Petra Bueskins states in her post of Wednesday 15 February 2012 at 12:35:55 PM:

"Everyone who has followed this story
knows this sequence of events and the
role that Jennifer Wilson has had."

With all due respect, it does not show.

One of the reasons this article was even able to be written, and to perform the smokescreening function that it does, is best seen in a 'pocket biography' of MTR written by her friend Miranda Devine. See: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/why-being-christian-gets-you-crucified/story-e6frezz0-1226250226632

Miranda Devine's piece attempts to attribute claimed 'Twitter hate' as having been a response to, initially, Rachel Hills' 8 January Sun-Herald article in generality, and, subsequently, MTR's having been publicly called for being a 'fundamentalist Christian' in Jennifer Wilson's blog piece of 10 January 2012.

Miranda's piece failed to state that the explosion of outrage on the Twitter hashtag '#MTRsues' did not occur until after 14 January when Jennifer Wilson revealed the defamation action threat on her blog, and that that outrage was in overwhelming measure at MTR's seeming first resort to such defamation proceedings in an attempt to silence someone MTR had identified as a critic, and little or nothing to do with MTR's religious or feminist affiliations real or perceived.

I commented in detail upon the chronological deficiencies of Miranda's piece here: http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/01/21/entitlement-bullying-and-private-faith/#comment-11175

Further, the opinion-piece(s) controversy as to MTR's feminist qualifications, far from any 'casting [of] her out from feminism', has, if anything, on balance upheld her status therein, to the extent that it was ever in question. The whole function of this faux controversy has been to divert attention from the free speech issue resident in MTR's first resort to defamation action in an attempt to silence a person, Jennifer Wilson, she had already identified as some sort of threat to the realization of her ambitions.

MTR was lying in wait for Jennifer Wilson. MTR had already tried to have Wilson shut out from publication on OLO, remember, long before Hills' article was published, but Wilson did not learn about this attempt until MTR sued! http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/01/17/some-thoughts-on-being-threatened-with-defamation-by-melinda-tankard-reist/#comment-10738 in response to http://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/01/17/some-thoughts-on-being-threatened-with-defamation-by-melinda-tankard-reist/#comment-10707

Squeers I reckon that's your best ever post. A darn good read!

Well thanks, Houellebecq, I think..

You'll forgive my hesitation; unlike feeling feminists, I suspect you're seldom earnest and your compliments tend to leave one on guard. This evolved sensibility does you great credit, of course, and sincerity should never be trusted.

Briar Rose,
You don’t seem to agree or like the personal policies or beliefs of MTR, and you have attempted to tie this to her religion.

Unfortunately, under the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991, this is discrimination.

It is similar to a feminist saying someone “lacks balls”, because they didn’t agree with the actions that person had taken, and a feminist has recently said this in the press.

That feminist has carried out discrimination, because they had discriminated on the grounds of “physical feature”

Feminists have called for anti-discrimination legislation, and now they have it I think they are some of the first people to break the law under that legislation.

One of the places that we disagree, Jennifer, is in defining your blog post, or your disagreement with Tankard Reist, as the critical issue here. For all your talk of objectivity and evidence, surely you would concede that perhaps you are not the most objective person on this matter? By which I mean you are necessarily impacted by this at a very personal level. Therefore, for you, the matter of defamation and litigation is central, in your words, “without any doubt at all the crux of the matter”.

I don’t believe any of us are objective. The best we can hope for is to follow rules that maximise objectivity and to engage with the multitude of perspectives on any given matter with the hope of expanding our own understanding. My point is that for you the matter of litigation is central, but this is not so for everyone. For the topics I address in my article – feminism, insiders and outsiders, liberals and conservatives - it is not.

When I refer to “the dogs barking” I mean that Tankard Reist cops a lot of vitriol for her unrelenting stance on pornography and the sexualisation of women and girls. Again, I am not making this point exclusively in relation to you. You are one of her critics. True. But you are not the only one, nor are you among the more vicious. Recall, I didn’t even mention you in my article, which is part of your problem isn’t it?

With regards your question – Am I supportive of a woman being silenced? Of course I am not. I think we should all be able to speak freely (albeit respectfully) but calling someone something they are not is not the same thing. It strikes me as a fairly benign mistake – I wouldn’t be suing you if you called me a Baptist – but I’m not Melinda Tankard Reist, and I don’t know her reasons for doing so. This aspect of the problem is beyond my expertise. As I have said repeatedly, my focus was on a different, even if related, matter.

Part 2:

I have read your position on pornography and can see that you do indeed hold a nuanced view. However, for whatever reason, your arguments gain greatest traction where they are critical of those who are critical of porn. You seem most intent on exposing the spurious motives, “bad research”, or religiously inspired (read: delusional, biased, conservative) background of those who are critical of porn.

Given that this is a very abusive industry (in general, not always – yes, there’s a small amount of DIY porn that’s OK, there’s some feminist porn), I wonder why, if you agree with at least some of Tankard Reist’s concerns about the sex-industry, you spend so much energy on “exposing” her?

I agree it matters where people are coming from. However, if a person’s beliefs are reduced to a stereotype and there is a pre-existing bias regarding how that will be interpreted e.g., Tankard Reist’s Christianity disqualifies her from making a feminist critique about porn, or slaps a conservative label on her which is ultimately designed to shut her up, then that too is open to critique. As I said in my article, "Outing Tankard-Reist’s Christianity, or her concerns about abortion ... has a subtext in liberal circles: once identified as such she can no longer be a 'real feminist'. She is not one of 'us'. Rather, she is a fake".

Moreover, in a world that reduces politics to sound-bites, Tankard-Reist’s complexity is lost. What is at stake here is the truncation of her identity and politics for the purposes of, as Klein and Hawthorn say, cutting an influential critic of the porn and prostitution industries to her knees. The “exposure” of Tankard Reist’s beliefs is hardly designed to illuminate her activism, it’s designed to render it and her flawed. That feminists should participate in this is abhorrent, though I also offer some explanations for why this may be so.

Alain de Botton had a funny tweet today that is germane to this discussion: “Intolerance from atheists is more shocking because of how much they target precisely this flaw in their opponents.”