There’s nothing quite like getting up first thing in the morning to discover service documents sitting in your hallway (or, if you’re in Australia or the US, poking out of your mailbox). This is what has happened to Australian political and skeptical blogger Jennifer Wilson (her blog is ‘No Place for Sheep’) yesterday. I have had a couple of these in my time, although interestingly, none since becoming a lawyer. This is presumably on the basis that lawyers know their own kind, and know what they can get away with.
Anti-porn campaigner and self-described ‘pro-life feminist’ Melinda Tankard Reist is behind the claim, and although the basis of the suit has not been revealed, Russell Blackford suspects defamation. I agree with him, although invasion of privacy may be an outside possibility. I say ‘an outside possibility’, for the simple reason that Australia has no tort of invasion of privacy, and for obvious reasons is not a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights [ECHR], where Article 8 provides a qualified protection for privacy and family life. Russell comments:
The Christian anti-porn campaigner Melinda Tankard Reist has apparently threatened a defamation action or something of the kind against the blog No Place for Sheep (NPS).
NPS is the blog of Jennifer Wilson, an Australian academic, psychotherapist, and writer. It suggests that Ms Tankard Reist’s threat relates to true claims that she is a Baptist who attends the church in Belconnen – what this really amounts to, I think, is that the blog suggests she is motivated in her anti-porn campaign by her adherence to a conservative Christian belief system.
There may be more to it than that. I don’t claim to have researched all the claims made by the blog about Ms Tankard Reist. Perhaps some genuinely defamatory imputation can be found there somewhere … or not.
In any event, she is a public figure and a forthright campaigner for her cause, one who makes plenty of robust statements of her own (I’m wording this carefully, as I’m not especially interested in being slapped with a letter of demand or a defamation suit myself).
Once more from the top, people
1. Defamation
Legal Eagle and I wrote a guide to Australian defamation law (available here) in April, 2009. The law has not changed since then. However, it is important to remember that Australia has enacted Uniform Defamation Laws (for example, the Defamation Act 2005 (Vic) in LE’s home State of Victoria), so what is true of one state or territory will be true of all the others. The salient points to remember in this instance are as follows:
A publication will be defamatory if it tends to injure reputation by:
- disparaging a person;
- causing others to shun or avoid a person; or
- subjecting a person to hatred, ridicule and contempt.
If an individual is defamed, then he or she has a right to damages for the injury to reputation, as the purpose of the tort is to vindicate and protect reputation. Courts do not only look at the literal meaning of a defamatory publication, but also consider what the ordinary reader or viewer could have understood the publication to mean. This may be different from what was intended by the plaintiff or what was understood by the defendant.
The three main defences are:
- fair comment
- justification/truth
- qualified privilege
‘Fair comment’ is available when the publication is a comment (rather than a statement of fact). The comment must be:
- based on facts (which must be stated or sufficiently identified);
- relate to a matter of public interest; and
- an honest expression of the commentator’s view.
This is backed up by the statutory defence of ‘honest opinion’ (see eg, s 31, Defamation Act 2005 (Vic)), which is in similar terms.
In Australia, there is also a defence of ‘justification’, which applies if the defendant can prove the allegations are ‘substantially true’ (see eg, s 20 of the Defamation Act 2005 (Vic)). This can be compared to UK defamation law, where the defamatory statement is presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove its truth. ‘Qualified privilege’ applies when there is a legal, social or moral interest or a duty to communicate something to a person and that person has a corresponding interest or duty to receive the information. This is what protects job referees, for example.
2. Right to privacy/invasion of privacy
As Australia has no tort of invasion of privacy, all I can do is point to a piece of mine on English and European law on breach of the Article 8 ECHR right to privacy. The salient thing to remember when it comes to the European law is that we are dealing with breach of a human right, not a tort, so tortious reasoning is not very helpful. Instead, the two contending ECHR rights (typically Article 8 and Article 10, the right to freedom of expression) are balanced against each other. This means that no distinction is drawn between public figures and private individuals (a contrast with the US position). Instead, a distinction is drawn between different types of expression, with political speech protected more powerfully under Article 10 than, say, celebrity gossip. We do seem to be following the French in seeing sexual behaviour as ‘inherently private’.
The European law of privacy is thought-provoking (my piece summarizes not only the relevant law but also its historical origins) — in part because it is so foreign to people coming out of an Anglophone legal tradition. However, as it is not a part of Australian law, and if Australian law were to change it would most likely be in the form of a new tort, the High Court’s discussion of the issues in Lenah Game Meats v ABC [2001] HCA 63 is of greater moment.
The important thing to remember about Lenah Game Meats is that the Australian High Court is open to the development of a tort of invasion of privacy in circumstances where a person intrudes upon the personal affairs of another, where the matter made public is highly offensive to a reasonable person and there is insufficient public interest in having the information disclosed. This bears considerable similarity to the US law on point, and is distinguishable from the European law discussed earlier. As should be reasonably obvious, Australian law is still waiting for a suitable test case.
A little legal speculation or, why would someone prefer not to reveal their religious affiliation in debates about porn and abortion?
1. Melinda Tankard Reist – some background
According to her publisher, respected feminist imprint Spinifex Press, Melinda Tankard Reist is:
[A] Canberra author, speaker, commentator, blogger and advocate for women and girls. Melinda’s books include Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000), Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (2006) and Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls (2009). Getting Real is already in its fourth printing. She has been a contributor to China for Women: Travel and Culture, Cat Tales, A Girl’s Best Friend, and HorseDreams.
Melinda has just initiated a new grassroots campaigning movement called Collective Shout. It aims to expose corporations, advertisers and marketers who objectify women and sexualise girls to sell products and services. In demand as a speaker, Melinda is named in Who’s Who of Australian Women and the World Who’s Who of Women.
She is regularly attacked and slandered but loves the women in the ‘To’ address bar in emails who have helped keep her sane in difficult times.
Her personal website provides a little more detail:
Melinda’s commentary has been published and broadcast in Australia and overseas. She has been a panellist on ABC’s Q&A, and is a regular on Channel 7′s Morning Show, along with frequent appearances on a range of television and radio programs. Melinda contributes regularly to online opinion sites including ABC The Drum Unleashed. She’s also editor of Faking It: The Female Image in Young Women’s Magazines (WFA 2007).
Further detail again is available on well-known Australian humanist Leslie Cannold’s site. Cannold’s information is taken from material Reist wrote for her publisher, in various collections of essays and stories. The most salient:
By 1994 she was describing herself as ‘a freelance writer with a special interest in women’s health issues, bioethics and population programs’ (‘Contributors’, Michael Cook [ed.] [1994] The New Imperialism: World Population and the Cairo Conference [Little Hills Press], p.8). She was also presenting radio broadcasts for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation e.g. ‘Bullets or Babies’ (China for Women op. cit., p.350).
At about this time, Tankard Reist made three important moves as far as her future career was concerned. Reference has already been made to Spinifex Press which published China for Women and which later issued one of Tankard Reist’s own books, Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (2006). Spinifex Books is run by Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein, the latter being one of the best-known and longest-established ‘pro-life feminists’ in Australia.
[...]
Senator Brian Harradine, an ultra-conservative Tasmanian senator, hired Tankard Reist as his bioethics adviser in about 1993-94. Harradine retired in 2005 at which time Tankard Reist had been in his employ for 12 years. She may well have directly influenced a number of Harradine’s more important political deals, including the imposition of a longstanding ban on importation of the RU 486 ‘abortion pill’.
Also around 1994, Tankard Reist became involved with the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute (SCBI), a Catholic-dominated organisation that produces a range of statistics and research papers, virtually all of them favourable to official Catholic positions. One of these is Tankard Reist’s own ‘RU 486 Trials – Controversy in Australia’ (September 1994) which quotes Senator Harradine, Renate Klein and the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference as authorities in this area. Selena Ewing, one of Tankard Reist’s co-directors at Women’s Forum Australia, is a Research Officer at SCBI.
In a careful (and recent) profile, writer Rachel Hills left out Reist’s religious affiliations, but did make some other telling observations (the whole piece is worth a read):
Tankard Reist links media reports of increased child-on-child sexual assault to “children acting out what they’re learning from pornography”, but the 2010 Australian Crime Commission study the stories were based on stresses that “sexualised behaviour in children is only rarely a result” of sexualised media. The American Psychological Association’s 2007 investigation into the sexualisation of girls is more concerned with narrow beauty standards than it is with sexual media content.
“There is often a suggestion in the anti-porn movement that men’s attitudes towards women’s sexuality were better in the ‘good old days’,” argues Alan McKee, a professor in film and television at QUT and co-author of The Porn Report. “But we know statistically that young men today have far better attitudes towards women than their fathers or their grandfathers did.”
Hills’ failure to draw attention to Reist’s religious affiliations drew criticism from Jennifer Wilson (she who has been sued), who observed:
I’m surprised that you didn’t mention Tankard Reist’s religious affiliations. She’s a fundamentalist Christian. As feminists we learn to always ask anyone who is publicly morally prescriptive where they are coming from. Yet you don’t ask that question.
