CATHOLICS NEED NOT APPLY

Nicole Williamson
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

Updated: I promised myself and Reverend Graham Long from the Wayside Chapel that I wouldn’t use the ‘B-word’ or the ‘H-word’ for the next three months while the Marriage Equality debate is on. I told him, I’d think the word ‘hug’ every time instead. So I updated the blog too.

When I was a kid growing up in Canada, Dad used to tell a story about his father’s best friend standing at the door of an Anglican Church rather than coming inside to watch him marry. I also knew that my Grandfather had been ex-communicated from the Catholic Church for marrying a Protestant. That’s how I remembered the story.

I never met my Grandfather but when we moved to Australia, I came to understand what being born in Woolloomooloo in the early 1900s meant. I knew very little about Dad’s father except that Bill ‘Bluey’ Williamson was a great Cricketer who pulled himself out of the slums and ended up running the Messenger Department for the Commonwealth Bank. My Grandmother died shortly after we arrived, so there was never an opportunity to get to know the family’s history first hand.

The real story was more dramatic. My Grandfather was born into a Catholic family of eight or nine children and when he married a Protestant, his family cut him off forever. My Dad only met his Grandmother once, on her death bed, in hospital. The ‘best friend’ was actually Bill’s brother, the only one of his family to maintain contact. Dad never met his Grandfather or any of the other members of his family.

Dad’s memory isn’t so good these days and it’s sheer coincidence I heard the story at all. It came out recently over lunch — I’ve moved back to Woolloomooloo and we were talking about how it’s changed. I’d never heard anything at all about my Grandfather’s side of the family, only that they were Catholics from Woolloomooloo.

I googled and found the Williamsons in about five minutes: the number of siblings and the year of my Great Grandmother’s death lined up with Dad’s memory of being a very young boy at his Grandmother’s deathbed. I found it puzzling that Dad showed no interest in hearing about the Williamsons of Woolloomooloo — I was completely fascinated. Later I guessed that his Father had probably never spoken about his own family. They cut him off, so he never spoke about them at home.

This HUGary in families came back to this morning while reading Tony Abbott’s comments about protecting the traditional definition of marriage.

The kind of HUGary Tony promotes is the very opposite of religious freedom. It’s like my Catholic Family booting my Grandfather out for marrying a Protestant — I know there are equivalent stories of HUGary from the other side with Catholics treated terribly in relationships, employment and public life. And when we first moved to Australia, some girls I knew called the girls at Tony’s sister Christine Forster’s school (Catholic) Molls. Anti-Catholic HUGary was still everywhere and I was pretty shocked by it.

Anyway, Christine had the perfect response to her brother’s comments.

Tony, I respect your right to put forward a traditional view on marriage. But please don’t hide behind the banner of religious freedom: the bill written by Senator Dean Smith of Western Australia and other Liberals went out of its way to protect the rights of churches, institutions and individuals to maintain the status quo.

When you play the ‘political correctness’ card, you reveal your hand. It’s clear you’re trying to provoke vitriol from those who want change.

You want to stop time Tony, instead choose love over hate and old-fashioned HUGary.

True Love is very hard to find. We want more marriage not less.

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