Some of those on the side of SSM are showing a great deal of intolerance
MALCOLM Turnbull continues to ignore the voters he needs the most, writes Miranda Devine. And anti-Christian incidents this week show they need protection.
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ON MONDAY night at dusk, 200 Christians from the No-voting western half of Sydney travelled to the Prime Minister’s harbourside mansion in Point Piper and held a candlelit vigil.
Mainly Maronite Catholics, they prayed together that Malcolm Turnbull would keep his promise, made during the same-sex marriage campaign, that he would protect the religious freedom of the 4.8 million Australians who voted ‘No’.
“We want to be free to express our religion,” says their spokesman, 28-year old Maronite builder, Charbel.
“We don’t want our priests to be sued, we don’t want to see the local florist punished for not participating in gay ceremonies. We don’t want to go to jail for saying something that could be treated as offensive.
“We want Malcolm Turnbull to know that we will fight for our rights so we headed off to make a point at Point Piper.”
Charbel, who did not want to give his last name, said some of Turnbull’s neighbours joined their protest when they arrived at about 8pm, bringing their own candles and dubbing the Prime Minister, “Malcolm Turnaround”.
To underscore the protesters’ point that No voters are a minority under siege since the same-sex marriage postal vote returned a 61.6 per cent Yes vote, two religious statues were vandalised early yesterday outside a church in the inner west.
So as soon as they finished their prayers in Point Piper, Charbel and his fellow protesters headed across town to the St Paul of the Cross Catholic Church in Dulwich Hill to join a crowd of at least 1000 who had gathered to pray, and weep, beside the decapitated statues of Jesus and Mary.
For those who squeezed into the garden in front of the church to hear their priest speak of courage, it was a galvanising moment. They recognise too well anti-Christian persecution which their forbears in the Middle East had escaped.
Elsewhere around the country, there was similar gratuitous vilification of Christians perceived as No voters. Out the front of a Greek Orthodox church in Kogarah a young man posed in a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Jesus is a c…”.
In Brisbane, after mass at his local church, former Army major and prominent Catholic Bernard Gaynor says he and other parishioners, including children as young as nine, were accosted by an angry man in his 40s who demanded to know if they were responsible for displaying “It’s OK to vote No placards” during the campaign. When they admitted the placards were theirs, he launched into a “completely foul-mouthed tirade” until they threatened to call the police.
“I never felt intimidated in my own church before,” says Gaynor. “There has been unleashed a satanic fury against Christians in Australia.”
On the other side of the country, in Perth, more venom from Yes voters was aimed at Christian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, a No voter who has pledged to abstain from the parliamentary vote on same-sex marriage. As soon as the results of the postal survey were announced last week, he was bombarded with hateful messages at his electoral office and on his Facebook page. He was called a homophobe, bigot, “a useless piece of shit”, “arrogant bigoted fool” and “f…ing maggot”.
Even during the campaign, Christians were vilified as homophobes, with “Crucify No voters” graffitied on church walls, and activists storming a Coalition for Marriage launch, chanting “crucify Christians”, and brandishing a banner reading: “Burn Churches not Queers”.
Is it any wonder No voters are genuinely frightened that they will be victimised for holding a belief in traditional marriage, and are demanding that parliament offer them protection in the form of amendments to the marriage legislation to be pushed through parliament before Christmas.
Yet there has been no reassurance from the Prime Minister for the one in four Australians who voted No, not even when his treasurer Scott Morrison on the weekend intervened to insist on amendments to the marriage bill to protect basic freedoms.
It is an extraordinary oversight considering that on December 16 a by-election in the No-voting electorate of Bennelong will have such a profound impact on the government’s fortunes.
Bennelong is home to a new cohort of socially conservative Asian political activists galvanised by the Safe Schools and same-sex marriage debates. Asian-Australians are concentrated in the most No-voting seats, and Bennelong is one of the most ethnically Chinese seats in Australia, especially in the suburbs of Eastwood, Denistone, Marsfield and Ryde.
Fewer than half of Bennelong residents speak English at home. Almost one in four speak Chinese. Almost 30 per cent of people in Bennelong have Asian ancestry, mainly Chinese.
But they are not catered for by either John Alexander, the local Liberal MP forced to a by-election by the citizenship fiasco, or wildcard Labor candidate Kristina Keneally, both of whom are Yes voters.
So if Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives party runs a candidate, it would split the conservative vote, and potentially hand the seat to Labor.
Bernardi is set to announce a candidate this week, and among those locals supporting him is Dr Pansy Lai, the GP who was the face of the No campaign and active against Safe Schools. Last night at the second packed branch meeting of Australian Conservatives in Eastwood, Liberal defectors told of troubles in Alexander’s campaign, which is struggling to find booth workers.
In the 2007 election which saw the defeat of the Howard government, it was Bennelong which made the humiliation emphatic, by turfing out its long-serving member John Howard. Now little Bennelong again stands on the precipice of history, with its decision on December 16 shaping up to be make or break for the Turnbull government.
Surely a Prime Minister who wanted to win over the 50.2 per cent of people who voted No in Bennelong would be at pains to make clear that he wasn’t just talking hot air when he promised during the campaign that he believed in religious freedom “even more strongly” than in same-sex marriage.