Tankard Reist’s critique of sexuality is based on the moral values of fundamentalist Christianity. She is of the religious right and a member of a church that preaches the second coming of Christ, the end time, and evangelism.
If we can tell Tony Abbott to get his rosaries off our ovaries because of his Catholic beliefs, why aren’t we telling Tankard Reist the same thing? And why are journalists such as yourself concealing her religious affiliations?
Hills’ response was that she thought the religious origin of Reist’s views was obvious:
You’re right, I didn’t ask MTR about her religious beliefs, and perhaps that was misplaced of me. I suppose the reason I didn’t was because it seemed so obvious to me that it wasn’t worth asking – have you ever met anyone who identified as pro-life who wasn’t religiously motivated? But fair point: it was an omission, and I should have mentioned it at least in passing.
For the record, I did ask Melinda what she thought healthy female sexuality looked like, if she thought women had a role to play in regulating men’s sexuality, and to articulate how she defined “sexualisation” and why it was of concern to her. Some of those answers didn’t make the final story (I wrote it from 45-pages of transcripts and background material – there was a lot of info that didn’t make the cut), but I don’t think you could say that the story repeated her POV uncritically.
2. So why the coyness about religious affiliation? And is privacy an issue?
People — including, believe it or not, public figures — do not like to have ‘where they hang out’ made available for public consumption. If this is the basis of Reist’s claim, then I have some sympathy — having had something similar done to me — even though it will not sound in Australian law. Once media people know where you shop, or exercise, or whatever, then they are in a position to make your life pretty bloody miserable. In the process, they can also make other people’s lives pretty bloody miserable if the place in question is quasi-public (a gym or a church, say). Ever seen footage of someone trying to bolt while being pursued by a bunch of people with cameras? Ever noticed that sometimes they chase the wrong person, or any person? This is likely what Reist is trying to avoid, and has some salience in English law, for example, in Campbell v MGN Ltd [2004] UKHL 22. In that case, the House of Lords held that the press couldn’t, without more, reveal that model Naomi Campbell was attending Narcotics Anonymous (the story included, among other things, paparazzi pictures of her taken outside the clinic).
However, I do think it is important that Reist’s religious affiliations are noted (even if the exact location of the church she attends is not revealed). This is because, I submit, her religious coyness is borne of the weakness of religious arguments against both pornography and abortion. This part of my argument is largely for people like Rachel Hills, who naively revealed in her comment on Jennifer Wilson’s site that she’d never ‘met anyone who identified as pro-life who wasn’t religiously motivated’. It would appear that Hills has never heard of Christopher Hitchens, at least in some of his moods.
3. Why are religious arguments against porn and abortion so bad?
You’ve all heard them, admit it. Chastity and morally upright behaviour will make us all better people; we can do without sex; celibacy is a gift from God; true love is love of God, sexual attraction is a diversion. Then there are the arguments against abortion, which are even worse: abortion creates a ‘culture of death’; raise every child regardless of whether you can afford it or not, weigh an infant’s life equally with that of the mother, worry about the unborn but do nothing (or very little) to assist those children (and their mothers) when they are born, or, in the alternative, do worry about this and find oneself subsidizing an utterly unworkable welfare state that routinely produces disasters like this.
It’s important to understand that this lack of quality is not because Christians and Muslims are stupid. They made (and make) interesting and sophisticated arguments in other areas. But they don’t ‘get’ sex at all (a point detailed with great knowledge and wit by University of Virginia professor of psychology, Jonathan Haidt). Haidt comments:
I think, however, that at least two less benevolent motivations [for religious hostility to human sexuality] are at work. First, there may be a kind of hypocritical self-interest in which the older generation says, “Do as we say, not as we did.” Buddha and St. Augustine, for example, drank their fill of passionate love as young men and came out only much later as opponents of sexual attachments. Moral codes are designed to keep order within society; they urge us to rein in our desires and play our assigned roles. Romantic love is notorious for making young people give less than a damn about the rules and conventions of their society, about caste lines, or about feuds between Capulets and Montagues. So the sages’ constant attempts to redefine love as something spiritual and prosocial sound to me like the moralism of parents who, having enjoyed a variety of love affairs when they were young, now try to explain to their daughter why she should save herself for marriage.
There are a number of reasons for these very bad arguments, but I will outline the most obvious:
- The anti-sex/sexual expression arguments outlined by early Christian theologians like St Augustine have been disproven by scientific evidence (see Haidt, above, for exhaustive detail).
- The most able Christian theologian, St Thomas Aquinas, followed pagan thinking (particularly Aristotle) on abortion, not disapproving of it until ‘quickening’. If any Christian was going to come up with a decent anti-abortion argument, it would have been Aquinas, but he didn’t bother. He was a bit busy trying to convince his fellow Christians that the universe obeyed rational scientific laws.
- Protestantism is theologically very weak, having largely shorn itself of Catholic excellence in this area (Aquinas, Augustine, Finnis, Feser, etc), forcing it to rely on the Bible, which is, shall we say, not a morally sophisticated document. The best argument against sola scriptura is the fact that large chunks of that scriptura are just, well, awful. Steven Pinker points out that you’d get a more sophisticated moral code from reading Homer… but that’s not saying much.
- Arguments for moral laws are often extrapolated from facts in the natural world, but just because something is a certain way doesn’t mean we ought to do a particular thing, do anything or do nothing as a consequence. This is known as the ‘is-ought’ problem in philosophy.
- (Attempted) chastity and (attempted) morally upright behaviour across large regions does not make for better people, or contribute to moral improvement. In fact, the opposite occurs.
- As part of (1) above, women are expected to greater or lesser degrees to police male sexuality and, by analogy, many other male habits. There are many interesting roles to fulfill in the world; ‘God’s Police’ is not one of them.
When your arguments are bad, but you still endorse the position those bad arguments buttress, you have to look elsewhere for good arguments. Religious anti-abortionists have come increasingly to rely on scientific arguments (a point Hitchens makes with some skill in his piece above) and on the non-aggression principle, which is borrowed from libertarian philosophy. Both are intelligent propositions, and ought to be taken seriously. They do not have a religious origin at all, although religious people now use them.
When it comes to pornography, religious anti-porn campaigners have turned to feminism and its various offshoots in the social sciences to make their case, once again because of the weakness of (1) above. It is important to note that not all feminists are anti-porn, only a sub-group are. Relevantly, however, those anti-porn feminists have produced considerable research and argument on the issue, and have shown themselves able to influence public policy in various countries. Their arguments, like Hitchens’ argument from science and the non-aggression case against abortion may be wrong, but are worthy of respect. It is important to bear this in mind.
Of course, the available research on porn, the status of women and sexualisation points in fifty different directions, which pleases no-one. There is evidence that freely available pornography reduces rates of violent sexual assault, for instance, along with evidence that teenagers are watching porn and getting what my mother used to call ‘ideahs’. Reist is particularly hot (along with Clive Hamilton) on ‘corporate paedophilia’, attacking the sexualisation of children in advertising, an attitude often coupled with a more general hostility to commerce. There is a kinship between her ‘Collective Shout’ and the feminist inspired ‘Pink Stinks!‘ campaign over here, for example. The difference, of course, is that the latter is a consumer pressure group only; Collective Shout actively seeks (and sometimes obtains) complete bans.
The upshot?
I have no wish to advise feminists (or others) on whom they choose as allies, but I will make a few observations. First, I think it is very dangerous for any school of feminism to find itself siding with women who do want to be ‘God’s Police’. Feminism went down that road once before; it was called ‘Prohibition’. It didn’t end well. Second, I am very wary when the available scientific research is so equivocal; we may well be confusing the noise for the signal. Third, there is something to be said for ‘the merit of candour’ in debate. Admitting that one’s arguments are ordinary and that one is actively looking for better arguments is no bad thing. Doctors no longer accept the doctrine of the Four Humours, the civil law no longer endorses obtaining a confession via judicial torture — this despite the fact that the most able minds of the past thought both were legitimate examples of ‘best practice’. People just found better arguments.
Accepting that one has a religious affiliation and that it motivates one’s beliefs (even though it does not provide substantive arguments to buttress those beliefs) is surely better than commencing litigation against someone who has merely pointed out the awkward association.
106 Comments
Thanks for this post, I found it very useful!
I received a letter of demand that I remove everything on my blog relating to Tankard Reist, otherwise I’d be subject to libel and defamation action. The letter claims she is not a Baptist.
The the location of MTR’s church has been available on other blogs for a long time now, and she has taken no action to have it removed from them.
There is far more extensive info about her religious affiliations available on other blogs, and again, she has not had any of it removed from them. Leslie Cannold hosts an unbelief.org piece that is far more comprehensive than mine!
Thanks, Jennifer.
