Even the people are taking a medievally cruel pleasure in being unkind to the Liberal Party, locking it in the stocks and throwing refuse at it in the Wentworth by-election and Victorian state election.

My ugly delight in this government’s agonies makes me blush to think that, a man-about-town in Shakespeare’s London, I would have paid to go and see the bear-baiting.

In my imagination I see myself putting on my best codpiece to sally forth with my wild mates (those popinjays!) for a great afternoon out. We begin at the bear-baiting (on Bankside near the theatres we have a choice of five bear-pits) then perhaps on to a whorehouse and then (my codpiece a little rumpled by now) to The Globe. There we invest a penny in seeing Shakespeare’s latest blockbuster.

My bear-baiting analogy is especially apt not only because the Reps at Question Time is a kind of bear pit but also because there is something eerily ursine (bear-like) about our big and lumbering and articulately growling prime minister. In Question Time, tethered, and tormented by Labor, PM Morrison actually lashes out rather well, just as in Elizabethan times some baited bears became celebrities for their entertaining dog-wounding ferocity and pluck.

But I hate myself for watching federal parliament. And so, buoyed by all the recent discussion of gay conversion therapy (and thrilled by the prospect that, after all, one might be delivered from one’s queer and shameful orientations) I approached my acclaimed therapist, Numinous Noeleen.

Could she, I begged, devise for me a course of Question Time conversion therapy? Could she convert me away from my loathsome habit of going, sweaty-palmed, to my computer at 2pm on sitting days to wallow in the wickedness of Question Time (brought to us in spectacular Rabbleorama)? Could she convert me instead to doing something ennobling (like listening to fine classical music) with my afternoons?

Noeleen has been doing her best using some of the most powerful tools in her mystic toolbox (including electrohomeopathy, bioresonance, and, less plausibly, prayer to the Virgin Mary) but progress is slow. And there was a glimpse on Monday this week of how intractable my problem is, how ingrained my perversion.

I was listening to ABC Classic FM and to the West Australian Symphony Orchestra with soloist Cédric Tiberghien playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.3, one of the most sublime jewels of the classical repertoire. But even as Pure Ian rejoiced in this experience Debauched Ian, his eye on the clock, noticed that 2pm was approaching. Would Pure Ian have the moral strength to stay with Rachmaninov’s intellectually-demanding but uplifting masterpiece? Or would Debauched Ian instead drag this weak-willed columnist down into the cheap entertainment, the vaudevillian gutter of Question Time in the House of Reps?

Satan’s gutter won. I switched off uplifting Rachmaninov and, loathing myself, turned to the irresistible filth of Question Time. Is there a therapy that can save me?

This past week’s parliamentary gibberings have been peppered with the issue of whether or not religious schools should have the right to discriminate against LGBTI students and teachers. On all this, where doesJesus stand?

The exciting thought that we may actually be able to ask Him is kindled by a new interview with Him just published in the respected online newspaper The Onion, “America’s Finest News Source.”

The Christian religious zealots who provide religious schools believe they know where Our Redeemer once stood on LGBTI matters but even if they’re right, what if He has since changed his mind?

In the Onion news story, Christ Super Embarrassed About Stupid [Things] He Said 2,000 Years Ago, Jesus tells reporters that he can no longer bear “to look at those old speeches from his Nazareth days”.

“Man, I was into some really weird religious mumbo-jumbo back then … all those long-winded, preachy parables I told my apostles are just so not me,’’ said Christ of the multiple sermons He gave, many of which He now views as pretentious and overwrought, adding that He was only 30 years old and still learning how to be the messiah.

“Honestly, if I had known that people were going to write down everything I said and turn it into the New Testament, I probably would have been more careful with my words.”

The Onion is playing, here, with an issue that humourless atheists (my mob) have always taken seriously. How can Christians believe that what Christians take to be the Bible’s wisdom is fixed, forever-relevant wisdom? Is there a single clear-thinking character in the New Testament who wouldn’t, able today to use all of the social-historical-scientific knowledge accumulated since his or her barbarously backward biblical times, exhibit a sea-change of changed opinion?

One feels sure that Jesus, with His lively and inquiring mind, reading the 21st century scientific proofs that homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice but is biologically determined, would be exceeding wrathful with those religious schools  that think it unseemly for the school to allow a gay pupil to bring a same-sex object of his/her affections to the end-of-year school formal.