It’s only just occurred to me that the biggest Australian political issue of the moment, and the biggest international issue, both suffer from bad cases of completely missing the point just to make an emotive statement.

In Muslim countries around the world there are angry mobs attacking embassies and getting people killed, all in a fairly knee-jerk response to some cartoons. Yes, they’re just as offensive as most satirical depicitions of religious figures, if not more so, but the initial publication was months ago and Jyllands-Posten has since apologised. We are (rightfully) hearing criticism of the use of violence, but without touching on the deep-seated and very emotional hatred of various Western-world ideas that is coming from most of the mobs, which seems to me to be the real fuel in their fire. The cartoons, I suspect, were just an excuse to let out pent-up anger.

(I also suspect the other two big current international issues, Hamas in Palestine and Iran and nuclear weapons, suffer from similar problems, but I don’t know enough about either to really comment.)

Locally, meanwhile, we have the Prime Minister and most of his Cabinet rambling on about how regulating RU-486 shouldn’t be taken out of the hands of the Health Minister. But listen to anyone else on this issue and you’d think it was a debate over whether abortion should be allowed at all, not whether we should restrict access to just one method of doing it.

Personally, I’d prefer decisions about drug regulation to be made by educated experts rather than politicians. But I think the vested interests in this debate are just using it as a chance to put forward their (typically emotional!) pleas. Take the anti-abortion ad in today’s West Australian describing how much pain an abortion caused to the Generic Stock Photograph Woman. Not that I want to deny the many emotional issues around abortion … but that’s not even the topic of debate!

Thank goodness the agency that manages the billboards at Fremantle train station (and others) saw enough sense to reject a similar ad from the same group. That, and it’d have been horrible if an anti-abortion message went and displaced that delightful beer festival billboard