Interestingly, in The Age yesterday, there was this piece about porn and child sexualisation, which said (inter alia):
So it’s quite a pervasive narrative. I have absolutely no idea whether it has any veracity or not. I suspect, as with many things, that it is very hard to empirically establish anything. The thing that struck me upon reading this is what was meant by “porn”. Did it mean professionally produced porn, or did it mean people who took salacious shots of themselves and put it on the internet?
Jennifer, it is possible that she may have converted; if one is going to be Christian, then one ought to be Catholic, just as if one is going to be a monotheist, one ought to be Jewish (subject, of course, to the rules of membership, and the right of existing members to bounce you out the front door).
I must admit I found the church attendance information readily myself, and I am not the most savvy internet user — it was on facebook! I took a screenshot of the facebook page, as it has now been modified.
I refer to and endorse Russell Blackford’s comments:
SL: I’m sure we were discussing the other day the fact that a very clear defence to any claim for breach of confidence/privacy exists where someone is a public figure commenting on public issues, and their private life is directly relevant to the formation of their public opinion. I wouldn’t go as far as Lord Denning in Woodward v Hutchins (speaking about Tom Jones and his publicist):
I don’t have much interest in knowing about the sex life of bands, but when someone is commenting on public policy, surely it’s fair to point out the motivators of what may be affecting their views? What’s the shame in being a Baptist anyway, or having one’s views informed by Christian faith? I’m not a Christian myself, incidentally, but grew up with a girl who was Baptist, and know that it encompasses an incredibly wide spectrum of belief depending on one’s particular congregation (libertarian, happy-clappy, conservative).
Oh yes, with the greatest respect, this is not the strongest of claims.
Not going to get involved in the ‘legalities’ of what’s going on but I’d like to mention a couple of things arising here, and on Jennifer Wilson’s post:
1) she seems to confirm the lawyer-letter threatens both defamation and libel suits?
2) Hitchens mentioned far more eloquently (and incessantly) than me how it is possible to have a moral code without the need for religious backing for that code; if that is the case (and I do agree) then maybe MTR has a minor point in insisting it is not necessarily her particular religious beliefs which inform her views?
I suppose I’m thinking there’s a bit of double standard about this when most would insist that one’s religious views be held privately (if at all!), but then demand knowledge of same views in a particular argument.
KVD, of course one may have a moral code without religious beliefs (I believe I fit into that box myself) but I don’t think one can say if one is religious that one’s moral beliefs are not affected by one’s religion, as most religions attempt to define a moral code of one sort or another with regard to sexuality, abortion etc, particularly where that religion is one of the Abrahamic religions. I guess what I’m saying is that if one is a devout conservative Christian, one cannot argue that one’s view of sexuality or the like is not affected by those beliefs, because it necessarily follows that one’s views are affected.
I am presently reading ‘The Passion of the Western Mind’ by Richard Tarnas, and it is extremely interesting. It charts the various Hellenistic strands of thought which became enmeshed in Christianity, and then the various ways in which Christianity tried to incorporate science and scientific thought into its world-view (Aquinas is the big one, of course). Then gradually, science became less and less compatible with Christianity as more discoveries were made (heliocentric solar system, non-static world etc). The biggie was really evolution. There’s no way one can accept the whole Bible word for word if one accepts evolution. Which, I guess, is precisely why so-called “creation science” was developed (an interesting attempt to marry religion and “science” so that one’s faith is not wholly discredited).
My ‘religion’ is science, which doesn’t mean I accept science uncritically – indeed, the imperative for science is to question each hypothesis intently, and not to take things on faith.
Yes, the double-barrel ‘defamation and libel’ phrase is interesting, because libel is simply part of the overarching tort of defamation now. Back in the day, ‘libel’ referred to written defamation, while ‘slander’ referred to spoken defamation, and the rules were different.
Would just note that after Lenah Game Meats there has been Giller v Procopets (2008) VSCA 236, about which I did a blog post here – a majority of the VSCA appeared to adopt some of the UK cases (Douglas v Hello! and Campbell v MGM) – it seems to accept a nascent breach of privacy tort accreted onto breach of confidence, but hasn’t been developed since as far as I’m aware. Also an interesting case because of the use of Lord Cairns’ Act damages to get around the common law/equity divide (i.e. aggravated damages for breach of equitable obligation – awarded as damages in lieu of an injunction). Okay, /end law nerd now.
LE, I do take your point, but in Wilson’s posts, it was mentioned that MTR wished her arguments to be judged on their merits. I’d tend to agree with that approach, and thought that Wilson had done a fair job of refuting her views on that basis.
MTR did not say (in your words) “one’s moral beliefs are not affected by one’s religion”. And even if they are – as you suggest – what has that got to do with the validity of the stance she might take on any issue? That is almost saying “you cannot be correct because you are a Baptist” – which is a nonsense.
Anyway, only a minor point, I expect.
My point was an argument from candour, rather than merit. If one is asked about one’s affiliations, then honesty is probably the best policy (and something I have learnt from experience).
It then becomes easier to separate one’s personal beliefs from one’s larger claims without encouraging the suspicion that one is being less than upfront about the former.
Since the world includes both moral and immoral actions, you cannot differentiate between the two except on the basis of some normative principle: mere existence (‘is’) does not get you there.
So, for example, the how do you know the procreative function of sex is morally dominant? question cannot be answered by reference to what happens in nature.
Hence natural law theory ends up systematically engaging in the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Use of sex for non procreative purposes (actually quite common in the natural world) is not “proper” sex. Same-sex marriages (also existing in lots of cultures in various forms) are not “true” marriages, etc. (The idea that legally recognising same-sex marriage is some “definitional error” is nonsense on stilts: but a nonsense this sort of view is driven to.)
They want to use definitions as the end of moral argument instead of its beginning. (This leads to some hilariously nonsensical arguments about polygamy for example.)
Monotheism has enormous difficulty getting past sex as a distraction from the divine, since the divine is transcendently non-sexual (unlike animist and polytheist conceptions of the divine, which are profoundly sexualised). Procreation is really the only permitted “in” to sexuality. Which leads to the drive to control expressions of sexuality and the fertility of women (no contraception, no abortion, no divorce) and the consequent devaluing of female choosing (e.g. coverture marriage).
A mode of argument which allows one’s (preferred) conclusion to choose the ambit of its premises is therefore terribly useful. But it is not a truth-seeking technique, it is a preferred dogma-rationalising one.
While natural law theory provides an intellectually sophisticated version of this, it is a general feature of monotheists on sex and gender, hence their penchant for bad arguments.
@11,@12 this is all good stuff, so I’ll expect you will immediately start agitating for the personal and criminal history of every miscreant brought before the bench to become the first part of the evidence submitted as to guilt or innocence? “Oh no, we can’t do that – because it might influence the bench or jury as to the specific guilt in the specific case”
Unless of course he or she is a religious nut. In which case it’s ok, because it must have influenced the outcome?
kvd@13 Explaining a tendency is not the same as judging a case. Hence past history is generally excluded from criminal cases. (Except if one was a rape victim, in which case your sexual history was somehow relevant: revealing exception that.)
I am not sure how discussions about tendencies and good sense in public debate have any implications for judging a particular case beyond reasonable doubt.
If witnesses put their character in issue (‘crediting the witness’), they can be cross-examined on it. If the accused (this copied from the civilian countries, and now in PACE 1984) fails to disclose at interview something on which he later relies at trial, then a negative inference may be drawn.
Personally, I don’t like the latter very much, but it was copied (from France) in response to a very real problem: suspicions among jurors that they were being ‘snowed’.
Mind you, if no-one asks, then there’s no need to say anything. And if this comment is anything to go by, it would appear that — in the past — few have asked. Wilson asked, and now it’s all blown up every which way.
Lorenzo, SL, I have quite a bit of respect for your intelligence, and ability to argue your points. But I’d like simply to repeat my earlier comment that Ms Wilson seemed more than capable of refuting the arguments she was addressing, as I’m sure you yourselves are, without resorting to a general demolition of MTR’s religious beliefs per se.
Of course all this will change should I become aware that SL is Presbyterian, and Lorenzo is a vegan – because of course that would ‘inform’ your views, hence negate my opinion
And SL@15, your ‘this’ link doesn’t.
It seems to be working for me now, kvd, but then it is entirely possible that I have done something that means it works for me, and won’t for anyone else (I have also completed this process in reverse, too). DEM thinks we lost the ability to do formatting in comments about three WordPress updates ago. Jacques is on holiday (I think, I haven’t heard from him in a while) and my technical incompetence is near total, so I won’t be doing anything!
I’ll just paint in the big long link and hope it works:
http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/01/14/mtr-threatens-sheep-with-legal-action-if-we-dont-censor-our-posts-about-her-immediately/#comment-10450
KVD, I do not know much about Tankard-Reist apart from the fact that (a) she campaigns against the sexualisation of children; and (b) she featured in an article where women said that they had received hate-mail for expressing their views.
If she is indeed Baptist of a conservative stripe (and I have no notion of whether she is or is not, nor do I particularly care) one hypothesis is that she might not want that known among the more progressive types who might support her in her campaigns against sexualisation of children, because she is worried that they may baulk at her Christianity, and may not agree with her any longer. I suppose I’m thinking of the people who may like Clive Hamilton’s theories on this issue too. Personally I don’t really care what a person is, as long as they justify their arguments properly, but there are those who will feel differently, as KVD averts to.
