IN an act of supreme irony, Australian leftists are trying to get law professor Dr Joanna Howe sacked from her Adelaide University academic post because they think she is being raped by her husband James – in other words they want to cancel a woman who they believe is a victim of rape.
This bizarre state of affairs came about after James, who appears on podcasts with his wife, said “I don’t do consent … I do marriage.”
The deputy state topic editor for The Age, Katie Hall, jumped on the story, reporting his exact podcast words: “Like for me, like, I just … I don’t do consent. We don’t do consent,” the father of five said.”
Ms Hall did give some partial context, reporting that “James’ comments came during a broader discussion about sexual consent education and the government’s Digital Duty of Care bill, which the Howes believe amounts to “school-based indoctrination” and “brainwashing”.”
Note Hall’s use of quote marks around “school-based indoctrination” and “brainwashing”, which means they apparently have difficulty understanding the validity of the terminology.
James Howe was referring to the “Teach Us Consent” program, which advocates to school children “safe sex” between consenting people, without reference to marriage, age limits or traditional moral boundaries.
It is otherwise known as a federally mandated, national curriculum framework called Consent and Respectful Relationships Education (CRRE) that became mandatory in all Australian schools starting in 2023.
The program was supposedly driven by the Teach Us Consent campaign founded by Chanel Contos, a 21-year-old Instagrammer at the time, who gathered tens of thousands of signatures and testimonies highlighting “the urgent need for better sexual assault prevention and relationship education”.
This morphed into the hysterical feminist campaign focusing on domestic violence cases involving murders of women, which became conflated with federal government plans to censor and control social media content, and then the unfounded and baseless outrage over five Sydney Swans players accused of “sexual assault” against a trio of strippers who performed for them in a hotel.
The Age report continued: “Howe appeared to agree with the comments made by her husband of 17 years, and as a successful influencer among Australia’s far-right, she immediately understood the impact of James’ words. “They’re going to clip that up online, and you’re going to sound really bad,” she said laughing.
“James replied: “I don’t give a f—. Like, I do marriage, man. Like, I don’t, I don’t do consent.”
He went on to say that he believed the “consent” ideology was used by largely leftist men and women to justify casual sexual encounters in their circles.
“But as it turns out, both James and Joanna Howe definitely do give a f—. Not only about an education model that aims to reduce Australia’s appalling national rates of sexual violence, but also about our abortion laws,” Hall wrote.
“Over the past 18 months, Dr Joanna Howe, a law professor at Adelaide University and a Rhodes scholar, has become one of Australia’s most recognisable, prolific, and aggressive anti-abortion activists.”
And that is why feminist journalists and some men across the Australian media landscape have published numerous hit jobs on the couple. The News24 (formerly Sky News) crew would be the exception.
The fact that Dr Howe has aligned herself with Pauline Hanson also has the leftist establishment worried, as indicated by Hall’s report.
She continued:.”On her YouTube channel, Howe boasts almost 50,000 subscribers, and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has appeared on her show multiple times. On Instagram, she has more than 150,000 followers, while James Howe has close to 200,000 – even after a sizeable drop following his comments about consent.
“Howe has used her platform to attack politicians who identify as Christian but are pro-choice, and said a podcaster who spoke about her experience having a termination was “celebrating her abortion”. She described Chanel Contos – the woman behind the Teach us Consent and Fix our Feeds campaigns – as “moronic”.”
The claim that so-called sexual consent education being pushed into public schools at most levels is indoctrination and brainwashing is not hard to substantiate, given the nature of the “porn literacy” process as described to the Howes by researcher Ed Schuller, in a recent podcast (video above).
As stated by Schuller, “Consent” is part of a “sexual education” program distributed by private entities that has cost state and federal government nearly half a billion dollars over the past decade, which hardly sounds like a half-hearted government commitment to an education program.
Ms Contos herself was recently granted $3.8 million over two years from the Federal Government to fund her organisation’s Promoting Consent Initiative (PCI) that will target 16 to 25-year-olds, indigenous youth and establish “a youth-led expert advisory council to help guide public policies on sexual violence prevention”.
Ms Contos is already well paid as chairwoman of the Youth Advisory Committee at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL), a role she was appointed by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
In this role “she oversees a global youth committee focused on emerging challenges for young people in the gender equality space”, which essentially means promoting feminist and LGBTQ+ ideology among young people.
