Barnaby's been hypocritical. But the SSM angle on his staffer scandal is too long a bow, IMO

The more details that emerge about this scandal involving Barnaby Joyce and his pregnant staffer, the more unedifying it becomes. No use beating around the bush here, he's made a complete hash of things.

Sure, pollies do have a right to privacy but not if their personal shenanigans impact their taxpayer funded work in such an obvious way ... And I do think that since he's been on the record as espousing "family values" he is certainly guilty of big time hypocrisy.

That said, the vicious glee with which lefties have been tweeting about this is really disgusting. He's certainly not the first pollie to have strayed from the marital bed. And plenty of those guys were on the Left, remember.

Take Bob Hawke, who fell in love with Blanche D'Alpuget, the writer of this book about him. There was also that unedifying episode involving Tony Burke, along with countless others across the spectrum here and overseas.

You can be damn sure that most of those members of the Twitter trollective getting stuck into Joyce would be much less critical -- even defensive -- of their male fellow travellers embroiled in similar circumstances. And some of these hypocrites are even sledging the young, powerless female staffer involved! How very feminist of them.

Interestingly, many of these trolls have been relating the scandal to Joyce's stance on same sex marriage. Now, we know he was against it. But he actually abstained from the plebiscite vote -- probably because of these events unfolding in his private life. Yet opportunists are still using this issue to bash him over that one. Bizarre.

If it had turned out he'd been having an affair with a bloke, sure, it would have been far more relevant ... But tweets like the one above strike me as being opportunistic and mean-spirited. They certainly aren't a positive endorsement of "marriage equality", either.

They are very negative in essence, implicitly equating SSM with the erosion of family values. The subtext is basically, "Dude! You trashed the institution of marriage with your infidelity. So why can't gay people also trash it by becoming legally married?"

Here are some more tweets in this vein: 

This one is probably milder than most. But it's silly and sanctimonious as all get out:

FFS. If you "suffer greatly" because your family disagreed with you about politics (basically exercising their democratic right to defend an institution common to pretty much every culture on Earth and one that that has endured for thousands of years unchanged) then you really need psychological help. Sorry ... And of course it was wrong that his guy was bashed by homophobic plods decades ago. But how is this Joyce's fault?

Given so many lefties have linked the issue of SSM to this disastrous destruction of a family by their conservative hate figure, I think I'm justified in pointing out that those in the "rainbow" range of progressivism have also behaved in the most selfish and destructive ways relationship-wise. Take Kathleen Wynne, Premier of Ontario.

The story of her own journey towards sexual self-actualization certainly came at a heavy cost to others. And it just goes to show that despite what the right-on MSM keep telling us, "rainbow families" aren't always full of joy, harmony and love.