AUSTRALIAN moral crusader and Christian Democrat leader Rev Fred Niles swears he’s never caught a glimpse of hard-core porn in all of his pious life.
'Porn dear? Me dear? No, dear, never!'
But, according to this report, a parliamentary audit revealed that three computers in his office had been used to access 200,000 smutty websites between February and June.
Niles’ explanation is that he had asked his staff to conduct research into the porn industry. There was no question of his employees “perving on the internet”. He himself had never watched porn, and had certainly not seen Debbie Does Dallas – although he had heard of the title.
Australian Sex Party President Fiona Patten finds this curious, and referred to Nile’s very successful tour in the mid-1980s when he and fellow Christian prodnose Mary Whitehouse lobbied Australian states to ban films with an X-classification. Media reports documented them showing samples of “mucky” movies to political movers and shakers.
Brian Burke, then West Australian premier, had complained that what he’d been shown ”put him off his lunch”.
Said Patten:
One by one the state premiers fell to the moralistic rhetoric and the sample films that Reverend Nile showed them. Unless he turned his head away during the viewing, he has some explaining to do about this. Either he has lied about his claim to seeing X-rated material or he has banned a genre of films that he has not even had the courage to watch.
According to this later report, Nile says he will share a list of websites accessed using his parliamentary internet account with the public.
He said:
When we get the print-out we’ll be happy to make it available to the media.
Nile, a long-time political foe of the sex industry, insisted that one of his senior staff members, David Copeland, had used his parliamentary account to carry out official duties researching websites operated by the Australian Sex Party.
I have not accessed or viewed any of those sites but my researcher has, particularly the Sex Party, Eros Foundation and others, and those sites do have links to hardcore pornographic material which (those websites) support.
Patten hit back, saying said that the Sex Party had been unjustly smeared by Reverend Nile’s explanation for the audit. She vigorously denied the allegation of links to porno sites, and said that his comments verged on defamation.
The Sex Party’s spokesman Robbie Swan contacted NSW upper housePresident Amanda Fazio demanding access to Reverend Nile’s parliamentary internet records in the interest of transparency.
As the political party named by Fred Nile in all this taxpayer-funded research, we have a right to access this material and to found out why he was snooping on us. Is he snooping on our homes as well? What’s he doing?
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
September 6th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Can’t you go easy on these people, Barry? This is getting embarrassing!
September 6th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
200,000 – hey, that is heavy viewing. How do they find time to do anything else.
This is the usual prissy, preaching sanctimonious hypocrites. Preaching to the rest of us what they decide is wrong while claiming they are uncontaminated by anything as earthy as sex. Same with the Roman Catholics who fulminate against sex in the pulpit while arrangeing for a supply to be available to them in secret.
Here is something moderately amusing: the RC hierarchy, with Vincent Nichols well to the fore, is accusing the BBC as being anti- christian. Try listening to the BBC, or watching, on Sundays Vince. There is proselitising by the hour. I guess, like myself, you avoid it as the content is devoid of thought, mind numbingly boring and comprises a series of mantras we have all already heard endlessly.
A point we ought to be addressing is not that you think that there is not enough superstitious claptrap poured out but whether there should be any at all. There has never been any evidence, sign, or fact that indicates the existence of god. Couldn’t the hours of air time be put to something useful.
September 6th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
200,000 sites? That’s a lot of wanking.
September 6th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Maybe he was wanting to watch Saving Private Ryan and accidentally typed in Shaving Ryans Privates?
September 6th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
Wow bible bashing fundie in double standards shocker and in other news the earth goes round the sun
September 6th, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Very funny, Zombiehunter!
September 6th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;
Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
Through tatter’d clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furr’d gowns hide all.
King Lear 4.6.176-181, Lear to Gloucester
September 6th, 2010 at 7:02 pm
The mention of Mary Whitehouse reminds me of my all time favorite freethinker cover, a picture of a smily couple raising their glasses with a caption ‘Mary Whitehouse dead, a nation mourns’. That edition gave her a priceless obituary in the editorials as I recall.
As for Niles, well he is just another example of someone who is so totally repressed about sex that he has become obsessed with it. Isn’t sex a bit like oxygen, it only becomes a really big deal when you aren’t getting any.
September 6th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
I’m sure it’s been said before but doesn’t this make Niles a “porn again christian”? Sorry.
As for Mary Whitehouse, someone on B3TA has devised a machine that generates electricity when the old bag is shown porn and spins in her grave. Very funny:
http://omg.b3ta.com/board/10153193
September 6th, 2010 at 8:01 pm
These religionuts are obsessed with sex. They cannot get enough of it, if not in reality then in images. They cannot leave it alone: preaching, fulminating, cursing it, denying it, hiding their obsession and their – to them – guilty, sin laden practices. They cannot win. The drive is too strong. Either they accept this in a healthy way or in repressed, dark corners where any pleasures are stained by their guilt and fear of being exposed. Why do they think the god they believe in put these powerful drives there?
How truly, horribly, grisly to be caught in the chains of superstition.
September 6th, 2010 at 8:51 pm
I took great delight in creating that cover, Stonyground. And I’m so pleased that you still remember it almost a decade on. Here it is.
September 6th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
The first question that springs to mind is what kind of ‘research’ into the online porn industry actually needs to be done, indeed CAN accurately be done, in the first place. Whatever they presented as the objective of the exercise it would probably sound as pointless a project as exposing the Nazis as being a bit dodgy and/or akin to trying to discover how many types of red fish there are in the world from scuba diving in the Channel.
September 6th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Hey, I feel for the guy. I’ve done similar research myself in times past.
September 6th, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Many believers in the Semitic religions seem to have a pathological need to control other people’s sexual behaviour,even if they’re getting plenty themselves.
September 7th, 2010 at 5:02 am
That’s an old story…the sex-obsessed moralist.
September 7th, 2010 at 5:59 am
This sort of fall from grace happens to prominent religiots with monotonous regularity. It would be interesting if someone were to compile a pamphlet, or even a book, with an alphabetical list of who, what they represented and their dirty little hypocritical secret. If done as a web page it could be updated as new revelations occurred.
http://www.religioussexualhypocrisy.com(only a suggestion).
No religiot would like their mugshot and profile appearing here as it’s a more lasting embarrassment than a few days coverage in the papers.
September 7th, 2010 at 9:11 am
Australian fundie Fred Niles,
Claimed indifference to feminine wiles.
But for Debbie Does Dallas,
He whipped out his phallus,
And chucked his muck over the tiles!