Emails

My email to Margaret Court

Gay marriage. It’s died down completely as an issue since I wrote this letter to Margaret Court earlier in the year, but I thought I’d post it just for shits and giggles.

I don’t know what shits have to do with giggles. Do you? Margaret Court almost certainly does and I deeply regret not asking her what the shits/giggles link is in the below email to her.

Indeed, Margaret knows many things, including that “Australia is on a steep moral decline” and that “Minorities are now making it harder for the majority.”

I recommend reading Margaret’s Herald-Sun magnum opus from January before getting to my frippery:

Dear Pastor Marg,

Can I call you Pastor Marg? I was brought up to believe that anything goes, and sometimes I make terrible assumptions – I hope this isn’t one of them. Anyway, Pastor Marg, just wondering if you’d be willing to attack me personally in a mainstream newspaper. I love your vibrant, single-sentence-paragraph brand of chastisement and want to feel what it’s like to be corrected morally by a truly righteous person.

Admittedly, I’m not gay, so that cuts out a lot of your stock material, but if it helps, I have been told several times that I do come across as a little bit poofy…

…once at my wedding…

… by the celebrant.

Speaking of my wedding, what a time that was. My brother read from Grug, I mocked my friends and family in a speech, we ate fish and I coveted many an ass/arse. I couldn’t agree more with the central thrust of the very line of argument that has got you into so much (unjustified) trouble: marriage is grouse.

What I think excites me most about the prospect of being put in my place by you, Pastor Marg, is the fact that a hopeless loser like me has such a great deal to learn from a winner like you. Recently you said that you won three Wimbledons and could have won six with Jesus on your side. In other words, Jesus multiplies things by two.

Fuck! Brilliant!

That means that if I’d found Him, by now I would have won two under-13 coaches awards at the Ashburton Redbacks and two runners up medallions for 5th Division Indoor Soccer at Box Hill.

The other reason I want you to release some anger in my direction is because I think you, and the church you lead, get a rough deal and want to do my bit to make you happier (and you seem to be at your most content when berating people and telling them how to live their lives). You know what I’m referring to: the loud but tiny minorities (the secularists, the atheists, the agnostics, the humanists, the Jews, the Catholics, all the other Protestants, the browns (mostly Moslems), the Pastafarians, the Greens, the yellows, the pinks (homma-sec-suals), the reds, the Soviets, the Maoists, the ABC, the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the Ay-rabs, the Buddhists, the ones who do the resonant voice chant thing, the Hindus, the leftists, the centrists, the moderate conservatives, the libertarians, all the hippie off-shoots of the League of Nations (or whatever they call themselves these days), the scientists, Fairfax Media, The Argus, the independent media, SBS, the Lizard People (Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, the Rockefellers, the Rothchilds, the Queen, etc), people with the AIDS, musicians, the police, Victorians, Tasmanians and South Australians) who claim your teachings are bigoted, exclusionary and based on preposterous notions. What rubbish!

Let’s start with the claims that your rejection of evolution is based on unscientific nonsense. The evolutionists – or evo-poo-tionists, as I like to call them (you can use that) say that it’s absurd to believe that the Universe is only a few thousand years old. They say that the concept of humans living with dinosaurs, for instance, is laughable. But you’re proof positive that it not only did happen but still does! You have a neck exactly like the tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park and my Western Australian friend swears he once saw you behind a Subiaco restuarant holding down an animal carcass with your taloned foot, and eating its flesh with minimal chewing.

As for this idea that your church is exclusionary – again, your critics only have to look to you to realise they are wrong. Would a church that is “prejudiced” and “cruel” make a witch its pastor? No! They have accepted you into their fold (I honestly didn’t mean that in the Sodom and Gomorrah way) and now consider you a leader.

And finally bigotry. Is it bigoted to call someone an abomination? OF COURSE NOT! What part of “I hate the sin, not the sinner” don’t these people get? How hard is it understand that you can loathe and despise every single thing about a person, and feel it necessary to belittle them and regard them as scum, while still loving them and wanting to hug the gay out of them and wanting them to join your flock.

Speaking of your flock, once you have criticised me and my lifestyle in a Murdoch newspaper, can I join your pasture?  A boy at school once said I looked like a pig with Downs’ Syndrome, but I think I’m much more like a sheep. I am woolly, white, quite dumb, compliant and will happily be castrated (as I believe Jesus encouraged in Matthew 19:12) to be closer to heaven. I can’t know this for sure, but I also believe that my flesh would be tasty, which I know might be another tick for you, Pastor Margosaurus rex. I feel that what I have been missing in my life is a shepherd (and I mean that in both the Christian guide sense, and in the Australian rules football sense, because I’ve always thought I was a very capable footballer made to constantly look sub-standard by teammates who simply refused to make space for me).

But I’ve got ahead of myself. Here are a list of things I would like to see included in your abusive op-ed about me:

• Complete disregard for the separation of the church and the state, with rewriting of history if required.
• Bible references – lots of them. Here are some of my favourites:
  • The time Noah got shitfaced, got naked, then passed out before he could get his clothes back on and his youngest son Ham found him, looked over both shoulders, and then gave him a quick one up the date, leading to black slavery. (Genesis – 9:20-27)
  • The time when an old bloke called Elisha was walking along minding his own business when some little boys ran out of a nearby city and called him “baldy” and Elias asked God to curse them and God, bald himself, was furious and sent out two bears from the forest to slap a few of the boys around, but the bears went fucking psycho and killed 42 of the boys. (Kings – 2:23-24)
  • The bit that says if your balls are squashed or your knob’s been cut off, you can’t get into heaven. (Deuteronomy 23:1)
  • The bit (as discussed above) where Jesus says lopping off your knob is a good way of getting into heaven. (Matthew 19:12)
  • The time a man called Ehud stabbed a rotund man called Eglon in the belly and poo came out. (Judges 3:19-25)
  • The bit that says women should remain silent in churches (Corinthians 14:34)
• Mention of the depravity of worshipping not God, but life and things within it, followed immediately by a catalogue of your Grand Slam silverware.
• Elaboration on what you mean when you describe the Bible as a TV guide and a training manual.
• A non sequitur involving a Catholic doling out corporal punishment.

I know I’ve asked for a lot in this email, but is there such a thing as “too big an ask” for a person who genuinely seeks redemption?

I’ll let you answer that question in your newspaper article.

Sheepishly yours,

Jonathan Rivett

You won’t believe this, but she never got back to me. I wonder if Cory Bernardi would be more courteous.

Haught fact of the day:

God said let there be feijoa. But there was no feijoa. So God said “Ah, bugger it. I’m going to have to do this one manually.”

He was feeling lazy so he took an avacado, made it smaller, removed the stone, but some fuzz on it and then flavoured it like a strawberry with some peppermint chewing gum notes.

And there was feijoa.

Read more Haught emails

…or choose one that takes your fancy from the list below:

My email to Yarra Trams
My email to Metro Trains
My email to Facebook
My email to Microsoft
My email to Coles
My (unsent) email to the Victorian Department of Transport
My email to Alan Jones
My email to Kyle Sandilands
My email to Gasp Jeans
My email to Jim Beam
My email to Ben Polis
My email to Hoo haa Bar
My email to Weis ice creams
My email to some tobacco companies
My email to KFC