s disappointments. And he loves to add inverted commas to the word Christian – suggesting that these Christians are not really Christian at all since they are so intolerant as to oppose gay marriage (according to Marr’s argument).

The previous week, Henderson catalogued the the “hyperbole” of the anti-Catholic sectarian “lowlights” of Marr’s “shoddy, unprofessional” Quarterly Essay on “Vatican ideologue” Tony Abbott, such as:

Page 13 : Marr refers to the fact that Abbott’s girlfriend Kathy McDonald fell pregnant while at university (it was found out, years later, to someone other than Abbott) as “the old Catholic catastrophe: no chastity, no contraception, no abortion, and…no marriage”. Marr seems to believe that such a fate only befell young Catholic women in the 1970s.