Mocking Christ? Fine, just don’t dare say men are not women

So in modern Australia you will be feted for mocking Christ but cast out into the social wilderness for saying men are not women. That’s what the stories of Reuben Kaye and Moira Deeming suggest.

Kaye is a self-styled queer comic who was fawned over on the ABC’s Q+A this week for his swipe at the son of God. It was on the Ten Network’s The Project back in February that he told a cheeky crucifixion gag. He said he didn’t understand why Christians had such a problem with him. “I love Jesus,” he said. “I love any man who can get nailed for three days straight and come back for more.”

The Project hosts giggled awkwardly. Christians were not so amused. Some threatened to protest at his gigs. Things got so heated that Kaye cancelled his appearance at the Sydney Comedy Festival in April out of fears for the “safety of his audience”.

The audience on this week’s Q+A was a different affair entirely. They came not to douse this “blasphemer” in holy water but to gush over his supposedly daring Jesus-bashing.

An audience member asked if he thought a straight comic would have caught so much flak for a joke about the crucifixion. Q+A host Patricia Karvelas then read the joke out, for context, eliciting chuckles from the audience. Kaye said, yes, it was because he was a “queer person” that the religious reacted with such spluttering fury to his Jesus joke. They want us to “become invisible”, he said.

The applause was rapturous. He was treated as a valiant warrior for free speech. Chill out, you sad, tragic Christians, and let us say what we want to say – that was the undertone of Kaye’s own puffed-up self-defence and the cheering he received on the ABC.

Look, I am a free-speech absolutist. I support every person’s right to mock gods, prophets, ideologies and orthodoxies. My view is that Kaye should have suffered no retribution whatsoever – including any loss of income from gigs that had to be cancelled – for making a joke at Jesus’s expense. And yet, you will forgive my cynicism if I question how genuine the Aussie chattering classes’ new-found commitment to free speech really is.

After all, it was only a few weeks ago that the Q+A audience was cheering the demonisation of a blasphemer; whooping the expulsion from polite society of a woman who dared to bristle at orthodoxy.

Moira Deeming with Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull. Picture: YouTube

That woman was Deeming, the grotesquely maligned Liberal MP.

The Victorian Liberal Party suspended Deeming for nine months for the thoughtcrime of attending Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s Let Women Speak gathering in Melbourne in March. It is an indelible black mark against the reputation of that party that it would punish a woman for exercising her freedoms of conscience and association.

Surely it’s time for a name change. Liberal? Hardly.

In April, the woke types who traipse to Q+A were celebrating the hunting of the witch Deeming. Non-binary activist Deni Todorovic said Deeming shouldn’t have attended Keen-Minshull’s meeting.

“Like seriously, stay at home … doll,” he said, like a newfangled version of those 1950s sexists who instruct­ed sheilas to stay in the kitchen.

The audience lapped it up. How do we explain this? This weird situation where a Q+A audience can go from damning a “blasphemer” (Deeming) to defending one (Kaye) in the space of a few weeks?

It’s because the old orthodoxies have been replaced by new ones. The old religions and their stiff rules might be withering away, but new religions have taken their place. Christianity may be on the wane, especially among the young, but the cult of wokeness makes as many tough and often unforgiving demands of the new generation as Christianity did of generations gone by. It is no longer considered blasphemy to make fun of Christ, but try saying “trans women are not real women”. You’ll be branded a bigot, a witch, the utterer of abominable words. Q+A audiences will boo you, universities will deplatform you, media outlets will blacklist you. Witness what happened to Julie Szego, sacked by The Age because she dared to question some of the excesses of the trans ideology.

So progressive Australia is a world in which men are cheered for having a pop at Jesus or for demeaning Deeming as “doll”, while women face suspension, the sack and demonisation for saying: “Biology is real.”

Does that sound liberal or fair or good to you? To me it doesn’t.

I wonder if Kaye would ever go on The Project and blaspheme against the trans idea. Or, indeed, make a joke about Mohammed. I dare you, Reuben. Go back on that show and say something witty about The Prophet.

You’ll soon find out what cancellation really means.

Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.