There is only one way to enshrine freedoms. Through a bill of rights

Israel Folau should be able to express his views.

There has been no other more ominous warning of the looming apocalypse. In Kentucky, the owners of a reconstructed Noah’s Ark have filed a claim against their insurer for flood damage.

Happily, the Ark itself, a 155-metre timber structure built several years ago, was undamaged but the access road leading to the car park at what the owners call the Ark Encounter themed attraction suffered damage after what the Statement of Claim refers to as “substantial rain.”

Naturally, the owners of the attraction were mightily unpleased to be cast as global laughing stocks and southern rubes. In a statement on their website they have explained the damage, which has since been repaired, occurring due to “some off-and-on rain that occurred over a two-year period (two years ago) and caused a hillside to gradually erode — but no flood!”

I’m not sure which is worse. An Ark Experience themed attraction taken out by a flood or one unable to withstand the destructive forces of the occasional shower, but we’ll leave that to the US Federal legal system to work through.

In the wake of the 2019 federal election a lot of inferences have been made about the rise of the religious right, sometimes encoded as a stirring of “quiet Australians’’. It is a bold take given the Coalition has picked up one seat, Labor has lost one with one added on the crossbenchers compared to the 2016 double dissolution election result.

I’m not sure we can conclude too much other than the election was a comprehensive rejection of Bill Shorten and Labor’s big tax-and-spend agenda.

Now that Morrison government finds itself back in power, Attorney-General Christian Porter has been put to work on a bill to reinforce religious freedom in Australia. Without seeing the bill, it seems superfluous given freedom of religious association is one of the few freedoms explicitly mentioned in the Australian Constitution. Freedom of speech, incidentally, is not.

In what seems an eon ago, Folau posted on Instagram that hell awaits “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolaters. Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and come to him.”

I have to say right up front, I tick a number of those boxes.

Folau is a Pentecostal Christian and, one presumes from his Instagram page, an Old Testament literalist. That is, he believes every word in the Old Testament is the actual word of God whispered into the ear of men who wandered the Middle East 3000 years ago.

Gay men and women, especially those who are young and vulnerable should not have to bear the guilt Folau seeks to impose on them. They should not be forced to be something they are not. We all know the grave harm that can do.

At the same time, we should be concerned when a person’s livelihood is taken away for whatever reason. The ARU has torn up Folau’s contract. I appreciate that Folau may choose to continue to play rugby in Europe, possibly, or in Japan if he so chooses, but he is denied the chance to represent his state and his country and that is a huge price for him to pay. Too much, I wager, for the expression of views that most people would regard as laughable.

In a completely different set of circumstances, many people in this country sought to have our cricketers, Steve Smith, David Warner and Adam Bancroft, hurled out of international cricket for serious but forgivable indiscretions. What was perhaps worthy of a two-match suspension blew up to a mob reckoning complete with pitchforks, torches and demands for lifetime bans from people who should know better. It said a great deal more about the condition of the collective psyche than it did of the cricketers themselves.

Is it part of our national consciousness that we must crucify, metaphorically speaking, someone or other every eight weeks in this country? Is that something we are comfortable with?

Folau should be able to express his views. The ARU’s diktats on social media policy, a bizarre concept in the hands of any employer, should count for very little.

Similarly, Folau’s views should be subject to scrutiny, open rebuttal and firmly repudiated by rational argument. Too often in matters of faith though, debate lapses into mockery and viciousness. In this respect atheists are worse than most.

Where religion is concerned, there is faith and there is fact. The two are not designed to go together. They are, more often than not, mutually exclusive.

When all is said and done, the government’s intention to provide some bulwark for religious freedom is tinkering at the edges. If we want to enshrine freedoms of assembly, association, movement and expression then there is only one way and that is through a bill of rights.

I think I’m on safe ground when I say this could not happen in this country unless an extraordinary set of political circumstances arose. It is not due to a lack of political will or courage from our politicians. Governments don’t much like the citizenry having and enjoying their personal liberties. It’s messy and sooner or later, the cops will jack up.

In any event, we have come too far in this country. We have ceded individual liberties or had them whipped away in the dead of night in our parliaments.

Take the poor mugs stripped searched at Central Station in Sydney after a sniffer dog delivers a false positive on the railway platform. Or the nationwide “move along’’ laws that see the law abiding minding their own business facing criminal charges if they try and argue their case for freedom of assembly.

You could be one of the 300,000 Australians and counting who have had their metadata sifted through by any number of government agencies, all without a judicial warrant and without your knowledge. We can’t all be terrorists and criminals.

I could go on.

Sadly, we allowed this to happen on our own watch in the face of alarmist arguments for law and order or national security. In this context, religious freedom legislation is a shiny thing dangled before us to get us excited.

We’re at the point now that making laws to protect religious freedoms are, if not unnecessary then unworkable. If it happens and it probably will, the question arises, what about the rest of us?