Posted By Bernard Gaynor on Monday, January 20, 2020 10:31 am | 22 comments

There are really only three things that you need to know about the proposed Religious Discrimination Bill.

Firstly, it places ‘religious freedom’ in the hands of the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Secondly, it then lets these secular militant overlords decide what our religious views are and whether they are doctrinally correct in order to determine if any one of us is ‘protected’.

And, thirdly, it opens the door to ‘positive’ religious discrimination.

For anyone with any common sense, these three things should give you a massive case of the Hibbidy Jibbadies. If you believe in freedom, then the best thing that you can do is run as far as you can, as fast as you can, from this bill.

No good will come from it. Ever. Full Stop.

Let’s go through each of these points in more detail so that even those who are a bit slower on the uptake can still uptake the consequences.

Point One: We have a problem expressing mainstream Christian views on issues such as marriage in Australia precisely because of organisations such as the Australian Human Rights Commission and its sister agencies in each of the states and territories.

So only a numpty could possibly think that it is a good idea to give the very same government bureaucracies that are the cause of our problems the power to protect ‘religious freedom’.

Why have I been in court since 2014 due to the complaints of a vexatious homosexual activist? Well, I have the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Board to thank for that.

Why was the Archbishop of Hobart dragged into litigation at the behest of a man who thinks that he’s a woman? News Flash: that was the work of Equal Opportunity Tasmania.

Why can’t Israel Folau play rugby for Australia anymore? That’s easy. Rugby Australia basically took the various state and federal anti-discrimination acts and turned them into a workplace code of conduct.

Christians who support this bill might as well start building their own guillotine on the lawns of the Commonwealth parliament. Because that is what they will end up with when ‘religious freedom’ is handed over to the woke, secular militants who believe that it’s their moral duty to use the coercive power of the state to impose Groupthink on Australian society.

Let’s not forget that Gillian Triggs was running the Australian Human Rights Commission when she lamented that she didn’t have the power to monitor the conversations around our dinner tables. Or that this organisation is so morally bankrupt that it huffily demanded that the government pay $350,000 to a murderer held in immigration detention.

Put another way, the biggest problem with these various government ‘human rights’ agencies is not a legal one but a cultural one: no one works in these organisations unless they already hate traditional Christian morality. After that, it doesn’t matter what the law says. The result will always be to the detriment of Christianity, regardless of how bad (or worse) the legal fine print is.

If it still hasn’t sunk in, just ask yourself this question: how many people working in the anti-discrimination industry think that marriage is a union between a man and a woman?

We all know the answer to that: zero. A big, fat one of ‘em.

And now the ‘conservative’ government wants us to believe that an industry that thrives by sucking funds off the taxpayer to virtue signal how offensive everything about Christianity is will protect our religious freedom from the attacks that it is rubber-stamping against us. Yeah right.

Point Two: Once you get past the cultural problems, the legal issues raise their ugly heads.

Section 11(1) of the proposed bill states:

A religious body does not discriminate against a person under this Act by engaging, in good faith, in conduct that a person of the same religion as the religious body could reasonably consider to be in accordance with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of that religion.

So this bill does not protect Catholic schools by allowing them to hire Catholic teachers, as we have all been lead to believe.

Instead, under this Act to protect ‘religious freedom’ a Catholic school will only be able to hire a Catholic teacher if:

• the hiring was done in ‘good faith’ – a very subjective term that undid Andrew Bolt when he faced complaints under the Race Discrimination Act, and
• other Catholics agree that this hiring was in accordance with Catholic teaching.

And it’s further complicated by the fact that section 11(5)(a) says that a religious body is only protected if it adheres to the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a religion.

So if a Catholic school wants to hire a Catholic teacher it must also prove to Woke World that it is a Catholic school that follows the doctrine of the Catholic church.

That is a lot of words and the one thing I have learnt over the past six years in court is that the more words there are, the more likely you are to have a problem.

And this is where it gets really tricky.

Who can’t find a trendy lesbian ‘Catholic’ nun or a Father James Martin these days to state that it is the teaching of the Catholic Church to celebrate everything rainbow?

Speaking at #WMOF2018 @JamesMartinSJ condemns Church discrimination against gays https://t.co/9kvugRzsw0 pic.twitter.com/3AibARY3rT

— The Tablet (@The_Tablet) August 29, 2018

Throw that little problem into the court room and all of a sudden I don’t think anyone can really say, hand on heart, that this bill will make it easier for Catholic schools to hire Catholic teachers.

Indeed, I’m going to bet that it is rather more likely that once this bill is made into law that there will follow a judgement that says Jesus taught us to love our neighbour and so, as a result, it is not the doctrine of the Catholic Church to discriminate against gay teachers and that, consequently, Catholic schools that don’t want them are not actually Catholic and therefore not protected under the Religious Discrimination Act.

You might scoff and think that this is fanciful.

But this bill clearly intends to give the anti-discrimination industry the power to determine what is and what is not Catholic doctrine, which normally is solely a question for the actual Catholic Church. It is bad in principle and will be just as bad in practice.

And while the social justice warriors like to think that they are infallible, the safe money would be betting that they stuff this up in a big way, either by accident or, more likely, through malicious design.

Given this bill will also thrust upon us another highly paid, taxpayer-funded activist – the Religious Freedom Commissioner – the likelihood that we’ll have an imam or lesbian Uniting Church ‘priestess’ overseeing the whole shebang makes this almost a foregone conclusion.

