Religious freedom fight misses target
YES, of course our private schools should have the freedom to kick out kids who are gay. Long live freedom of faith. So the Federal Government’s review into religious freedom is quite right to recommend it.
But here is what it failed to add in its report, leaked yesterday: such schools should then not get a single dollar of taxpayer money. No to state funding for bigots.
Wow. I can see why former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and, now, successor Scott Morrison sat on this report for five months, wondering what the hell to do with it.
Is this really what the Liberals should make a top order of business: reducing the cause of religious freedom to being mean to gay students?
Not with my taxes, they don’t. The schools – Christian and Muslim – who want to reject openly gay students as an abomination can do as they please, since no parents are forced to send them their children.
But their government funding should be cut. Taxpayers should be equally free of any obligation to fund a hostility to gays. Long live that freedom, too.
That’s not the only strange thing about this report. It also contains a basic logical inconsistency.
There is a big moral difference between discriminating against what people are born with and what they actually do.
We can’t choose our gender, gayness or colour of our skin, which is just one reason why such things shouldn’t count in judging someone’s moral worth.
But we can choose how we behave and those choices are what makes us moral beings.
In fact, some religious schools already accept this difference. They will hire gay teachers, provided those teachers keep their private life private and do not get married.
But check out the confusion in this report. It says religious schools should be free to reject children just for being gay, but businesses cannot reject, say, baking a wedding cake for gay adults choosing to get married.
Somehow a school shunning a gay teenager as sinful is fine, but denying a wedding cake for two gay adults is evil, according to the report, because such bans “may cause significant harm to vulnerable groups”.
Seriously? Shouldn’t this be exactly the other way around?
But, no. The report insists: “To some school communities, cultivating an environment and ethos which conforms to their religious beliefs is of paramount importance . . .
“To the extent that this can be done in the context of appropriate safeguards for the rights and mental health of the child, the panel accepts their right to select, or preference, students who uphold the religious convictions of that school community.”
True, Commonwealth law already gives religious schools freedom to discriminate against gay students and teachers, but how sad that this report urges more of the same.
That’s even more surprising when you check out its authors: former attorneygeneral Philip Ruddock, Australian Human Rights Commission president Rosalind Croucher, former Federal Court judge Annabelle Bennett, priest and lawyer Frank Brennan and constitutional law expert Professor Nicholas Aroney.
But you know what’s even sadder? That the fight for freedom – particularly of speech – gets boiled down to the freedom to reject a gay teenager.
Sure, there is more to this report, which so far has not been publicly released and which we can therefore judge only from media reports.
For instance, it also suggests the law be changed to stop the kind of religious persecution we’ve seen so far – priests and even a Tasmanian Archbishop dragged off to the tribunals and courts for preaching church doctrine on marriage.
And it reportedly wants an end to the blasphemy laws that rob us of our freedom to debate religious ideas, including poisonous ones.
This is where the debate should really be, particularly when religious vilification laws are increasingly turned into new blasphemy laws, used particularly to protect Islam.
In Victoria, two pastors were dragged into court for quoting and criticising passages of the Koran that praised jihad, and the ACT two years ago passed even tougher laws against religious “vilification”, with MPs citing the need to protect Muslims.
Let’s talk about that, shall we, rather than let the noble fight for freedom turn into this miserable fight to tell gay students they’re not wanted. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights