The ACL (Australian Christian Lobby) has recently started a campaign to get their followers and supporters to get Margaret Court nominated and voted in as a National Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia.  Women’s Day, one of the most popular gossip mags here in Australia, has a website with a short-list of 100 nominees where you can vote.

In an attempt to counter this, we’d like to try to get as many people as possible to vote instead for Professor Ian Frazer (#32 in the list), the inventor of the Gardasil vaccine.  Reasons why you should support him are given below the jump.

Margaret Court (#24 in the list) has recently courted controversy at the start of the Australian Open tennis tournament by speaking out about her opposition to marriage equality.  Her speel came directly from the books of right-wing fundamentalist christian apologetics, with plenty of blanket assertions and outright lies that are unsupported by any evidence, and actually fly directly in opposition to all the evidence and science on the issues.

The ACL are a right-wing fundamentalist religious group, and therefore any information about sexual activity is seen as bad.  Although I cannot find a location where they explicitly express as much in their press releases or on their website, things like sex education, safe sex, and anything healthy related to it their spokespeople tend to oppose.  They consider it all the “sexualisation of society” and promoting of an evil act, rather than just encouragement for people to do safely what they would otherwise be doing unsafely anyway.

For this reason, the ACL and many other right-wing fundamentalist religious groups are generally highly opposed the Gardasil vaccine.  Having Professor Ian Frazer outvote Margaret Court would be a direct slap in the face to the ACL.

If you need more reasons, then what better can you find than that it will also be a slap in the face to the AVN.

The AVN (Australian Vaccination Network) are a misleadingly named anti-vaccination lobby group from northern NSW, Australia.  They actively promote the misinformation and blatant lies about vaccines, scaring innocent victims and families in to not vaccinating their children.  The results of this can be seen as measles, whooping cough, and other easily preventable diseases are making a massive comeback globally.

Please, vote for Professor Ian Frazer for National Living Treasure.  Please also spread the word.  Help piss off the ACL and the AVN in one swoop.