Or perhaps, if MTR is a Baptist, she feels that her relationship with God is a private thing (as this is a Baptist tenet).
I don’t really know. It does seem stupid to sue someone for saying she attends a Baptist church – as she falls foul of the Streisand effect as a result. I had never really cared enough about MTR or her views to investigate her religious beliefs. Now, as a result of this action, she has given the matter vastly more oxygen. She would have been better off leaving it. Indeed, were I her legal adviser, I’d advise her to drop this action post-haste, as I feel it has little practical or legal merit.
I should say that I did point out my own religious beliefs in the discussion above because I do think that they inform my views on these matters. I am the child of two scientists, married to a scientist. This affects the way in which I look at the world profoundly, and may help those who read my comments understand my views.
I’m not sure why KVD has a problem with transparency.
If Mr T is telling me, for example, that headache pill X will give me cancer I really do want to know, and I believe I have a right to know, what potential conflicts of interest Mr T may have in the matter. I want to know, for example, if Mr T has just invested his life savings in headache pill Y. The argument that a potential conflict of interest is not important and that only the merits of Mr T’s argument matter would only make sense in some perfect world where I have the expertise, time, etc to assess the merits of all the relevant arguments. But in truth this a nonsense, I have no special expertise and little time, so I must rely on heuristics to form my opinion and one time honoured heuristic pertains to conflicts of interest.
Do I really need to spell out to KVD how me forming an opinion from the comfort of my armchair differs from a criminal trial?
Hopefully MTR will now attract a suitable level of derision and her reputation will truly be harmed.
Actually, Jennifer is probably more at risk from religious vilification laws. Now an action on those lines would be fun to watch!
Mel, it’s not just financial investment that is relevant either; it’s also emotional and moral investment. For example, my husband was looking up something about lactose intolerance and came across a website which attributed all kinds of bad effects to lactose and milk products. Further research indicated that the author was a committed advocacy of veganism and believed that everyone should be vegan. Now I have no problem with people being vegan, or in advocating a vegan diet for others, but I do think it is relevant when assessing the veracity of the information. It doesn’t mean the information is necessarily incorrect, but it does mean that the author is emotionally invested in a particular way of being and is subject to certain confirmation biases.
LE@18,19 I agree with your views – you might be a child of scientology, but I agree with your views
And you could ask either Mr Eagle snr or jr if, upon being approached by A Einstein with his simple formula, would they immediately busy themselves with investigation as to his religious affiliation, or sexual proclivities? Or would they gather evidence, test his theories, and thereby either refute or acknowledge AE’s scribbles?
Mel@20 I don’t have a particular problem with transparency, but I do have a problem with irrelevant transparency, which I would suggest is what is meant by privacy – and which SL specifically referred to above.
None above in these comments has even attempted to question the validity or otherwise of MTR’s viewpoint; and all I’m saying is that is disappointing. She may or may not be a witch, but my how she’s burning..
And quite frankly LE, from my layman’s perspective, I’m beginning to doubt that any law firm would lend its name to such an approach, on such a basis. I’d be interested in the terms of the letter, and the name of the firm involved.
Sorry, but put me down in the doubters column, pending further information.
The ‘libel and defamation’ phrase is a bit of a clue, kvd, as to quality, although professional comity prevents me from commenting further
[Edited to add: just on LE's comment @9 on Giller v Procopets, it's interesting to see Australian courts adopting ECHR reasoning without the presence of an actual, um, Convention! (Admittedly, applying it in their own tortalicious way, though).].
SL@25 that wasn’t my phrase – I copied it from JW@1 I think… And now I re-read “The letter claims she is not a Baptist”.
Um… you are sure of the facts here, SL? I’m thinking email scam.
Maybe not very good lawyers, kvd, rather than a scam. If you follow the link @17, you’ll see the modus operandi. There have been a number of similar cases concerning altmed practitioners and clinics. This case is instructive (and recent). I know the young man at the centre of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhys_Morgan
kvd, I can see where you’re coming from with your point. However, one thing I think that counts against it is that in the One Plus One interview (linked from No Place For Sheep), Reist dismisses the evidence that shows pornography in a favourable light on the basis that it’s based on the work and views of those who use or make pornography. She then puts forward her views as somehow more objective than those that oppose her. I think if you publicly accuse others of bias and claim objectivity in your own views, you open yourself up to criticisms of bias in ways that might not have been previously relevant.
Yes, I did get to that SL.
I see on JW’s blog, on the “Who would Jesus Sue” post there is an update indicating that an email has been received, with hardcopy to follow. I also see she is somewhat naive about just how easy it is to get a physical address attached to a real live human being. The last time I had to do that it cost $150, and took about 20 minutes. And that was also in Canberra.
The question I’d really like answered is has anyone actually approached the (by now) dreaded MTR to ask for confirmation or denial of this approach?
Kvd, it is MTR who is the aggressor here, trying to strong-arm JW with legal threats so if you must throw a tanty, I think you should direct it at her
“None above in these comments has even attempted to question the validity or otherwise of MTR’s viewpoint; and all I’m saying is that is disappointing.”
That’s probably because the alleged merits of MTR’s viewpoint is not relevant to the post.
***
Nearly all historians analyse and explain the actions of key historical figures by first having regard to things like their religious affiliations and the wider cultural mores extant during the historical epoch in which they lived. I imagine poor old Kvd must have salivated and began chewing the pages when required to read history books in school: “Oi, its all about the merits!”
Thankfully for Kvd’s soundness of mind he never went on to study sociology or political science as an undergraduate since he would have been confronted with the concept of ideology, which by its very nature implies concrete facts like social class and religious affiliation are causally connected to one’s viewpoints irrespective of any considerations of merit and also irrespective of whether the actor is conscious of the connection.
Mel, happy new year and all that. Would you like a saw for that limb you’ve climbed onto?
I refuse to engage further with you until your snide, evil, hurtful post on the earlier thread is either withdrawn or apologised for. Preferably both; and “just joking” doesn’t wash..
But apart from that, do have a nice day down there in your cesspit.
I’ve included a few links, but no more than a gesture. This is for the simple reason that the evidence on point is vast, contradictory and unclear. Even in this post — in the interest of brevity — I have collapsed ‘porn’ into ‘sexualisation’ into ‘unrealistic advertising’ into ‘sexual criminality’. All of those categories are distinct; all have spawned separate data sets. I shouldn’t have done it, but the post was already over 3000 words, and it was important (as is always the case) to get accurate information on the legal issues out there.
FWIW, anyone running a campaign (as Reist is) suggesting a causal link between any of the media listed in the par above and a ‘negative view of women’ or ‘improper sexualisation’ is doing the statistical equivalent of arguing for a flat earth, or creationism. Yes, I’m serious. You simply cannot build public policy on moral panics like this, and to be frank I don’t care if the moral panickers are religious or secular. More is needed, much more. And even once we know one way or the other, the appropriate response may well be ‘do nothing’.
Kvd, it would help if you told me which one of my many “snide, evil and hurtful posts” has upset you. I’m always willing to apologise when I’ve been naughty.
I think kvd was referring to the Ayn Rand clip on the ‘It’s just not cricket’ thread, although I’m happy to be corrected on that score.
DEM has been busy doing other stuff today so hasn’t been around to police her threads. I, on the other hand, have been watching cricket (why I’m still up). I would like to go to bed, but I’m now a wee bit concerned that this thread will dive into the cloaca maxima in my absence.
SL
Oh yes. I was poking fun at Ayn Rand and libertarianism in general with that clip but I can see how it could be misinterpreted. Sorry if anyone was upset.
Do go to bed. My goal is 200 by bedtime, so I’d better sign off now too!
Goodnight and sweet dreams …
Crud, that should be 200 cuttings.
Bye.
Cricket’s good SL. And pleased don’t be concerned on my account. I’ll let you know when I consider it overdrawn
Personally, I have some sympathy for MTR on the sexualisation of young girls in the media at the least. I find it disturbing. I would not let my 6-year-old daughter put on make-up, I would not let her wear bras which she doesn’t need nor would I let her wear clothing that made her look like an adult on the prowl. Time for that when she grows up and can handle it. Consequently, I monitor the TV she watches and the books she reads and so forth. Would I call for such things to be withdrawn from the market? No – contra to MTR – it’s my personal choice not to participate in the market for these things.
But as I’ve said in a post here, the current phenomenon reminds me of Susan in the Narnia books:
And yeah, I know CS Lewis was a Christian, but he was an intelligent one, and I think it’s a valid point – you basically wish your life away if you just want to get to your 20s and then want to stay that way forever. Actually I have found my 30s vastly superior to my 20s, at least thus far…
But I do agree with Mel that whether or not I think MTR has at least some point is neither here nor there. To my mind, the real issue is that the law has been used as a blunt instrument to bully someone. And I don’t like it.
