Exposing the entrenched "morality" of the past

Australia's leader frank about a lamentably recent social ill

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Proper Studies (1927)

ON March 8th, Australian PM Julia Gillard delivered a remarkable address as part of International Women's Day. Earlier this week, Australian women - and women everywhere - were again her audience. Her theme was forced adoption, and the "moral" conservatism that mandated, with quite breathtaking hypocrisy, the removal of babies from their natural mothers, on the grounds of their being too young, or unmarried, and other "shameful" pretexts. Speaking to over eight hundred people, gathered in the Great Hall of Parliament House, Canberra, she set the record straight, pulling the facts from beneath the veil of outright double standards practised between the Fifties and the Seventies. With rhetoric as impassioned as it was objective, her address eloquently but uncompromisingly exposed this social atrocity, and outlined the emerging policies that will prevent such tragic history being repeated.

This, surely, is one of the things that social justice is all about - not insisting that each person play by a given set of rules or risk stigmatisation, but be recognised and valued as a human being regardless of their lifestyle and whether it tallies with prescribed "norms". It is not when we are cajoled into being the same that progress is made, but when our lifestyle choices are acknowledged and respected in individual rather than collective terms. Indeed, it is precisely the freedom to be true to ourselves, rather than abiding by given opinion or social "ideals", that enables the expression of human dignity at all. Liberty is indivisible, and diversity must always prevail, each voice listened to, not merely heard.

As little as forty years ago, the women in that room were told they were "bad", "unfit for motherhood", bemoaned by an outlook that appointed social conservatism the official disguise of bigotry, "tradition" the aesthetic term for a formal policy of oppression. History will record their victimisation by a "system" that stressed "propriety" over love, as if intolerance were preferable to compassion, but also their unswerving thoughts of the children they left behind, their innate decency and sense of duty to those absent sons and daughters wholly unshaken by the passage of time.