David Penberthy: Religions are in no place to lecture us on SSM
THE SSM survey will be a poll on the influence of religion in modern Australia, writes David Penberthy. And few of them have a clean pulpit from which to lecture.
IF you don’t like being told what to do, how to think, or how you should vote, Australia is a pretty excruciating place to be right now.
This postal ballot process is being rendered unbearable by the two warring camps in the battle over same-sex marriage.
Let’s deal with the churches first, for whom the SSM debate is their equivalent of what the 2007 WorkChoices battle was for the labour movement.
Australia’s spiritual life is at a crossroads. The most recent Census showed the fastest-growing category of religion over the past 50 years has been “No religion”, up from just 0.8 per cent in the 1960s to a whopping 30 per cent last year.
To this end, aside from having the effect of feeling like an unpleasant straw poll on whether there’s something wrong with gay people or not, this postal ballot is going to tell us a lot about the present-day capacity for the churches to corral and shift public opinion in this country.
As WorkChoices was a litmus test for the capacity of the unions, the SSM ballot will show whether the churches still play a dominant role in telling us how we should, or shouldn’t, live our lives.
It takes a lot to get Cory Bernardi, Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews and Australia’s peak Islamic leaders on a unity ticket — but such is the special genius of this interminable ballot process.
God, as man has imagined him, does not appear to be a big fan of those of the homosexual persuasion. With a couple of exceptions — principally those groovers at the Uniting Church — most religions remain stridently opposed to homosexuality per se and are preaching for the No vote, or are quietly troubled by the whole gay concept and doing nothing to support the Yes vote.
It’s not surprising you’d suppose, given that homosexuality gets a bad rap at various junctures in the major holy books, from the Bible to the Torah to the Koran, even though the specific passages are the subject of debate between orthodox and liberal analysts of the texts.
But on the question of gay marriage, the opposition from the churches, synagogues and mosques is more implacable and more organised. It’s almost like a demarcation dispute in that it threatens the centuries-old conviction that marriage is a theologically-based contract between a man and a woman and should never be anything but that.
It is also because, rightly or wrongly, the No camp fears that same-sex marriage could be a precursor to an anti-vilification legislative program which could classify some sermons or religious instruction as hate speech.
Not being a religious person, I fail to share any of the anxieties or prejudices of these religious organisations. Indeed, many of them leave me scratching my head.
I would be troubled to discover that I shared any opinions with Keysar Trad, Sheik Hilaly’s former right-hand man at Sydney’s Lebanese Muslim Association, or some of those nutty imams who got an invite to that feel-good post-Ramadan feed at The Lodge, despite being on the record as saying homosexuality should be punishable by death.
Trad this week compared homosexuality to incest. Far out. If any of my views were even remotely on the same spectrum as these people — who at their most extreme are fond of chucking gay blokes off rooftops — I’d be in the market for a new value system.
As for some of our mainstream Christian churches, it seems audacious that the same organisations that spent decades concealing and denying systemic child abuse are now preaching about the impact legalised same-sex marriage could have on impressionable young minds. Whatever the more stupid politically-correct excesses of the Safe Schools program, it’s nothing compared to the pure evil perpetrated by the worst of the clergy, especially in those small dioceses where the local churches were run by child molesters.
On the other side of the divide, there are many in the Yes camp who are doing everything in their power to make their cause as unpalatable as possible.
It’s been one bad headline after another this week for the Yes crew, from that moronic boss in Canberra who sacked a young staff member simply for saying on social media that she was voting No, or the drunken thug in Hobart who punched the former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
And forget the churches as there’s been plenty of sermonising from secular quarters about the need to vote Yes — Qantas, Woolworths and the undergraduate posturing of the AFL in changing its logo to a Yes sign at AFL House.
I have no issue with these organisations or any others saying that, as major employers, they support equal rights for gay people, including same-sex marriage and are committed to providing workplaces that are free from discrimination and prejudice. But telling people how they should vote is out of line.
I still think the Yes vote will prevail. I don’t think that all this hateful medieval church dogma holds much sway anymore in this increasingly secular country, where 30 per cent of us have openly abandoned religion and many of the other 70 per cent have no contact with their church anyway.
But the tactics of the Yes vote remind me of the republican camp in 1999 where it felt like a bunch of inner-city, uni-educated wankers — all in passionate agreement with each other — resolved that lecturing the average punter about how to vote was the surest path to victory. It isn’t and it might not be again.
As the rugby league great Rex Mossop famously said: “I’ve got nothing against male genitalia, I just don’t like having it rammed down my throat.”
People should be allowed to vote in peace and in private. All the rest is an impertinence by sermonisers, of either hue.