Gays burn in hell, the rest of us just burn

Bewildering moments this week with regard to the media and government reaction to Israel Folau’s sermon, placed on Facebook by his church.

Israel Folau.

There were a series of bewildering moments this week with regard to the media and government reaction to former rugby footballer Israel Folau’s sermon, placed on Facebook by his church.

Everyone from the Prime Minister down took high offence at a series of bizarre propositions, which were mainly that our recent spate of tragic and devastating bushfires were God’s punishment for our wicked ways, specifically legalising abortion and same-sex marriage.

Up until this point it has been considered perfectly OK for Folau to offend by saying that members of the gay community are going to hell. In fact, after Folau was sacked for repeatedly expressing these sentiments, the government inserted a clause in its religious freedom bill to bolster the rights of people to say these sorts of things, and to prevent a sacking such as Folau’s from reoccurring.

Now it seems a line has been crossed. Or perhaps the rules have changed. It is difficult to tell. When it comes to saying awful things based on a personal interpretation of Bible teaching, gay people are fair game but bushfire victims are not. And what of any bushfire victims who are also gay? Your guess is as good as mine.

Naturally, Scott Morrison’s reaction was likely driven by a sense of responsibility for each and every one of us. Any prime minister would want all Australians to be as happy as possible and for there to be no needless upset, conflict or disharmony.

It was understandable, then, that after the sermon hit the headlines, Morrison asked Folau to shut up and go away. “I thought these were appallingly insensitive comments,” he said. “If people don’t have something sensible and helpful to say, can you just keep it to yourself?”

Considering the government’s religious freedom bill, though, contains a clause specifically drafted for Folau, the Prime Minister is guilty of hypocrisy. After all, once the bill is passed employees won’t have to keep these sorts of statements to themselves. They will have the legislated right to say them.

Employers will not be able to do what Morrison did and tell people who come to work and say the same things that Folau has about the bushfires to keep their comments to themselves.

You see, with his preaching, Folau was simply making “statements of faith”. Contained within the draft laws that the government is about to ask the Senate to approve, a “Folau clause” allows employees to make statements of faith and specifically protects them from being shut down or told to desist.

With his remarks about the bushfires, Folau simply was accessing a section of draft legislation the government wrote specifically for him. So, before the draft law has been passed, Morrison already has gone against the spirit of it and specifically against the person for whom it was written.

All going as planned, within the next two weeks the bill should hit the Senate.

It is, as I have said previously, nonsense and an affront. Outside the government it is impossible to locate anyone praying for it to pass. Perhaps there are some aspects of life that legislation cannot be drafted to handle. Perhaps regulating the rights of people to make statements of belief in workplaces is a swamp where the government should not wade.

On Wednesday federal Attorney-General Christian Porter spoke at the National Press Club in Canberra and he (wisely) touched on the bill for the briefest moment. He mentioned conduct that was malicious and vindictive, and how government best legislated to protect people from it.

He lamented that inevitably, when doing so, the challenges were always with “the colliding nature of rights”.

It is true, we have the right of someone to tell gays they are going to hell, or bushfire victims that God is punishing them, versus the right of people to come to a safe, pleasant and harmonious workplace and the right of an employer to manage it.

Everyone’s rights have to be carefully balanced, yet not everyone can always prevail and so, generally, the rights of the person in charge to maintain order and harmony trumps the rights of individuals to say whatever they want.

However, the religious freedom bill subverts this situation and allows the rights of individuals to say whatever they want to trump the rights of the person charged with the maintenance of order and harmony. And here is where employers will really suffer.

In designing the bill, Porter said, his job was to write a law that “fixes known problems” that people of faith were experiencing. Yet when a reporter observed that most religious institutions didn’t support the bill, Porter’s response was extraordinary.

The Attorney-General said he didn’t think anyone would be “at the deliriously happy end of the continuum” with the bill, but by making “all equally unhappy” he felt he had done his job. In fact, he argued that in this colosseum of competing rights, to end up with everyone off side should be seen as the mark of success. That is one way of looking at the situation.

Here is another, which I prefer; if everyone is unhappy with the job you’ve done, then perhaps you are not a legal genius, simply misunderstood. Perhaps, on this occasion, you simply have done a bad job.