Musings on hypocrisy and virginity tests

I was reading a mag in the staffroom yesterday as I tucked into the lovely stuffed capsicum I'd taken for lunch, and I almost choked when I read this 'In Brief' snippet, :

 Virginity tests averted

(Jakarta, Indonesia), Feb 11 - A member of parliament on the island of Java has been scrutinised following an attempt to introduce forced virginity tests for females planning to graduate high school. Kusen Andalas, deputy head of the district, insisted that the plans will not go ahead. 'I don't think it's ethical to carry out such tests. It is against people's rights'.

Seriously, ya think?

The article made me realise, yet again, how little personal power we have - how our dignity and privacy can be stripped away by unscrupulous, unethical - dare I say in some cases twisted? - officials who truly believe they have a mandate to do whatever they bloody well like to us.

Was the official in question merely a 'dirty old man' who gets off on the thought of probing high school girls and tries to shield his depravity with a veil of religious devotion to 'purity'? The conspiracy theorist in me can't help also wondering whether it's part of a larger and far more insidious plot to deter girls from wanting to get an education - to make the prospect of even finishing high school abhorrent, a rite of passage only achievable after a shameful, irrelevant and unnecessary invasion of her most private self?

How the hell do these creeps get hold of power in the first place? What kind of morons vote them in?

When my train of thought reached that point I derailed it. After all, I live in the country that voted in a creep who has spent the last 18 months locking up children and torturing asylum seekers.

I live in the country whose government is wringing as much political mileage as it can out of pretending to be compassionate and locking horns with the Indonesian government over the impending state-sanctioned killing of two Australian drug runners who knowingly flouted Indonesian law, and whose own Federal Police actually tipped off the Indonesians in the first place, knowing the consequences of drug-running through Indonesia.* WTF???

I live in the country whose government refuses to accept any whiff of responsibility for the deaths of Reza Barati, a 23 year-old Iranian asylum seeker who was killed on Manus Island during rioting at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre as an unwilling 'guest' of the Australian government, and 24 year-old Iranian asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei, who died because of unforgivable delays securing urgent medical attention while he was also a 'guest' of the Australian government on Manus.

I live in the country that points fingers at other countries' human rights records, while ignoring its own deplorable treatment of its own indigenous people; whose self-titled Prime Minster for Indigenous Affairs supports the defunding and closure of remote aboriginal communities because they are lifestyle choices. Arrogant, ignorant, offensive creep.

*Let me make it clear that I do not support the death penalty. What I also do not support is the hypocrisy of a government that apparently values the lives of convicted criminals over the lives of innocent people who have fled torture and terror in their home countries.

For the Guardian story about this lowest of low acts, click  here