You are raising your child, not the state. That, to my mind, is the salient issue. Parents who want society reordered at law in order to facilitate their needs forget that one is only parent of a young child for a relatively brief period. The rest of the time one is single, or one of a couple, or a worker, or divorced, or the parent of a young adult…
It is very dangerous to pull policy levers on the basis that all other people are like oneself. They may not be, and then there’s trouble.
Ain’t that the truth. I often see that with friends who want to pull policy levers for all – they mainly mix with people who think exactly like them, and thus they think that all of society has the same concerns as they do, and wants the same thing.
That’s why it’s good to make sure that one knows people from a lot of different backgrounds and with a lot of different views.
Well, with nobody willing to answer, I sent the following to MTR:
Dear Ms Reist
Jennifer Wilson who blogs at noplaceforsheep.com has stated that she has been contacted by a firm of lawyers acting on your behalf, with a threat to sue for defamation and libel.
Is this true, or could this possibly be true of someone acting on your behalf?
Thank you
- I will let you know what if anything is received in response. I remain disheartened by the apparent lack of any other such direct approach to ascertain where the ‘truth’ lies in all of this.
Well we haven’t been on speaking terms for a time, but it won’t prevent me from congratulating you on the wide ranging and thought-out thread starter.
kvd@16 I am still puzzled by your comment, since I wasn’t commenting on the particular case at all, but expounding on a point SL made about a particular form of problematic reasoning.
And beliefs do have logics to them. It is obviously true, for example, that strong believers in monotheism are disproportionately active in arguing against non-heterosexuals having equal protection of laws. Indeed, have previously attempted to shut down any positive public portrayal of homosexuals or bisexuals. This non-random pattern has non-random causes, it is perfectly reasonable to examine the pattern and its causes.
I agree that implying someone’s religious beliefs preclude them from being correct in some argument or claim is nonsense, but that is a rather different claim than any I was making or implying.
I suspect this will inhibit her ability to pose as the token feminist viewpoint.
Lorenzo@43 your last sentence contains all I was wishing to make as my own point. I agree with, and accept, your first two paras, but my comments were only directed to the point you make in that last.
Two new hopefully relevant thoughts, first having now read Cannold on MTR it is clear that MTR is marinated in a conservative brand of Christianity. If MTR claims her views on sexual matters are not flavoured by the marinade, I’ll counter claim that my shit doesn’t stink.
A second thought is that while it is OK to go beyond the overtly expressed opinions of a subject and to look at the subject’s possible motives it is also true that the analyst also has motives and that all too often the motives of the analyst mean the analysis itself is utter crap.
Here’s Mark Bahnisch, possibly my least favourite lefty bedfellow (he always hogs the doona), cluelessly denouncing the genteel critiques of religion proffered by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as being rabid examples of Calvinism, anti-Catholics, anti-Islamists and various and sundry other dastardly thingies beneath the veil of rationality. http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/10/18/both-atheist-rationalism-and-catholic-triumphalism-betray-mary-mackillops-legacy/
Reason is a slave to the passions, as Hume said.
Well I have to admit to some sympathy for kvd’s comments. I have seen this referenced on twitter and the blogosphere with a somewhat alarming credulity about the idea of the legal claim.
I first felt uncomfortable with the implication in the original post that MTR’s religious affiliations invalidate her political positions. As a religious person, my own political, social and moral beliefs are of course informed by those influences, but I would share MTR’s approach in the politico-social domain of seeking to justify those beliefs on their own merits rather than by reference to religion.
Anyway, for all that I have issues with MTR and her approach, she seems smarter than to use the sort of lawyers that would send the sort of letter that has been described. Call me overly sceptical, but I am more inclined to believe that a MTR opponent has sent the letter or had it sent with the express intention that it would result in precisely this sort of widespread condemnation of MTR. I too reserve judgment.
Are you the Dan who comments at John Quiggin’s site?
SL
I am confused.
What are “service documents”?
It doesn’t appear that any legal process has been served yet, as far as I can gather.
Just a letter of demand at this stage, Marcellous, although I didn’t even know that when I wrote the post (and so was deliberately vague). I’ve left it unmodified, as the relevant information from Jennifer is now in this thread and over at Russell’s place. A shot across the bows, basically.
[Edited to add: Catherine Manning of 'Pull the Pin' tried to make direct contact with MTR in a similar situation, but does not appear to have had any luck. As everyone here knows, I always favour cock-up over conspiracy in situations like this, so I will be interested to see if kvd gets a response.]
kvd said:
It may be that having spent so long working as a SpAd (special advisor) for a Catholic conservative politician, this is seen by skeptics as Tankard-Reist having made her religious views a very public issue in the past. You’d be hard pressed to argue that they weren’t involved in her being a professional advocate of Harradine and religiously-motivated bioethics policy AT LEAST BACK THEN. Whether or not they are still an issue today is more questionable.
Like most observers I was quite puzzled by the legal ‘shot across the bows’ until I read the bit about her involvement with research for the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute. Then the penny dropped.
The catholic church is absolutely notorious for astroturfing, ie. dressing up campaigns to further church doctrine in national policy as spontaneous grassroots social concern, to the point where it fatally undermines the credibility of virtually all the pro-life groups. [Even when the catholics aren't behind them... they might be! They share many of the same arguments.]
Tankard-Reist may well have been responding to the possible misconception that “Collective Shout” is an astroturfing group rather than a genuine grassroots protest against the sexualisation of young girls in commercial culture – I wouldn’t know whether that is the case or not.
Wilson made a pretty bald statement that:
The first part of that statement is a matter of opinion. TR’s church membership is a matter of fact and repeating it may not be what she is actually objecting to (if it were, then a simple email to point out “actually that’s not true anymore and/or has never been true” and ask for a correction would have been the appropriate response).
I’m sure there will be pro-life arguments against the availability of abortion and/or sex-negative arguments against porn that AREN’T “based on the moral arguments of … Christianity” – after all, I managed to find a christian moral argument in favour of access to abortion [freedom of religion] – but it’s not unfair to query whether TR’s current work is an outreach of her personal beliefs as it has been in the past.
SL@50 I received the following reply from MTR about 3 hours after my email to her. Sorry for delay in providing this; sleep intervened. Herewith:
This of course entirely destroys my thought that Ms Wilson might have received something of a scam nature, but leaves for someone else to now query her for the exact content of the email she herself received.
The internet can be an ugly place, but I am somewhat reassured that it is still possible to ask a civil question, and receive a timely and civil reply.
If Jennifer is happy to share, LE and I can take a look at the solicitors’ letter. I will just add that if MTR has not understood what has gone into it, I am tempted to be sympathetic. I was discussing with DEM off blog the fact that most people grasp nothing of legal procedure: Jennifer’s failure to understand the uses to which the Electoral Roll can be put is emblematic of this.
I’m slightly taken aback at some comments here that seem to suggest I’m lying about having received a letter of demand from MTR’s lawyers.
At the end of the letter I’m advised that it is subject to the s126 Civil Law (Wrongs) Act and is not for publication. So I assume I may not publish it . Without this restriction, I would be very happy to do so.
I note MTR has described the letter as merely “seeking an apology.” This is a lie by omission. An written apology couched in terms agreed upon by her lawyers and published on my blog is indeed sought. A retraction is sought. I am to pay all MTR’s legal costs to date. MTR also reserves her right to sue me for damages for defamation.
Rather a little more than just asking me to say sorry, as Tankard Reist would have it.
The lawyers also complain that I have not sought to question MTR before writing about her. This I strongly contest as I have been questioning her publicly for quite some time, on ABC’s The Drum for example, on On Line Opinion, and my own blog. I’ve never received any response to my questions though I have received a considerable amount of abuse from her followers.
This has taken the form of suggesting that I have a prick in my head, and that I should STFU and get back into my “man-fondling” box. Oh, and accusations of being anti-feminist, whatever that might mean.
As I usually inhabit a space of blissful ignorance about the law, I’m uncertain of its language. I think I am only being threatened with defamation, not libel, though somebody told me they are the same thing.
No doubt there are people who would lie about receiving legal threats. I am not one of them and I don’t take kindly to such suggestions. I might get a taste for lawyering up myself.
Jennifer, that’s a standard form letter of demand in defamation. It is possible that MTR does not understand what her lawyers have done, but that is speculation on my part.
It would appear that we are dealing with the sort of person who, were they poorer, would be reduced to being what the Scots call ‘party litigants’.
Now I am aware of the situation (and I am sorry for any imputation to the contrary, Jennifer), I will make one observation. One of the greatest weaknesses of monotheism is its tendency to spot patterns where there are none. Dan did it above: seeing conspiracy where there is only cockup. 9/11 Truthers do the same thing. Steven Pinker makes the comment that it is unfortunate to reduce Stoicism to a bumper sticker, but accepts that Stoicism’s key insight is worth repeating: shit happens.
There is no conspiracy. There is no pattern. Monotheists who see things that aren’t there are of a piece with aficionados of the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot.
