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In the lead-up to the South Australian state election this weekend, Cory Bernardi is once again being pilloried by certain sections of the media for arguments he made fourteen years ago against the re-definition of marriage.

But to his credit, the One Nation candidate is not backing down, saying, “I own what I said. I live up to it, and I don’t care if the ABC or their political wing, the Greens, are offended by it.”

The hypocrisy of our national broadcaster is quite simply staggering, especially when one considers how it has positively platformed and promoted TV shows portraying sexual activity between owners and their pets. See, for instance, Rake, Season 1, Episode 5, “R V Chandler” starring Sam Neill, which is still freely available on ABC iView.

The Peter Singer Connection: Philosopher’s Views Revisited

This weekend’s election is surely a litmus test, though, for the great political shift which has occurred throughout the entire country.

For anyone not aware of what the former federal senator said, here is a transcript of Bernardi’s unedited speech from Hansard:

There are even some creepy people out there—and I say ‘creepy’ deliberately—who are unfortunately afforded a great deal more respect than I believe they deserve. These creepy people say it is okay to have consensual sexual relations between humans and animals.

Will that be a future step? In the future, will we say, ‘These two creatures love each other, and maybe they should be able to be joined in a union.’

It is extraordinary that these sorts of suggestions are put forward in the public sphere and are not howled down right at the very start.

We can talk about people like Professor Peter Singer, who was, I think, a founder of the Greens or who wrote a book about the Greens. Professor Singer has appeared on Q&A on the ABC, the national broadcaster. He has endorsed such ideas as these.

I reject them. I think that these things are the next step. As we accede to one request, we will then have the next one, which will be for unions of more than two people. We will have suggestions for unions of three or four people.

I notice the Greens are heckling, but the point is that they misled their constituent base and there was an outcry about this. Where do we go then? Do we go down the Peter Singer path?

Those who say this is the end of the social revolution have no history of being honourable about that. They continue to push and challenge our social and cultural mores.

We simply cannot allow such an important social institution to be redefined, especially when Australians do not see this as a priority issue.

What a lot of people are unaware of, though, is that Peter Singer—the moral philosopher from Princeton University—along with the famous homosexual environmentalist Bob Brown, were integral in formulating the political philosophy and policy framework for the Greens.

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Significantly, back in 2001, Peter Singer gave a glowing review of the book by Midas Dekkers, called Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. Significantly, the article was titled “Heavy Petting“, and Singer himself argued that because he rejected the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of seeing ourselves as having been made in the image of God—and as therefore being distinct from animals—then we shouldn’t consider sexual intercourse with them as being ‘taboo’.

Indeed, according to Peter Singer, caging a chicken for egg production is just as cruel as beheading a chicken while seeking to have sex with it! As Singer states:

Almost a century ago, when Freud had just published Three Essays on Sexuality, the Viennese writer Otto Soyka published a fiery little volume called Beyond the Boundary of Morals. Now entirely forgotten, it was a polemic directed against the prohibition of “unnatural” sex like bestiality, homosexuality, fetishism and other non-reproductive acts.

Soyka saw these prohibitions as futile and misguided attempts to limit the inexhaustible variety of human sexual desire. Only bestiality, he argued, should be illegal, and even then, only in so far as it shows cruelty towards an animal.

Following Soyka, one would conclude that some of the acts described in Dekkers’ book are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes. Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of the sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple.

(But is it really worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in a wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)

But sex with animals does not have to be cruel. Who has not been at a party disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop. Soyka would presumably have approved.

One might be tempted to rationalise Singer’s shocking ethical justification for humans having sex with animals as something of an anomaly. Unfortunately, it was not. As the following clip titled “For love of animals” from the ABC’s now defunct Q&A program in 2010 revealed, Singer unashamedly teaches that bestiality is not immoral.

Why were people so upset then, when just two years later, the then Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi made a similar argument between same-sex marriage and bestiality? Especially when Bernardi’s speech specifically referenced Singer’s own ethical position?

All of which to say, history has proven Cory Bernardi to be 100% correct. If marriage can be redefined to include people of the same sex simply because it is consensual, then nothing else should be considered to be morally repugnant.

Cory Bernardi should be commended then for not backing down against those in the media who continue to try and silence him, and the South Australian state election cannot take place soon enough.