No need for a funereal mien.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

Hey, John B, what’s with the dark glasses and bowed head? Your Christmas wish for Oz was right on.

Surely not guilt and shame?

You told it how it is – and should be.

OK, your timing might have been out.

Small matter.

At the pearly gates St Peter will not say to you, I’m pretty sure,

“John B, your fidelity to the Truth was impeccable.  But, really, you shouldn’t have declared it before the Sanhedrin. That was unwise.

“So, I’m sorry, John.  I really am. You did well, but, please take the door on the left: yes, that one lit by the ruddy glow.  And, mind the step down.”

No, no, no, John!

Whip off those glasses, raise your head, let that trademark spring in your step kick back in – and, savour in your thoughts the perennial wisdom of Lady Macbeth:

“Only look up clear/To alter favor ever is to fear.” (Macbeth, Act I Sc.5)

You see, John, it’s not you who were wrong, but that other John: that John H. fella.

You see: he’s just campaigned to uphold the age-old understanding of marriage.

At the same time, he stuck it to PM Malcolm Turnbull and his Cabinet for not being upfront about what protections for religious freedom were on the table.

Now, with the battle lost, John H. turns around and says that it’s vital that Turnbull’s captaincy of the Liberal Party and Coalition government be preserved.

Here we have a government whose high leadership has connived with Labor, the Greens and “the forces of progress” to overturn the ordinary human understanding of marriage and which, as of this day, has stood by as those same forces put to the sword Coalition Senators who sought this week to defend freedom of religion, and we are now told that the preservation of this leadership is of paramount importance.

It illustrates the fundamental problem of the Liberal Party.  The only kind of ‘conservatives’ really allowable in this party are those that, with each advance of the cultural revolution, baptise it and claim it as their heritage.

As St. Peter’s High Boss once put it,

“… being what thou art, lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, thou wilt make me vomit thee out of my mouth.” (Apocalypse, 3.16)