Yes, I’m happy for you to look at the letter, skepticlawyer. My problem is that it has been emailed in a format that I can’t print out, or copy. I haven’t yet received the promised hard copy, but when I do, I will fax it to you.
Many years ago I had occasion to send lawyers’ letters. Not one letter was sent without me receiving a copy.
I hope my failure to understand the uses to which the electoral roll can be put is not interpreted as a lack of intelligence – I have had no need of that knowledge up to this point.
Dr Jennifer Wilson
I too want to clarify that I never intended to impute that Jennifer had not received the letter in question. I was more intending to get at the internet phenomenon that everyone seems to be highly cautious about most claims on the internet, apart from those that we really want to believe because they reflect badly on people that we otherwise don’t like for whatever reason.
Plus the fact that it doesn’t ring true when smart people in public positions appear to have dumb lawyers. I don’t think that my monotheism had anything to do with how or why I formed that opinion.
Jennifer, feel free to forward it to me. You have my email address.
Oh, I see where I got the libel word from. It’s the subject heading of the email : “Libel of Melinda Tankard Reist”
Have forwarded email. Many thanks.
Have they specified what part of your blog is meant to be defamatory?
Jennifer, may I quote from the letter you have forwarded to me? Updated: Oh whoops, I just saw that the letter is not for publication. Doh! As a lawyer I should know to read the last page!
Jennifer, it may hearten you to know that I wasn’t aware of how process servers got people’s addresses, and I worked as a commercial litigator for some years…heh. I just knew that they did it.
Jennifer @ 54, I presume what they are doing by saying that you have not sought to question her is trying to establish some kind of malice on your part (i.e. you didn’t check with her privately off the blog before you published, and merely asserted certain matters as to her beliefs).
It is a most unpleasant and aggressive letter (well, lawyers’ letters tend to be). I also note for the doubters that it emanates from a genuine law firm and the partner in control of the matter is a very experienced defamation practitioner.
Again, however, I wonder about the efficacy of all this – MTR has focused attention on her beliefs rather than removing public attention from it: the precise opposite effect of what she intended. Perhaps, too, if she’d written to Jennifer on a private basis before things escalated to a legal basis, things could have been resolved nicely. Sometimes lawyers turn things into a big fight rather than resolving disputes. Sigh.
I have now also read the letter in question, and can confirm that it is in the terms that Legal Eagle has described above @63. It does give the appearance of aggression, but that tends to be the way lawyers’ letters work, I’m afraid.
Now, a final point. I live and work in Scotland and am admitted in England and Wales (I am working on Scotland, but not there yet). Legal Eagle lives and works in Victoria and is admitted there. Neither of us has ever worked in the ACT, ever, for any reason, legal or otherwise.
For that reason (ie, law is a much larger topic that the sum total of our legally relevant experience) we have a long standing policy of not providing legal advice except in the most general terms on this blog (see our FAQ), and wish that policy to continue. Therefore (and for the avoidance of any doubt) we wish to make it clear that we looked at the letter of demand Jennifer received in order to confirm that her statements with respect to it amounted to a ‘true bill’. I am sorry to admit that we did so on the basis of entertaining what amounts to a conspiracy theory.
As a general rule, if someone says they have received a letter of demand from a firm of solicitors, they are telling the truth.
Thanks SL and LE for clarification. I wanted to chime in again to clarify that I for one never intended to suggest that Jennifer Wilson was lying about receiving the letter. If she or anyone took my comments as suggesting that I apologise wholeheartedly and totally retract that implication.
I have separated out this comment so as not to detract from or undermine my previous comment.
I find the further information about the background of the letter to be quite astonishing. As a matter of legal strategy (and without knowing any detail of what is alleged) it would have to be a quite speculative claim – I think that for policy reasons a court would be unlikely to find that the mere imputation of faith is in itself defamatory. If the intention is to follow through on any action, the only thing that could follow is a highly public stoush, which would put MTR in the unenviable position of presumably having to argue being of faith is inherently negative.
On the other hand, if this is just a scare letter, then surely it is likely to substantially backfire if it is revealed to be a bluff.
Dan @57:
“Plus the fact that it doesn’t ring true when smart people in public positions appear to have dumb lawyers. I don’t think that my monotheism had anything to do with how or why I formed that opinion.”
Your monotheism directed you to this thread and at least in part caused you to comment.
Sadly the left of politics has a nagging, harping anti-sex component and I’m pretty sure that many of them would be sympathetic to MTRs concerns about our increasingly hypersexualised culture including the ubiquitous commercialisation of sexuality. Notably, a significant proportion of the lefties who travel in this camp are monotheists. Compare for example right wing MTRs Pussy energy drink: sexism in a can and left wing catholic Kim’s On feeling sympathy with Stephen Conroy
Relax and enjoy the new era, folks.
I don’t understand how a solicitor can send you a letter and then say that it is not for publication. They’ve already published it to you and you must be entitled to tell the world what they have told you. I don’t see how one can unilaterally impose obligations of confidence in unsolicited correspondence.
What they probably mean is that if JW publishes the letter that is not with MTW’s approval so to the extent that this fans the fire of the claimed defamation then that will also sound in damages. (Especially since the letter probably also spells out some of the claimed defamatory meanings of whatever is complained about.)
As a rule, however, I would have thought that the wise thing for a person to do when receiving a solicitor’s letter is to seek legal advice from actual rather than virtual lawyers.
In this case, this is important because a timely response may be important.
For example, the request for an apology is something which is relevant to any subsequent damages. The reference to section 126 of the Civil Wrongs Act is a reference to a part of the act which permits a person who has made a defamatory statement (or who might have done so) to offer to make amends. There is a time limit on when this can be done which is, in my opinion, too short for most people, but there is a procedure which enables you to buy a bit more time if you don’t understand how you are claimed to have defamed someone by asking for further particulars.
The importance of that an offer to amends procedure is that it is not just up to the plaintiff to impose a form of apology, because if the plaintiff rejects a reasonable offer of amends that can affect the plaintiff’s damages. This is a rough paraphrase and the terms of the legislation are from memory and a quick review rather than anything detailed. In addition, if there is anything that JW thinks she can on reflection apologize for, it is generally a good idea, in law as in life, to do so as quickly as possible.
Marcellous, agreed. Have been thinking about it today while out with kids.
Well it has been an interesting thread, I must say. Out of it I have taken the following:
Ms Wilson possibly believes she has been called a liar and even though Dan has promptly apologised, for the life of me I cannot see where this impression has come from.
My comment @23 “None above in these comments has even attempted to question the validity or otherwise of MTR’s viewpoint” was completely misinterpreted. Perhaps I should have added what I thought quite obvious on a thread about defamation – “that she has been defamed”
If you take MTR’s polite and timely response to my email to her at face value, then there seems to be a significant disconnect between her “an apology has been requested” and the “unpleasant and aggressive letter” reported by LE, and supported by SL. Maybe as LE suggests it is the lawyers at work.
Out of the above stream, my point of interest was the inclusion of MTR’s religious beliefs not just as a contributing factor, but as a reason for disagreement with her views. It is interesting that DEM@51 picked up on the precise para from JW’s words that triggered that thought in my mind.
Monotheists believe in Nessie. (Or is it Nessie who is a monotheist? Not sure) Also, there is “a significant proportion” of leftists who are monotheists. Not quite sure what either has to do with the post, but this may mean that leftists believe in Nessie – which is pretty significant. Or not
Cast Iron Helen at Hoydens on the matter.
This link might work LE, but again, there doesn’t seem to be anything addressing the issue of defamation. Feel free to delete.
To be honest, KVD, I am not comfortable with commenting in any detail on the merits or demerits of a case which is on foot, particularly where I only have partial information, and only really heard about the parties in any detail via this post.
However, as I said @4 above, I do think that some kind of robust debate on matters of opinion and faith should be open in the blogosphere. Putting the law aside, and looking at what “ought” to be, if someone said that I dishonestly concealed a matter with respect to my beliefs on their blog, and I disagreed with that, I think the first thing I’d do would be to explain myself on their blog and say (a) that their interpretation was erroneous, and (b) explain why.
Just slamming a defamation writ on a person is not a way to developing understanding between people with whom you disagree. It is a way of stopping free and open discussion of ideas.
Can’t resist.
Am brim full of admiration for SL- and profoundly disappointed with the usually sensible KVD’s response. Dr Wilson operates a fairly gentle moderation policy, it’s as likely that some are pissed at some of the more robust comments offered and seek to punish Wilson, instead. Wilson observes that her own blog is relatively new and still not of the scale of say, an LP or Catallaxy, let alone a raptors nest. Hence she is probably right to presume herself scapegoated, as with Catherine Manning.
Could you have imagined them having the guts to take on one of the older, more seasoned sites?
Desipis mentioned the ABC interview involving Jane Hutcheon and mtr, it probably explains mtr has been unwilling to participate in other discussions as to her ideas – Hutcheon quietly and effectively shredded her.
