Sarah Harris’ former co-star Joe Hildebrand unleashes on The Project apology

Sarah Harris’s former Studio 10 co-star has weighed in on the ‘dangerous’ Project apology saga.

OPINION

I love Jesus. I’m obsessed with the bloke. Even as I write this I am currently reading a book called “Jesus”. For the second time as it happens.

Lest you think this is just a convenient coincidence, the book I read before that was Greg Sheridan’s Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World and a couple before that it was Christos Tsiolkas’s incredible historical novel Saul.

Along with Michael Grant’s Jesus, I have also read A N Wilson’s Jesus and John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography and The Historical Jesus — the latter of which, frankly, is a bit dry.

I’ve also read another biography of Jesus called The Bible and once wrote a couple of essays about it for good measure.

I chose to become confirmed as a Catholic as an adult and got married in a Catholic Church. Unfortunately it was to a Godless lapsed Proddy but in the one true church a deal’s a deal and so we’re still married to this day.

To my mind Jesus was the single most important and influential human being in the entire history of humanity itself. To the mind of Christian believers he was also the most powerful.

And so I’m pretty sure he could take a joke.

And this brings us to the unedifying and embarrassing spectacle of the hosts of Channel 10’s The Project being forced to deliver a grovelling apology for a joke that was made about the great man on their show.

A joke that they didn’t even make.

Comedian Reuben Kaye made the offending joke on Tuesday night.

If Australia ever goes down the path of introducing blasphemy laws — and there are actually calls for it under the fig leaf of making it illegal to ridicule people on the basis of religion — you can bet your sweet bippy that that moment will be one of the linchpins that swung it over the line.

That is not just ridiculous, it is downright dangerous.

And what is just as ridiculous and dangerous is erstwhile supposed crusaders against cancel culture actively cheering it on. You don’t fix cancel culture with more cancel culture.

One of the most common and predictable tropes is “Imagine if they had said it about Mohammad” or any other non-Christian religious figure.

Well, quite frankly, people should have that right too. I was one of the most outspoken defenders of Charlie Hebdo’s right to satirise the prophet — blessings be upon him! — as I was of Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s right to criticise Anzacs, Tom Ballard calling a Liberal politician a C-bomb and Bill Leak’s right to skewer uncomfortable truths about child neglect in remote Indigenous communities.

I might violently disagree with many of these sentiments — or rather nonviolently disagree, which is kind of the point — but that does not mean those who express them should be censured or sacked. I have never understood why so many people fail to grasp this.

In the case of The Project, this failure has entered high farce. Presenters Waleed Aly and Sarah Harris — who is, among other things, a dear friend of mine — were made to apologise for something they hadn’t even said.

Harris’s crime was apparently to laugh at the joke. Heaven forbid the world has too much laughter.

Harris laughed at the unexpected joke from Kaye, but later apologised for his 'offensive' Jesus quip.

But of course someone saw it, someone got offended and next thing you know Channel 10 was inundated with thousands of complaints.

That quantum alone tells you something. Because unless a large proportion of The Project’s viewers are conservative Christians — which is not a demographic I believe they are explicitly targeting — this is a result of a small number of people deliberately trying to whip up outrage about something the vast majority of complainants would have been otherwise blissfully unaware.

In other words, it is about outrage junkies trying to make happy people unhappy, which is about as un-Christian as you can get.

It is also the same tactic those on the left used in trying to drum up outrage against Bill Leak in the fallout from his infamous cartoon, including activists allegedly showing it to people who had never even seen it and inviting them to lodge a complaint with the Human Rights Commission.

Bill Leak copped a wave of backlash for this cartoon in 2016.

On this note it was refreshing to see Osman Faruqi launch a spirited defence of Reuben Kaye’s right to make jokes about Jesus.

But tellingly he was less full-throated when the ideology didn’t suit him, condemning Leak’s work for “awfulness” and noting that “unfortunately” he would be continue to be published.

Moreover when the Australian Press Council failed to censure Leak, Faruqi seemed rather unhappy in his reportage and wryly noted Leak’s masthead did not feel the need to apologise.

Yet when The Project did apologise is was apparently the death of jokes about Jesus.

And so conservatives and progressives alike still drink at the same horse trough of hypocrisy. It’s free speech when it suits them and hate speech when it doesn’t.

But perhaps the last word should go to Jesus and the people who knew him best.

Jesus himself was subjected to merciless torture and the most agonising form of execution. The two men most responsible for spreading his word, Peter and Paul, were likewise hunted and killed while always preaching tolerance and peace.

If Christ and his original followers could face such brutalities I’m pretty sure that those of 2000 years later should be able to handle a cheap gag on a TV show.

Yet here is just one message Harris received from a woman on social media: “Go kill yourself you dumb b*tch”.

Jesus wept.