Flcking through Linked in, Obadiah notices a self-description “graduate from paid employment”. Nice. Being that way inclined at the moment Obadiah gives a wry smile to himself.
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It turns out that replacing “mother” with “birthing parent” on Medicare forms was too much for Bill Shorten. Minister for Government Services Shorten has instructed public servants to make the change. This was a quick response within hours of a story of a mother, Salt Grover, complaining about the form, appearing in News Corp papers.
Shorten explained that he was trying to hose down a possible culture war.
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- Language, in case you have not noticed, is quickly weaponised. Obadiah sat through days of the NSW parliamentary abortion debates listening to Greens and Labor members referring to “people with vaginas” rather than referring to women.
(It also took to the final days of a long debate for the “Reproductive Health Care Reform Bill” to become the “Abortion Law Reform Act” – for a time, abortion was the procedure afraid to speak its name.)
The word war was about transgender people, and Shorten’s intervention has already been criticised by transgender activists. “While this term describes the experience of women – the majority of people who give birth – it does not describe the experience of men and non-binary people, who give birth to children too,” an Equality Australia spokesperson told SBS.
Obadiah, would prefer that Woman and Man retain their original meaning while wanting to treat transgender persons with absolute respect. But your prophet has been around long enough to know that the English language is not predictable.
Why did “Ms” catch on, but “womyn” did not? Both were changes eagerly sought by second-wave feminists. Maybe because Ms had been around for some time and was useful, it meant you did not have to check marital status when writing about women. It looks like pre-nomials are on the way out, the nine papers like Obadiah have stopped using them.
“They” used to refer to single individuals might make it into common usage. It can be useful, for example, when unsure of someone’s gender. “They said they were coming to church” is fairly common already. And Shakespeare used forms of “they”. Here’s an oft-cited example from the Comedy of Errors
There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
Even though Shakespeare is writing about a man, in the second line he uses “their’ not “his”. And Jane Austen does the same.
But “they” might not win the language battle. In New York magazine, Brock Colyar, a non-binary person reflects after four years of “the pronoun go-round,” it has got to the point that it is on cheap tee shirts. “I have begun to wonder what I was trying to accomplish by using they/them pronouns.” They wonder if the energy used to police pronoun culture could have been spent elsewhere. Good question.
Colyar’s main point is that pronoun protocols make sexuality the first thing you get to know about a person. And he has come to think maybe that is not a good thing. From a very different place, Obadiah agrees.
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Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian has become a media hero of many Christians and his “Christians: The Urgent Case For Jesus in Our World” is shortlisted for Sparklits “Australian Christian Book of the Year award. He quotes evangelical leaders like Stephen McAlpine and John Dickson in the paper. Yet he remains a devout Catholic. Sectarianism is definitely over.
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Congrats to you lot: Theothercheek ran a piece on masks – suggesting that a group that energetically campaigned against vax rules keeping the unvaxxed out of churches might give a hand to another group the immunocompromised, and suggest we mask up in church. Predictably perhaps, it set off a lengthy debate on Facebook. Obadiah was encouraged that the spirit of Theothercheek was adhered to. There was no name-calling, and people wrote to convince and not to insult.
Some commentators had immunocompromised partners or are immunocompromised themselves, and others are very passionate about the alleged ineffectiveness of some covid measures as they see it, but things did not become over-heated. Well done.
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And Obadiah had just sent his plea to mask up in church out to the internet when he got an email from his church, that said, please follow the suggestion of the Chief Health Officer and wear masks. I did not plan this. honest.
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Then there was our little contribution to the “how long should a sermon be” discussion that smoulders on. Scott Morrison took 37 minutes over his sermon, which we transcribed during the week.
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Quote of the week: from Theologian Thomas Oden on his turning away from Liberal Christianity towards classical Christianity: “My previous relationship to Scripture had been a filtering process which permitted those souces to speak to me only insofar as they could meet my conditions, my worldview and my assumptions as a modern person.” From A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir. IVP 2014
Question Do you and I have a filter on scripture?
In case you are wondering who Thomas Oden was, here’s what Theologian Timothy George wrote when he died in 2016: “Few theologians of the past 100 years can claim to have had tea and cookies with Rudolf Bultmann, discussed theology with Karl Barth at his hospital bed in Basel, had lunch with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, had an audience with Pope John Paul II, driven through Galilee in a Fiat with Avery Dulles in the passenger seat, and conferred with Coptic and Pentecostal theologians in Africa. Oden did all of these and much more. Along the way, he was both scorned and lionized, and he bore scars from some of the scrapes he was in.”