Lastly, a confratere of Tankard-Reists, Gail Dines, turned up in recent times as a likely surrogate.
Those of us hoping for the substantial discussion long denied by mtr herself, were to be disappointed, as the combative Dines, then most posters, embarked on increasingly fractious commentary, at the expense of the thread. Am thinking that the Moral crusaders wish to impose through law, their ideas, rather than through consent engineered through fruitful public discourse.
Ah almost forgot.
LE made a small but pertinent point early here, that alludes to some of the bases on which the episode has been conducted. Wilson, despite a hard upbringing, is basically a libertarian leaning to civil type. Her opponents are Miranda Devine clones including most of all mtr herself, who has been groomed by the latter.
Umm, kvd, your efforts to continue painting MTR as some sort of victim when she is using a high priced team of lawyers to threaten a blogger and to stifle criticism is kind of sickening. Note how MTR is already demanding JW open her wallet to reimburse already incurred legal expenses. Talk about oinkish impudence.
Also, given your own penchant for demanding apologies, I’m surprised you haven’t bothered apologising for wasting people’s time in respect of your conspiratorial suggestion that the email sent to JW was the work of someone other than the apparently saintly MTR, which you then followed up with a sniffy “it’s all about me” demand that you get a “timely” notification of the contents of the email.
On the other hand and sparing a thought for Legal Eagle, who is a family woman, I should say I intended not to be so severe with Tankard Reist in my previous post. Firstly, if someone like me is an occasionally capable of a tiny leap of altruism or empathy, why would this not be the case with Tankard Reist? It seems that one of the better things about conservatism of a sort that transcends politics, can be this upholding and enjoyment of family, being able to derive enjoyment in life through others rather than through materialism or hedonism, through a certain humility and respect.
KVD picked up on this, in mentioning the harm some forms of vice can do when involving children, say or some sex workers.
That sort of thing revolts me also and very likely both JW and MTR, also. So the original impulses are humane. MTR with her concern for lack of respect, violence and greed directed against the weak as a basis for the replication of an uncompassionate society. Equally, but coming from a different trajectory, also JW, who sees an endless replication of social conditions and therefore ugly behaviours derived of a censorious dumbed down Manichean society derived of simplistic authoritarianist solutions to complex problems. How long would it take to go through all the complicated nuances of something so complex?
Why can’t it be done without rancour?
LE@73 accept what you say, thank you.
PW@74 you’ve obviously been following the ‘scrap’ more closely, and a lot longer than I have. All I have to comment upon is SL’s well written post, and the links she provided. From that info I formed the opinion (as a layman) that most probably the letter of demand had little chance of success. Further, a read of my earlier comments should indicate to you that I thought JW had done quite a decent job of putting her side of affairs – except when straying into the area of religious beliefs. If you feel that what I wrote constitutes some sort of ‘defending of MTR’ then you are misunderstanding my words.
Mel@75 I’m coming to the conclusion that you respond according to the name tag attached to the commentary, rather than the actual content of any particular comment. How do you twist my throw away comment that MTR replied politely and in timely fashion into my “demanding” a timely reply? How do you twist my one and only suggestion (ever, on this blog) that you overstepped the mark in an earlier thread (which to your credit you seem to acknowledge) into a “penchant for demanding apologies”? Penchant indicates some sort of ongoing preference for; I’d like earlier examples of this “penchant” of mine. Lastly SL introduced the word “conspiracy” which again has specific meaning – not the least of which is an implication of an effort of more than one person towards some nefarious end. I thought when she first used it, and still do, that it was not appropriate as applied to my musing that perhaps JW had been the victim of a scam email from somebody or other. And before you jump back on your high horse, please note I confirmed for myself that this was not the case, and reported that finding earlier in the thread. Isn’t that exactly how one should proceed in polite discussion? Or is that not what one does on blogs these days?
As a Yank observing this whole debate from afar, I honestly feel it’s “a whole lot about nothing”.
Paul @ 74 – I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. This case is essentially about how a person deals with things in the media which she doesn’t like. MTR’s approach to sexualised images of young girls is to seek to ban them via lobbying; my approach is to turn off the TV, and to dissuade my daughter from participating in imagery. I wouldn’t seek to police the choice of other parents by calling for banning. This extends to something which I find quite grotesque and personally offensive, like child beauty pageants (Little Miss Sunshine = best ever critique of this).
This carries over to the blogging arena. MTR’s approach to a blog post which is critical of her is to seek to ban it via defamation; my approach would be to go to the blog and discuss/explain.
I guess my personal opinion is that banning stuff can have all kinds of weird consequences which are the opposite of what you intended, and you actually have more chance of persuading someone that they are wrong or mistaken by intelligent discussion. (<– yup, strong streak of pragmatism here)
KVD – more on this case from The Age, including comments from MTR about what her motivation is in bringing the action:
I agree with LE that the sexualisation of childhood is distasteful and that includes kiddy beauty pageants and clothing with phrases like “I’m Hot!” on toddlers. What the heck are the parents thinking?! In such cases it might not be a bad thing that MTR are lobbying companies to stopped being involved in such things.
But for adults it should be open slather. I’m not even sure I support rules against public nudity (subject to any reasonable hygiene considerations) and even public fornication. If folk want to hold an orgy in my local park I’m fine with that provided they don’t trample the shrubbery or disturb any nesting birds.
The only problem with that, Mel, is that kids walk around in public too. With modifications for that I too have nothing against public nudity or orgies or whatever, although this could clearly get ugly
In fact I sometimes think that society might be better off for it (although I also sometimes think the opposite!).
Monotheism does come in various flavours. In Australia, a Baptist is twice as likely to think homosexuality immoral as a Catholic.
The logic of belief is not necessarily the logic of believers. What this particular statistic measures is the propensity of believers to believe.
Patrick:
“The only problem with that, Mel, is that kids walk around in public too.”
So what? Kids are more at risk from sexual predators if they are ignorant about sex and if sex is taboo. Hence until a generation ago many little boys quietly submitted to being buggered by the local priest, as we now know.
Knowledge is power.
Easy enough to find out. Just present the copies of the letter(s?). What some people think is polite, others take as aggressive. And one of the most useful things to anyone is the capacity to be politely aggressive.
I must admit that I contemplated a speculation about collusion. I thought this move a tactic in a fundamentalist strategy to get aggressive with those who might get in their way. We’ve seen this most un-Christian behaviour in America.
I fail to see how revealing one’s religious affiliations can be defamatory. If one is ‘revealing’ affiliations that are dodgy, or one is similarly presenting false views of their theological convictions or (in America) one states that one has no religious convictions contrary to the facts – perhaps.
But to simply reveal that an agent in public life has a religious life and connect that with their agenda seems the very meat of what the fourth estate is supposed to do and, often, does not.
Lorenzo @83. Yes, although it’s possibly better seen as a measure of the importance (in more than one way) of the community of faith, independent of some of the beliefs. The various differences may be relevant here – after all, Wilson’s post about the Sunday Life article which seems to have sparked this implicitly attributes to MTR an understanding of the significance of the virgin birth that is much closer to Catholic teaching than anything from Baptists.
I think this demonstrates the danger of focussing on religious views as such rather than the sorts of questions Hills says she asked, but it also is one of many reasons I would think it would be better for MTR to be candid. If the accusation that she isn’t candid is really her problem, then that would make a lot more sense – but shouldn’t any letters from lawyers make clear what the issue is?
The article in the Age this morning seems to suggest that the relevant imputation is that she duplicitously hid the fact of her religion. I found that interesting, because I just don’t think that the original blog post accuses her of that – more accusing members of the media of failing to ask the hard questions.
The original blog post does seem to attribute to her very particular religious beliefs which would be likely to be seen as anti-feminist. None of the quoted beliefs necessarily flow from the assertion that she attends a Baptist church.
Dan @87, the Age quote from MTR seems to be quoting from the sentence in the original Wilson post: “She is deceptive and duplicitous about her religious beliefs and she does not declare herself.”
Everyone seems to agree that such a claim could be a serious dent in MTR’s reputation, but it sounds much easier to support than Wilson’s confusion about beliefs regarding the virgin birth.
It’s a completely trivial aside but the comment in one of the quotes about MTR having possibly influenced Senator Harradine’s views is exceedingly unlikely. I have no doubt that banning RU486 was his own idea or wholly consistent with his own ideas.
MTR has worked hard to build alliances with anti-porn feminists; her work is endorsed by Catherine MacKinnon, probably the most important living example of same:
http://melindatankardreist.com.au/testimonial/book-endorsements/
This means there are all sorts of complexities raised for a conservative Christian (of whatever stripe) if she wants to maintain those alliances with a movement that — at least in recent times — is broadly secular.
[To my mind, I am satisfied that she is a conservative Christian, based on the 12 years as a SpAd to Brian Harradine. SpAds need to be strongly reflective of their parliamentary employer's views; if one is offered a job as a SpAd (and I have been over here), then failure to agree on pretty much every major point of policy becomes almost insurmountably difficult. I knocked back the position because I disagreed too much, on too many issues, with the polly in question].