The Race Discrimination Act has given us Tim Whatisface and the Australian Human Rights Commission Act has given us Gillian Triggs. So we’d all better bunker down now and make preparations for Waleed Aly or that annoying Anglican bleeding heart with his inane and fatuous billboards to be made the Religious Discrimination Commissioner.

Who will be Australia’s first Religious Discrimination Commissioner?#draintheswamp #killthebill #freedom #WhereAreAllTheRealConservatives

— Bernard Gaynor (@BernardGaynor) January 18, 2020

This is the very opposite of what ‘draining the swamp’ is.

Point Three: the Religious Discrimination Bill, in order to fight ‘religious discrimination’ will allow ‘positive’ ‘religious discrimination’.

In other words, if this bill becomes law we will see job advertisements in Australia stating that in order to apply you must be from a non-Christian background so that woke big businesses and government departments can ‘rectify’ ‘historical’ discrimination in Australian society.

And don’t just take my words for it. Read the ‘conservative’ government’s own explanatory notes for clause 12 of this bill. Paragraph 264 of this document states in black and white writing:

For example, employment programs to assist members of a particular religious group who have been historically underrepresented in the workforce to enter the workforce could constitute a measure under this subparagraph.

So brace yourself for Qantas or Coles or the Australian Defence Force to put out job advertisements asking for people to enter the ‘Religious Diversity Employment Pathway’ – so long as they are Muslim. Or Satanists. Or anything other than Christian.

Indeed, this is already happening under state laws, as this job advertisement from the AFL makes crystal clear:

And if you lucky enough to be a Christian with a job, you should also instinctively know what comes next: workplace surveys that pry into your religious beliefs so that company executives can issue glossy annual reports trumpeting how they’ve identified that Christians are ‘over-represented’ in company middle management.

After that comes the five year program ‘targeting talent’ from ‘diverse religious communities’, complete with promotion quotas.

You know it’s true.

The Sex Discrimination Act is responsible for female employment pathways and associated quotas.

The Race Discrimination Act has spawned the indigenous recruitment corporate plan and associated quotas.

Both of these laws contain special measures provisions. And so does the Religious Discrimination Bill.

So it’ll take a couple of nano-seconds after this bill becomes law before woke workplaces create the ‘token Muslim’ job in every section of the workforce. And, oh yeah, the voluntary-but-compulsory-if-you-want-to-be-promoted morning teas to celebrate Satanic Inclusion Day.

I’m not even joking about that last part.

The first ‘religion’ protected under the Australian Capital Territory’s religious vilification laws was a Satanic cult. It follows the teachings of Aleister Crowley, who is infamous for promoting child sacrifice. He even has devoted followers in jail for running a paedophile ring.

I know the Catholic Church has had its own problems in this area but I would just like to point out that the crimes committed by a minority of clergy are not because of the Church’s teaching, but in complete contradiction of that teaching.

The same cannot be said of Colin Batley’s sex cult, which read from Crowley’s text at the start of its orgies with children.

And just to make it clear, only two days ago the Noosa Temple of Satan issued a statement boasting that Satanists would aggressively take all legal action possible to ensure that they could benefit from the Religious Discrimination Bill too.

No doubt, the secular militants will as well, just as they have been doing so in America to try and prevent shops from selling ‘Jesus candy’ at Christmas time. After all, the Religious Discrimination Bill protects those without religion as well.

No doubt, there are many people with good intent working to promote this bill. But if this law is ever enacted we will be beset with disaster.

I will not join the chorus of conservatives or Christians lining up to clamour for the Religious Discrimination Bill. I will not put myself in a position where, in two or three years when this law comes back to bite us hard, my words ‘supporting’ this law are thrown back in my face.

I do not support this law. I never will.

It is so badly flawed in principle that no amount of amendment of the fine print can improve it.

The only sensible answer to the problems we have today is to repeal existing anti-discrimination law. And, then, the buildings that house the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales and all the other temples of woke activism should be bulldozed into the ground.

Unfortunately, we are instead being asked to support more of the very thing that is being used to limit our freedom.

You have until 31 January to oppose this insanity. Please do so – and you can do so by signing my short submission below:

*****

I do not support the proposed Religious Discrimination Bill.

It will:

• give more power to the anti-discrimination industry – the very industry that is the cause of the oppression of Christians in Australia today;
• create a new layer of taxpayer-funded, rent-seeking, woke, activist bureaucrats who believe that the coercive power of the state should be used to impose a new moral worldview on Australians – this is the very opposite of ‘draining the swamp’;
• empower this bureaucracy to determine the doctrinal teachings of organisations such as the Catholic Church and to assess whether individual Australians are actually Catholic – normally a task that is the sole responsibility of the Catholic Church – an idea so bad in principle that nothing good can come from its practical implementation;
• ensure the return of jobs advertisements open solely to applicants of ‘approved’ religious belief – an idea that ordinary Australians vehemently oppose; and
• protect ‘religions’ that ordinary Australians find abhorrent, including Satanic cults, and create the circumstances for endless, divisive litigation that only results in the further limits of freedom, especially for Christian Australians.

I urge that this bill be scrapped.

I further urge that the real problem limiting freedom in Australia be addressed. The solution to the religious freedom problem facing Australia can only be found by repealing existing anti-discrimination laws and the abolition of agencies such as the Australian Human Rights Commission.

It is these laws and agencies that have enabled aggressive, vexatious and anti-Christian activists to increasingly drag Christian Australians through pointless and expensive litigation at great cost to numerous individuals and at greater cost to a previously harmonious society.