Truth in Advertising – The Australian Christian Lobby

As an Honorable Skeptic, one of my basic values is Truth in Advertising, the idea that what you see from any organization is exactly what you should expect and nothing else whatsoever. So I was offended by this website after hearing about it from a friend:

http://australianchristianlobby.org/

DEAR READERS:

It has come to our attention that there appears to be a case of mistaken identity between the ACL and another similarly named Australian lobby group.

PLEASE NOTE, IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DO NOT CONFUSE ‘Cat-Holics’ with ‘Catholics‘. (Although of course you can be both at the same time!)

http://australianchristianlobby.org/our-values/

The vision of the Australian Cat Ladies is to see feline principles and ethics accepted and influencing the way we are governed, do business and relate to each other as a community. The ACL aims to foster a more compassionate and just society by encouraging inclusivity, actively working against oppression of all kinds, and disseminating cat .gifs wherever they may be needed.

Our Values

Family

The ACL recognises the validity and right to exist of all families, whether they be straight, LGBTQ, childless, single parent, single cat, multiple cat or catless. The ACL actively encourages family values such as love, consent, communication, regular nap times, and scratches under the chin/behind the ears.

The ACL believes all love is equal, but the love between a lady and her cat(s) is more equal than others.

Life

The ACL believes in the importance of human and cat life, and as such, is a staunchly pro-choice organisation. No one should have anything less than full bodily autonomy, and no human or cat should have to suffer an unwanted pregnancy. Thus, the ACL advocates for full decriminalisation of abortion across Australia, the covering of RU486 (or “medical abortion drug”) by the Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme, and desexing of cats of all genders at the age of approximately 3 months.

Poverty & Injustice

The ACL strives for a world where all humans and cats may have a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and someone to clean their litter tray.

We stand against sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism, religious discrimination, fatphobia, whorephobia, and all forms of injustice. We understand that cat ladies come in all shapes, sizes, genders, sexualities, backgrounds and ethnicities, and encourage ACL membership by anyone who identifies as a cat lady or a cat lady ally.

We believe in creating a sustainable and healthy environment for ourselves, future generations, and cats for many years to come.

On this note, please keep your cats inside at night and make sure there is a bell on their collar, to prevent them from killing native wildlife.

Youth and education

Education is pivotal in the creation and maintenance of healthy families and communities. All cats have the right to be toilet trained, and all humans have the right to a comprehensive, well-resourced public education. The League of Australian Cat Ladies  believes in extensive, evidence based sex education, as it is proven to lower teen and unplanned pregnancies, decrease rates of STI infection, and increase knowledge of consent. We believe all cat owners should be properly educated on cat care, including desexing, vaccinations and the correct procedure for tummy rubs.

That website may be about cats, but it is not about Christianity at all. So why did they take the domain name http://australianchristianlobby.org ?  To poke fun at another advocacy group they oppose.

This is the REAL website for the Australian Christian Lobbyhttp://www.acl.org.au/

The vision of the Australian Christian Lobby is to see Christian principles and ethics accepted and influencing the way we are governed, do business and relate to each other as a community.

ACL aims to foster a more compassionate, just and moral society by seeking to have the positive public contributions of the Christian faith reflected in the political life of the nation.

ACL, established in 1995, operates in the Federal Parliament, and in all the state and territory parliaments, and is neither party partisan nor denominationally-aligned.

ACL does not seek to be the peak political voice for the church, but to facilitate a professional engagement of church with the state which allows for the voice of the church and individual Christians to be effective in the public square.

Read more about the Australian Christian Lobby here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Christian_Lobby

Sorry, but while I support gay rights and oppose Christians messing around with politics to force religious values on the people in general, what the Australian Cat Ladies did was clearly unethical. If the real ACL decides to sue the fake ACL over the taking of a domain name the real one should have had, I will support such a lawsuit. The domain of the Australian Cat Ladies should be australiancatladies.org

3 thoughts on “Truth in Advertising – The Australian Christian Lobby

  1. Their website domain expired. Everything they did was legal and, in fact, I’d consider it unethical to allow an organization which spews hate in the world to have another outlet to do so if you have the chance to stop them.

    • Three things to consider:

      1. Just because something is legal does not make it ethical.
      2. Defining a hate group based on strong religious values alone is itself inaccurate and unfair. Furthermore, even if it was an actual hate group like the Ku Klux Klan or a neo-Nazi group, no one should be making a website with the domain kukluxklan.org or americannazis.org to make fun of them. It’s still a form of LYING.
      3. The Australian Christian Lobby was not stopped. If anything, the stunt pulled against them only makes its opponents look bad and the real ACU look like victims of indentity theft, which is certainly wrong when done to any person. I’m sure Australian Christians in general will not be sympathetic to the Australian Cat Ladies at all, even if they own cats.

      • The Australian Christian Lobby are clearly a hate group – just do some research on Jim Wallace and you’ll see the homophobic and xenophobic rants he and other leaders of his unrepresentative body make.

        (Dale Husband: Noted, but that does not invalidate the points I made above. The USA has its own hate groups, but using dishonorable methods to fight them only makes us dishonorable; it does not make us right.)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s