Israel Folau saga an appalling indictment of our so-called values

Australia has behaved in the Israel Folau fiasco as badly as communist China.

“Religion is not a private matter. It is by definition public. One lives a faith. Hence people such as Folau have suffered a great injustice.”

Values: it is a term we hear a lot about these days. Many people, some of them writing for this newspaper, are crowing over a shift in public tolerance of what are sometimes dubbed, for some reason I haven’t figured out, “woke” social values.

The evidence for this, they assume, is the success of the Conservatives in the British election and, before that, the triumph of Donald Trump and the installation of our own conservative Morrison government. Even the fact Israel Folau was able to elicit an apology and damages from Rugby Australia has comforted them that events here and abroad are indicative of this shift. Forget about it.

Why are people not asking, if that is so, why do we Australians have to pass a bill to guard the most fundamental of all our rights, the right to religious liberty?

We have never needed a bill for the protection of religious freedom in the past and we don’t really need one now. But leaders of all the major religions are nervous that our current open and easy compact with religion will not last, and many individuals and religious bodies are fearful of the aggressive secularism that wants to expunge religion from the public square altogether.

Religious freedom is a fundamental “value” for a democracy. Yet it was a “values” campaign that made a religious freedom bill necessary in the virulently aggressive and overtly anti-religious campaign to change the meaning of marriage.

That campaign succeeded largely because many people who saw marriage as a purely legal form thought that the Yes vote would satisfy the gay lobby and “settle” the question.

It hasn’t settled anything, of course. Most religious people abhor the concept and they don’t see any reason they shouldn’t say so in public, whether in schools, from the pulpit or on social media, and they rightly resent being forced into artificial lawfare to shut them up. That is one reason for the bill.

Religion is not a private matter. It is by definition public. One lives a faith. Hence people such as Folau, whether you agree with him or not, have suffered a great injustice. Folau wasn’t given his job back, he can’t play anywhere else and he could have expected better in a nation where free expression of religion or politics is supposedly the norm.

We know that this was done simply because the corporate masters of rugby didn’t like what he said. No other players have been reprimanded for support of any social campaigns they approved of, whether it was gay marriage or against coal-seam gas — and never mind some players’ dreadful off-field antics.

It is an appalling indictment on our so-called values that in the matter of free speech and religious values Australia has behaved in the Folau fiasco as badly as communist China. The parallel that highlights the extent of the injustice done to Folau is last week’s case of the Muslim football player for Arsenal, Mesut Ozil, who tweeted against the Chinese treatment of the minority Uighurs. His protest caused that despotic government to punish him and the Football Association by cancelling the televised match. At least the player wasn’t sacked by his own team and refused any outlet to play anywhere else, as was Folau. Like it or loathe it, intruding into sport, whether it was diplomatic or dopey, the Arsenal player has a right to do that, as did Folau.

But the Folau case is only one example where freedom of religion and conscience have been attacked in Australia. There have been other more serious cases, notably that of Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous, who faced anti-discrimination proceedings after disseminating a pamphlet on the Catholic doctrines of marriage.

Many readers may not realise the action was not brought against just him as an individual. As the pamphlet also was circulated by all the bishops in Australia, if the case had succeeded it would have brought the entire Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal. There was a real danger that one jumped-up tribunal could challenge a fundamental 2000-year-old teaching of the Catholic faith, not to mention the even older Jewish tradition, and Muslim too.

At least now the bill makes clear that to teach in conformity with doctrine is not discrimination. Perhaps if this new bill does anything it could at least make clear that to rely on a narrow interpretation of the word discrimination is plain wrong, not to mention ignorant.

Discrimination is a word that has been redefined as a mortal sin of modern morality. It has become a pejorative in modern values speech, rather than a necessary faculty of human intelligence; that is, to be able to discriminate among or between things. Therefore, discrimination has governed the framework of all the legislation to do with identity. So the bill states that to teach or employ in accordance with a religious faith is not discrimination as defined by the current laws.

Manipulation of language was always one of the tools of the thought police. The word values is pretty meaningless now. It is a vague substitute for many other words, such as principles.

It is a naturally fluid concept dependent on social acceptance and situational ethics. In our looking-glass world where morality is governed by social media likes and general niceness, absolutes are not tolerated because they seem well, intolerant, especially in sexual morality, where even the natural laws of biology can be overturned. So male and female have become meaningless and the word sex is replaced by gender because it is neutral.

Enter the trans movement, the ultimate “emperor’s new clothes” cause, a naked attempt to fool all of the people all of the time, by the punitive elitism that forces people to ignore the bleedin’ obvious. What has politics to do with that? Politics can’t change the world. “It’s values, stupid!”