Peta Credlin: Essendon loses the plot by targeting man over his faith

Essendon supporters must be asking themselves now if they’re still welcome at a supposedly inclusive club, that isn’t inclusive enough to have a believing and identifiable Christian as its CEO, writes Peta Credlin.

What sort of country has Australia become when it’s impossible to be a footy club boss and a public Christian at the same time? Certainly not one that’s fair dinkum about freedom of religion.

Let’s just be clear about what has happened to former NAB chief, now former Essendon Football Club chief executive, Andrew Thorburn.

He lost his job because, in addition to his AFL role, he was also the chairman of the City on the Hill Anglican Church, which had a sermon on its website saying that gay sex was a sin (because Anglican faith, like many others, believes marriage is between a man and a woman, meaning any sex outside that union – heterosexual too – is a sin).

The sermon also preached that widespread abortion was a national tragedy.

This wasn’t a sermon from Thorburn; yet he’s gone as a consequence of something said nine years ago, by someone else, that he didn’t know about and doesn’t agree with.

Israel Folau was earlier sacked from the Australian rugby team for paraphrasing the Biblical injunctions against drunkenness, lying and adultery, as well as homosexual acts.

Andrew Thorburn lasted one day as Essendon CEO.

By contrast, not only had Thorburn himself said nothing to offend, as NAB chief he’d actually sponsored “pride” rounds.

But his refusal to denounce his faith and the right of preachers in his church and all others to preach their faith, meant he walked.

Talk about guilt by association. And talk about double standards.

You can be a Muslim woman football player, like Haneen Zreika, who refuses to wear a gay pride jumper, because it offends her faith and that’s cheered. Yet when Christian male players took precisely the same stand at the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles a few months later, it caused a boilover, with threats of boycotts and catcalling from activists in the crowd.

But the Thorburn case last week takes it all to another level.

Unlike Folau or Zreika or the Manly players, there was no public ‘faith’ statement from the then-Essendon boss. Just a witch-hunt.

How can you have religious freedom if you can’t have a private religious belief without risking your job? And what sort of a state is Victoria, when Premier Daniel Andrews’ first response to Thorburn’s connection to the church (before he even quit) was to go on the attack to denounce bigotry.

Columnist Peta Credlin.

Not the politically correct bigotry of the footy club who targeted a man over his faith but the Premier’s intolerance for the traditional position of most religions on these issues – Christian, Jewish, Muslim and many others.

A lot of Essendon supporters must be asking themselves now if they’re still welcome at a supposedly inclusive club, that isn’t inclusive enough to have a believing and identifiable Christian as its CEO.

And a lot of Australian Christians, who still make up about half our population, would be wondering why it is that tolerance extends to every religious view except theirs.

The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Peter Comensoli said that the Premier’s comments were “harmful” and “divisive” and that Victorian society was “in big trouble” if that was the reaction to people who expressed their faith.

The Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne Philip Freier has also criticised the Premier, saying that tolerance has to go both ways.

In stark contrast to his predecessors Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison – a Catholic-convert and Pentecostal Christian respectively – who both failed to deliver promised protections for religious freedom and indeed declined to weigh into issues of culture, new Liberal leader Peter Dutton showed no such reluctance.

In defence of religious freedom, he said: “The fact that an individual can be sacked from a position because of his religious belief doesn’t have any place in our country.”

Anthony Albanese has hidden from the Thorburn issues this week, says Peta Credlin. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

“Once,” Dutton continued, “we had ads for jobs that said …‘Catholics and Jews need not apply’. We’re not going back to those days.”

But it feels like we are, doesn’t it?

On this, it seems it’s open season on religion and faith and, as Dutton said, political leadership is missing.

What I find most interesting is how the Prime Minister has managed to hide from this issue for much of last week with the media letting him get away with it. Only a few months ago, when he was chasing votes in the campaign, Anthony Albanese proclaimed during the Channel 9 leaders’ debate that his three loves were the Labor Party, the Catholic faith and the South Sydney Rabbitohs. Now he’s in The Lodge he does nothing to defend Thorburn, or people of Christian faith more broadly, even though he says he’s one.

If someone had been victimised on account of being female, gay, black or Muslim, there would be a chorus of condemnation led by human rights bodies. Their deafening silence prompts the obvious question: why is this vast taxpayer-funded human rights apparatus only interested in the rights of some and not all?

WATCH PETA ON CREDLIN ON SKY NEWS, WEEKNIGHTS AT 6PM

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Essendon loses the plot by targeting man over his faith