Some of those issues (just off the top of my head).
1. While there are almost as many varieties of feminist as there are makes of motorcycle, support for reproductive rights is pretty much a deal-breaker. Now this position can be nuanced and finessed and dressed up or down in all sorts of ways, but is inconsistent with 12 years as a SpAd for Brian Harradine. Cast Iron Helen’s post at the Hoydens makes this point with great clarity (see link @71).
2. Melinda Tankard Reist may well feel that she’s been up front about her religious beliefs. Jennifer Wilson feels that she hasn’t. The materiality of that claim is a matter for debate, not a letter of demand. It also engages directly with (1) above.
3. People are right to be suspicious of the uses to which religion is put in public debate. If they aren’t, then you finish up with the current GOP race, which is farcical. Libertarian friends of my acquaintance are wondering ‘what happened to the party of Reagan’ and looking at the likes of Santorum, Gingrich, Perry et al in despair. Only one candidate (Huntsman) accepts biological evolution. Even Ron Paul is a creationist (ameliorated only to a degree by his libertarian belief that he can’t force that view on others). In response, I have been forced to point out that it was Reagan who invited the religious right into the GOP’s big tent, and we all know what happens when you invite vampires inside…
4. The originating basis of this debate: to wit, the causal influence of media portrayals on public and private attitudes — constitutes one of the thorniest problems in social science. It is a statistical and evidentiary nightmare. As I mentioned in the main post, the evidence points in fifty different directions. Yes, evidence for freely available porn being healthy is slowly starting to pull ahead of the pack, but as should be very clear, that is only one of the fish that MTR wishes to fry.
5. Building campaigns — especially for bans — when the evidence is not in is a very bad idea. I think LE and I have written enough posts on this blog about ‘the law of unintended consequences’ when it comes to sloppy and ill-thought out legislation to have made this point.
6. At a very basic level, we may be dealing with normal statistical differences both between men and women, and also statistical variation within the set, ‘women’. Many women dislike male attention, being ogled, say, or chatted up. They dislike porn and find it degrading of women. By contrast, many women like and want male attention. They have no problem with porn. There are also intermediate positions between the two. Many parents feel they should be able to dress their children how they wish (whether ‘sexily’ or not). Many businesses feel they should be able to take the benefit of market research that shows pink stuff sells, or girls like frilly knickers, or whatever. These are all perfectly reasonable positions to take.
7. To reiterate a point I made in the main post, but which I think bears repeating: anti-porn feminists, as well as those who focus on body image and seeking to control how women are portrayed more generally (as opposed to the more typical reproductive rights, domestic violence, equal pay issues one associates with feminism) need to have a good long think about the manner in which (6) above feeds into their views, and whether they are comfortable with being co-opted into a role as ‘God’s Police’.
@Mel – above Dan is not me (this is Dan from JQ’s blog).
Incidentally I am most definitely not anti-sex
In any event, JQ’s blog and Club Troppo are the only blogs I ever normall comment on. Cheers.
Jonathan D @ 88 – thank you! I read it three times and couldn’t see it.
Oh, and I should have clarified that I am not the same as DanN @91. I comment occasionally at a variety of places but always forget what I have called myself in the past.
Yeah wasn’t sure what was going on with all the Dans there, but didn’t say anything because at various times we have had three Tims (all commenting in the one thread, too!), two Davids and a Dave, and a Peter and a Pete — and that’s just for starters.
It usually sorts itself out eventually.
Can I ask, if MTR were to proceed, would a successful action really result in the removal of the entire post or just the phrase “deceptive and duplicitous”?
Whatever you think of her views I find it very hard to believe that people were not already aware of MTR’s religious faith, as the interviewer said, she didn’t think to interrogate that point because she thought it was by now, self-evident. I’ve visited MTR’s blog about three times l and saw one appearance on Quanda yet I knew she was considered religious and possibly fundamentalist. How does an interviewer’s failure to ask questions and a readers’ ignorance of commonly known and googleable facts translate to the subject being duplicitous?
What I would really like to see is legal action against the people who write to threaten violence against people like MTR, Nina Funnell, really any woman who has a public presence as an activist or feminist but this must be difficult as I have never heard of such action. That is the kind of speech that should be the subject of severe sanction.
Su, well, I agree – it’s better to focus on taking action against those who write violent, misogynist and unpleasant stuff than on Jennifer Wilson.
Su, that’s a question to which I don’t have a good answer. Why do people make defamation claims when they have experienced what is plainly incitement (or something similar) and not gone to the police?
I mean, apart from the threats of violence I saw, Rhys Morgan has had his house photographed and the image sent to him; other people routinely get notified that some ideological opponent ‘knows where they live’ etc. This strikes me as very serious. All I can think of is that sometimes the threateners are protected by anonymity, and if named there is a perception that they are all bluff and bluster and won’t follow through. My response to that is that Internet threateners may not have followed through yet, but that it is only a matter of time before one of them does and someone is murdered or seriously assaulted.
I’m sorry I don’t have a better answer. Good question.
Losing sympathy for JW at a rapid rate now.
1) Insisting MTR address the issue (religious influence) while not addressing the issue (duplicitous)
2) Suggesting lack of openness while pointing to a petition which carries no sponsor information.
Carry on; I must get back to my ironying.
I think the ABC interview covers the duplicitous issue quite handily, inasmuch as to drive the matter into the realm of public debate, rather than ‘you’re a defamer’ shuttupery.
I’m reminded of John Proctor in The Crucible: “Because it is my name. Because I cannot have another in my life”. I understand the urge to meet unfair characterizations with the threat of legal action while recognizing that it can become a means of discouraging any public criticism. I would think that there is also a chilling effect from online and private communications that threaten violence and I suspect that one reason why the adressees may not take action is a reasonable apprehension that it could inflame unstable people further and that ignoring them is the safer option. It does worry me however, for the reason you stated, SL, that ignoring may not be the safe option in every case.
Jennifer has commented on Eva Cox’s piece at New Matilda that references the kerfuffle to ask a broader question about right wing feminism. I find her comments a little strange. She says she was unaware that the Virgin Birth was common to all strands of Christianity and loses her temper with both Cox and Helen Pringle, for what reason I cannot tell. I remember Jennifer now as she commented on the OLO matter at LP.
They were deserting Jimmy Carter’s sinking ship.
How is it, Su, so far wide of the mark? Dr. Wilson was ridiculing the whole hocus pocus concept of “virgin birth”- a ridiculous concept upon which to base rational lawmaking – and I don’t blame her for a moment. See the forest for a twig ?
Paul@103 even Christopher Hitchens chose not to deride the possibility of a ‘virgin birth’. But from that point he chose to pursue a different path, saying in effect that while such a thing was biologically possible, he saw no reason to overlay it with some sort of religious baggage.
JW on the other hand seems to reject the possibility, and asserts it as yet another ‘proof’ of the objectification of women. I suppose it’s what you wish to achieve as to how you choose to interpret pretty most anything.
Me, I prefer Rita O’Grady. Now there’s a woman who actually achieved something worthwhile through common sense and determination.
Paul, she states that she believed that only Baptists hold to the doctine of the virgin birth, that is why she thought MTR was a Baptist. That seems an oddly ill informed assumption for someone claiming to be engaged in a critique of religious motivations in political speech. And someone’s religious affiliation is a poor guide to the extent to which they understand the basic doctines literally or more figuratively. I’m not against an examination of someone’s politics in order to argue they are influenced by faith, but it is something that must be shown, through analysis, not asserted as an a priori assumption, and it is certainly not something where you should just scream and shout and demand someone confess (irony). Jennifer has made it very clear that she thinks MTR is deceiving us with her feminist rhetoric. This fundamentally misunderstands how people “harmonize” the inconsistent parts of different sets of beliefs. Do I think MTR’s claimed feminism is sincerely felt – probabably, but I have no doubt that it is to some extent molded around her faith. That is a very different thing to someone deliberately misleading people about their thinking.
Having seen and participated in this, I do not like the kind of discourse which oversimplifies people’s arguments so as to dismiss them, and sorts those ideas and people into opposing camps, which demands absolute submission, and public shunning of dissidents, which does not recognize the ubiquitous human trait of sometimes holding beliefs that are not readily or comfortably reconciled but which may nonetheless be sincere, which uses very slight reasons to assume postures of woundedness or offence and use them to close off discussion and dismiss any disagreement with ideas. To you I imagine, that is exactly what MTR’s defamation suit does, and I tend to agree, but it is also in evidence in Wilson’s arguments IMO and her comments about Cox and Pringle – two feminists who come out of this very well, keen as they are to argue about the ideas, not patronize or attack each other and mutter darkly about each other’s “real” motivations.
Shorter me: a pox on both their houses.
su, I think it’s more that she saw it reported that MTR was a Baptist, found that Baptists do believe in the Virgin Birth, and then later finds that it is common to all strands anyway. Either way, your conclusion follows.
More generally, the first sentence of your second paragraph is wonderful.
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