Support for Folau speaks to a bigger cultural shift
Quiet Australians are sick of political correctness invading their workplace, their sport, their families and their private lives, and being lectured by the politically woke on how people like Israel Folau can behave, writes Miranda Devine.
Ha ha, haters. You might have bullied GoFundMe into closing down Israel Folau’s donations page but all you’ve done is galvanise more supporters into more generosity.
The new donations site set up by the Australian Christian Lobby was amassing $1000 a minute on Tuesday, passing the million dollar mark within a few hours, easily surpassing the GoFundMe total.
Quiet Australians are voting with their wallets to help a besieged rugby star wage a legal battle against the Christophobic bunglers who run his sport and the woke corporates who think their sponsorship money makes them the boss of us all.
People are not donating to Folau because they are bigots, or even because they’re religious.
They are donating because they know they are next. How many Quiet Australians work for companies like Qantas and have to stay silent in the face of gratuitous corporate activism that conflicts with their private values?
The fact is that Rugby Australia started this fight. It provoked Folau by needlessly conflating sport with politics when it became a cheerleader for the same sex marriage cause.
Did it not occur to anyone in the rugby hierarchy that more than half of all players, from the grassroots up to the Wallabies, share Folau’s Polynesian heritage and fundamentalist faith, and might hold a traditional view of marriage as being between a man and a woman?
Four in 10 Australians voted to retain that traditional view in the same-sex marriage survey. That doesn’t mean they are bigots. Many realised that marriage was just the latest proxy war in the cultural revolution. Nevertheless, they accepted the decision of the majority, and trusted the government to safeguard their religious freedom.
But that is not good enough for the tolerance fascists. They demand total submission.
So, let’s cut to the chase. The Folau furore comes because a minority of Australians in influential positions equate Christianity with homophobia and they will not rest until they have stamped it out.
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This is an untenable position.
The religion whose central ethos is to love thy neighbour as yourself, whose adherents minister to the poor, the sick and the dying, who devote their lives and a good portion of their wealth to good works, the religion which underpins all that is good and fair in our civilisation, is now vilified as an agent of bigotry and hatred.
The Bible, too, is being recast as hate speech.
The logical conclusion of this trajectory is a radical reordering of our society and institutions which only could be achieved by coercion and bloodshed. (See the Cristero War in Mexico in the 1920s, as immortalised in the Graham Greene novel The Power and The Glory and the Peter O’Toole movie For Greater Glory, for one historical example which ought to give pause to Christophobes among us.)
But just because dishonest or intellectually feeble people characterise Folau’s quotation of St Paul as homophobic vilification doesn’t make it so. The Bible is the foundation document of our Judaeo-Christian culture. It can’t just be re-cast as hate speech by a handful of entitled social justice warriors, even if they are members of our woke corporate ruling class — the wokocracy.
And, if quoting the Bible contravenes vilification laws, as Rugby Australia claimed when sacking Folau, that opens a huge can of worms.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: We must see attacks on Christianity for what they are
Former Nationals’ MP John “Wacka” Williams pinpoints the absurdity: “Three times I have been sworn into the senate on my great great grandfather’s bible,” he told me. “If you go to court you swear on the bible to tell the truth. But don’t quote from the bible, or you will be sacked”.
I don’t agree that homosexuals are automatically bound for hell any more than drunks, fornicators, idolaters (aka Catholics) or any of the bulk of Australians on his list of “sinners” who he urged to repent.
But why must Folau be sacked, hounded out of sport, bankrupted, and threatened with audits by unnamed tax officials?
Why must his netball star wife, Silver Fern Maria Folau be attacked for posting a link to his GoFundMe account, to the point that ANZ Bank has expressed displeasure to Netball New Zealand?
To its great credit Netball Australia has stood firm but no doubt its sponsors will be lobbied to pile on.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Yes vote means a new minority needs protection
GoFundMe explained why it closed down Israel Folau’s account by saying it was helping the fight for rainbow equality: “As a company, we are absolutely committed to the fight for equality for LGBTIQ+ people and fostering an environment of inclusivity.”
But weren’t we promised by the politicians and celebrities and the rest of the wokeocracy that legislating same-sex marriage would deliver equality. Now GoFundMe is telling us the fight is never ending.
Of course equality wasn’t really the aim. That was just the ruling class using lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people as the latest pawns in their identity politics power game.
It’s just another beachhead in a cultural revolution which aims to destroy the family as the last holdout of bourgeois morality, of traditional values, and of freedom from state control.
It’s all about power, not fairness. The corporates have gone woke because it buys them protection from their traditional foes on the left.
But the unholy alliance between the identitarian left and big corporations is alienating Quiet Australians. They are sick of political correctness invading their workplace, their sport, their families and their private lives and they notice the weakness of their leaders.
It’s not good enough for Scott Morrison to dismiss the Folau debate as having had too much “oxygen”.
He may feel vulnerable because of his own Pentecostal faith, but if you’re the Prime Minister of this country you can’t squib the religious freedom debate. You need to be nimble enough to get on top of an issue before it gets on top of you.
Leaving a vacuum of leadership when so many people are feeling besieged, whether Christian or not, is a recipe for social disruption and tribalism.
The irony is that the antidote to this natural human tendency to hate thy neighbour was Christianity.
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