Woke hypocrites humiliated as Folaus bask in apology

Israel Folau with his wife Maria in Melbourne on the day they settled with Rugby Australia. Picture: Aaron Francis

Who said schadenfreude isn’t good for you? Watching the convolutions of Peter FitzSimons as he tries to come to terms with Wednesday’s settlement between Rugby Australia and Israel Folau is some icing on some cake. Poor Fitzy has not had a good year. As one pundit on Twitter pointed out, when it comes to his frequent judgments and predictions the scorecard reads as follows: Alan Jones 3 Peter FitzSimons 0; events played — NSW election, federal election, Israel Folau.

The man with the red bandana was busy trying to convince himself, and his Twitter followers, that the settlement is nothing more than a “mutual apology”. But note there was no mutual moolah. Money went one way, direct to Folau. And in another failed prediction, within hours of the settlement being announced, FitzSimons bet RA couldn’t possibly have paid Folau more than between $200,000 and $300,000.

He’s out by millions. On Wednesday afternoon, RA agreed to pay Folau a multimillion-dollar sum for the harm they caused him. Nothing mutual about it, even though Folau apologised, kind of, for harming the game of rugby. A small price to pay for a multimillion-dollar payout. Indeed, given that Folau’s legal bills were covered by well-wishers and he is now free to play in Japan or France for much higher sums than RA could pay, RA’s settlement was a rich, and richly deserved, compensation for Folau’s six months of stress.

And don’t underestimate the significance of the comprehensive apology made by RA to Folau. Right from the start, the champion rugby player who was sacked for posting his religious beliefs on ­social media, insisted that an apology was important to him. “First and foremost, I am hoping for an apology from RA and an acknowledgment that even if they disagree with my views, I should be free to peacefully express my religious beliefs without fear of retribution or exclusion,” he said earlier this year.

Apologies matter. They restore a person’s dignity, and signal responsibility taken. And that, presumably, is why Christian Porter’s proposed Religious Discrimination Bill provides a legal avenue for an apology to be ordered.

Up until Wednesday afternoon, RA boss Raelene Castle said RA would not apologise. Until she agreed that RA should apologise, not just to the rugby champion, but to his wife Maria, too.

Remember the pile-on that Maria endured when she publicly supported her husband’s right to express his religious beliefs. Maria has been fully vindicated, as she should be.

While FitzSimons has made a goose of himself, Liz Ellis should hang her head in shame. In June, the former Australian netballer champion slammed Netball Australia for not taking action against Maria, a member of Adelaide Thunderbirds. Maria’s crime was to publicly support her husband, re-posting his online fundraising campaign to raise money for legal fees to challenge RA’s decision to sack him.

“Yeah nah not good enough,” the former Australian Diamonds captain tweeted in response. “There is no room for homophobia in our game. Anyone who is seen to support or endorse homophobia is not welcome,” she wrote. While Ellis tried to wriggle out of her mess by saying she wasn’t having a go at Maria, no one with an ounce of common sense believes that.

Ellis and FitzSimons fall into that class of hypocrites who just love their free, and multicultural country until it means allowing people with different faiths to express their beliefs. Would Ellis and Fitzy have been so forthright in ­denouncing Israel and Maria if they were Muslims, rather than Christians?

The other problem with people like Ellis and FitzSimons is that they are wishing a very fragile world upon us, where even atheists get upset over any mention of Hell. One very astute reader of this newspaper wrote on Thursday morning about an experience when he was in his early teens. It deserves repeating because it goes to the heart of the confected outrage over Folau.

“My high school years were spent at a Christian Mission school,” wrote Edmund. “I am not a Christian and never was, but circumstances meant that this was the only choice available. I was told by many of my schoolmates that I should ‘see the light’ etc etc and that I would face eternal perdition if I did not. My reaction? I was not offended, and I was only 14 when I faced this. I understood that they meant well since they were talking to me out of the depth of their beliefs and that they wished ‘salvation’ for me. I politely told them that I respected and ­appreciated their concern, but I had my own set of convictions which did not coincide with theirs. We ended up respecting one another,” Edmund wrote. “What I don’t understand is why people take offence at other’s beliefs. My schoolmates did not advocate harm be done to me. They were not violent, they were not abusive, they just said what they believed. Moreover, given that I did not share their beliefs, the prospects of Dante’s Inferno were totally irrelevant since, as far as I was concerned, it did not even exist.”

Edmund was in his teens. Those like Ellis who have chosen to take offence over Folau’s belief in salvation are adults.

As Edmund concluded: “It seems that we are living in a ­society that is so fragile that coping with any adversity is becoming increasingly difficult and people seem to be falling apart at the slightest confrontation.”

And this raises the bigger unresolved issue in Folau v RA. Fundamental legal and social issues have been kicked down the road. That is inevitable when matters are settled outside a courtroom. But it means the real issues at the centre of Folau’s claim are left undecided. At least until the matter is settled (or not) by the promised “Folau clause” in Christian Porter’s religious freedom laws, we don’t know if it is the law in Australia that a person can be legally sacked for expressing their religious ­beliefs.

And what will RA do should one its team members, another ­devout Christian from the Pacific Islands, post his religious beliefs on social media next week, and follow it up again in a few months with another? Will Castle pick up that same sledgehammer?

One thing is clear: she has no clue about the legal reach of RA’s code of conduct because the legality, let alone the morality, of the now ubiquitous and pestilential “codes of conduct” that employers, universities and others are using to control the ­behaviour of employees and others in their private lives, remains uncertain.

These codes are usually couched in vague, general and aspirational language that enables code owners to prohibit and punish behaviour they don’t like or of which they don’t approve, away from the workplace or university. Such codes breach basic rules of justice: how can a law be fair unless its application is both clear and reasonable?

Codes such as RA’s code are also an Australian version of Chinese social credit policies. They subjugate individual rights — to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, for example — to the employer’s views of acceptable social behaviour.

These views are often not merely irredeemably woke, but fundamentally bigoted. Thus Castle invokes “the very, very key value of inclusiveness” to justify terminating Folau’s employment because of his religious views. Consider the irony that in her world, “diversity and inclusion” is a benefit available only to select groups such as LGBTI people and is specifically denied to today’s most excluded and persecuted group, Pentecostal Christians.

Nor do such codes of conduct value or protect free speech. It is not only those who quote Leviticus or St Paul’s letters to the Romans who discover that codes of conduct trample free speech.

Highly respected professor of physics Peter Ridd discovered that his freedom of speech and thought was subordinated by James Cook University’s code on the basis that he had failed to be collegial to his academic fellows.

Perhaps even more worrying, these codes are being used to allow activists and zealots to ride rough shod over fundamental legal principles valued since Magna Carta. Queensland Supreme Court Justice Ann Lyons, for example, recently pointed out that the University of Queensland’s codes were being used to subvert basic “protections of the criminal law” such as procedural fairness.

All these issues have been kicked down the road. One day they will need to be addressed. But for now, let’s be grateful that RA chairman Cameron Clyne, Castle, FitzSimons & Co have been comprehensively humiliated.

Israel Folau has just had his most magnificent triumph.