Confronting secular bigotry

The Religious Discrimination Bill strikes a blow against the intolerable and intolerant religion of social justice. By Nick Cater.

It will be several months before the Senate votes on the Religious Discrimination Bill, or Trojan horse for hate speech as the Greens prefer to call it. The history of anti-discrimination legislation, good and bad, suggests the opposition will support it after the requisite amount of chin-stroking and some failed half-hearted amendments.

The Greens will be able to crown themselves as the only true adherents of the social justice faith, which declares all previous religions illegitimate.

Greens Senator Janet Rice painted a bleak picture of the depths of incivility into which the nation will sink should the Bill become law. It will be a country in which bosses yell abuse at transgender employees, childcare workers condemn single mothers as evil creatures who deny a father to their child and receptionists tell patients that their disability is a gift from God to teach them a lesson.

The Bill emerged from “years in secret meetings with the religious Right”, claims Rice, and was designed to distract attention from Scott Morrison’s abject failure to deliver the things Australians actually wanted, namely action on climate change, taxes for billionaires and raising income support.

This excitable rhetoric from the Greens’ LGBTQI+ spokesperson should make it easier for Anthony Albanese to decide which side of the fence he should be on. The Opposition Leader will find it harder to side with the irreligious Left than he did in January when he suggested that Margaret Court was an unworthy recipient of the Order of Australia.

Yet Albanese will find it hard to voice full-throated support for a Bill that overrides the social justice legislation being pushed through Victoria’s Parliament. Dan Andrews’ legislation would prohibit faith-based schools from sacking or refusing to hire teachers based on their gender identity or sexuality.

Morrison’s Bill will do the very opposite, offering protection for faith-based schools, public benevolent institutions, hospitals and aged-care facilities that wish to make faith a condition of employment.

Labor can hardly complain at the Commonwealth’s use of Section 51 of the Constitution relating to external affairs to usurp the jurisdiction of the states. Labor’s Gough Whitlam pioneered the caper to give force to the granddaddy of anti-discrimination, the Racial Discrimination Act. Whitlam lamented Australia’s lack of a US-style Bill of Rights but expressed the wish that his legislation would have “the same compelling lasting force”.

With hindsight, the instinct of many in Malcolm Fraser’s Opposition to oppose the Bill in the dying days of the Whitlam government was right. The many rounds of anti-discrimination legislation have not healed the supposed divisions in society. Instead, they spawned an industry of grievance harvesting and a proliferation of tribunals that mete out justice outside the normal processes of law, causing untold grief to those against whom they lay charges.

It would have been hard to imagine back in 1975 that the measures employed to outlaw racial prejudice would one day be needed to protect people of faith from godless bigotry. Religious adherence was in decline and Whitlam had joked that if he ever met God, he would “treat Him as an equal”. Yet it would have been difficult to predict that the fledgling social justice movement would develop into a faith in its own right, locked in an ugly sectarian battle with Christianity.

In recent years social justice has come close to establishing itself as Australia’s one true church, imposing its rites and prejudices upon public life while it conducts a puritanical social revolution overriding private conscience and exacting a high price for apostasy. Its adherents bristle at the suggestion that the view of the world is anything but rational and scientific.

Yet as James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose argue in Cynical Theories, social justice scholarship prioritises what it believes ought to be true over the obligation to establish what is true, turning it into a system of faith. “It has been allowed to bypass the usual barriers to imposing one’s belief system on others,” they write. “We must object to any requirement of an orthodox Social Justice statement of diversity, equity, and inclusion or mandatory diversity of equity training, just as we would object to public instructions that required a statement of Christian or Muslim belief or attendance of church and mosque.”

Morrison’s proposed legislation is hardly extreme. Laws to protect LGBTQI+ people from discrimination are governed by the Sex Discrimination Act and will be untouched by this Bill. Some of the more contentious elements of early drafts have been dropped, including the Folau clause, which would have protected employees from dismissal for stating their convictions.

The law will do little to deter the latest outbreak of acceptable prejudice, discrimination against the unvaccinated, many of whom are acting according to religious conscience. The Andrews government has already shut down that option by barrelling through legislation allowing the Juries Commissioner to exclude unvaccinated people from sitting on juries without facing a claim of indirect religious discrimination.

Yet Morrison’s Bill is nonetheless incendiary for that, standing in open defiance of the tyranny of confected morality that crushes individuals. It confirms that religious faith is a matter for individual conscience, not group conformity, and is a matter sacred between a person and their God.

For decades the social justice movement has marched on without a barrier in sight, asserting its dominance with ever more illiberal restrictions, cheered on its way with the hearty support of a sentimental media.

Andrews’ legislation preventing faith-based schools from appointing staff they deem to be morally equipped for the task seems likely to pass the Victorian Parliament with barely a whisper of dissent, just as previous legislation motivated by irreligious dogma has done. The Age editorialised in September it would “bring long-overdue comfort to members of the LGBTQ community” and deserved bipartisan support.

Morrison’s legislation will not stay the hand of the Victorian Parliament or galvanise the state Liberal Party to oppose the Andrews’ Bill with the rigour it deserves. It does, however, plant a flag for genuine diversity, the diversity of minds and imaginations. “When we claim freedom of worship,” Robert Menzies once said, “we claim room and respect for all.”