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Australia Today

Our New Deputy Prime Minister Once Called Homosexuality 'Unnatural' and 'Sordid'

Introducing Barnaby Joyce’s replacement: Michael McCormack.
Via Twitter

Following weeks of speculation in the wake of his affair with a former staffer, Barnaby Joyce has been forced to resign as leader of the Nationals and therefore his position as Deputy Prime Minister. And we now know who will replace him: Michael McCormack, currently Veterans Affairs Minister.

Who is this guy? Among other things, a former newspaper editor who once wrote an incredibly homophobic opinion piece that blamed gay people for the AIDS epidemic.

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In 1993, News.com.au reports, McCormack was editor of Wagga Wagga Fairfax newspaper The Daily Advertiser. He had a regular “editor’s desk” column, and using this platform published something with the very upfront headline “Sordid Homosexuality—It’s Becoming More Entrenched”.

“Dear readers,” the column began. “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 homosexuality, they’re here to stay.”

There are several more paragraphs, none of them worth regurgitating here. You get the point.

McCormack has apologised for the column in the past. In 2017, he was Small Business Minister and therefore literally in charge of the Australian Bureau of Statistics during the Marriage Equality Postal Survey. Fellow Coalition member Christopher Pyne made a point of querying this in parliament, forcing McCormack to issue an apology saying he had “grown and learnt not only to tolerate, but to accept all people regardless of their sexual orientation or any other trait or feature which makes each of us different and unique.”

That's all well and good, but you’ve got to wonder whether someone who once expressed the hope that gay people would be wiped out by disease is a good representative of an Australian public who overwhelmingly voted in favour of equal LGBTI rights last year. This guy is now literally our government's second in command.

I’m nostalgic for Barnaby already.

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