How is the right’s push on religious freedom going? Terribly! It’s really great to watch — a bright spot in an otherwise bleak political landscape. There’s no way it can end well for them, and whatever happens will in someway benefit the left. As an added bonus, they are actively damaging previous successes they had in securing the autonomy of religious institutions in hiring practices. I’m loving every installment of this.
Let’s do a quick recap. During the same-sex marriage plebiscite, one of the right’s more desperate tactics was to allege that a “yes” vote would be an assault on religious freedom in this country, for reasons they couldn’t explain. Discrimination on the basis of sexuality was already outlawed — same-sex marriage simply added one more area in which they couldn’t be discriminated against.
The “religious freedom” scare came from a section of the conservative right identified with both elite Catholics like Paul Kelly — who see religion as a glue to bind society together whatever their real attachment to belief in God — and Protestant politico-cultural hysterics like Andrew Bolt, who believe the pagan endtimes are upon us.
This gang has rode out before, in the great 18C debacle — remember 18C? — and had their arses handed to them by Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party, petrified of the reaction from Big Multiculturalism. They lost on 18C, and they had a lot better material to work with. The best they could come up with on religious expression was Israel Folau.
Personally I don’t think sports people should have to trade away their citizenship freedoms to do what they’re good at. But Folau appears to have flouted a contract he knowingly signed and it’s a far-from-ideal rallying point. Luckily for the right, the cultural left has come to their rescue, turning Folau’s childish just-so story pronouncements of “burning in hell” into potent political statements, by constructing them as potent hate speech.
Still, even with this sterling subaltern service from part of the left, the conservative right can’t get the religious freedom thing going. The reasons are not hard to see. A specific “religious freedom” statute — i.e. a right based on content, rather than on the form of activity, such as speech, assembly etc — is just junk rights of the type that the right has hitherto criticised as coming out of the Australian Human Rights Commission.
One trouble with content-based junk rights is that they accumulate and start to contradict each other. With other anti-discrimination rights on gender, sexuality etc already well established, a religious freedom statute sets up a nightmare of incommensurable rights claims.
That would clearly clash with the religious right’s determination to extend the privilege of religious institutions to employ who they like, which has been their principal cause since the plebiscite. At the moment such organisations have exemptions that allow them to shape their staffing and composition. But what if a Muslim or a Jew wants the job, and is best qualified? What about a Buddhist waiter who won’t serve meat? Or an Islamist receptionist who won’t shake hands with the opposite sex? And on and on.
The obvious point is that not only would this create a legal dodgem derby, it would do more than anything I can imagine to establish that the state — as the representative of public values — should have power over the market and capital.
In The Australian, Katrina Grace Kelly — her name at time of writing — noted that Folau’s claims were unlikely to succeed given the lean towards employers in such laws, but that if they did, they’d reset employment law entirely. The Institute of Public Affairs’ John Roskam is running a little dog ‘n’ pony show around the right (word is still out on whether Roskam is pony or dog), and Freedom Boy Tim Wilson made a cute little comment on the push by getting sworn in on a copy of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.
Well, let it run. The whole thing will surely collapse in ignominy in a few months, leaving the Bolts etc to denounce Morrison as yet another leader who has disappointed them, while the corporate sector yells furiously at them for even suggesting more employee rights.
What could go wrong? The cultural left could get could get in the way and simultaneously claim the right to talk about “burning Australia down” or “hatefuck” people they disagreed with, while reserving the right to define other people’s words as “hate speech”. That would turn this into a populist v elites thing, which we’d lose.
But that’s not gonna happen. Right?
Help us keep up the fight
Get Crikey for just $1 a week and support our journalists’ important work of uncovering the hypocrisies that infest our corridors of power.
If you haven’t joined us yet, subscribe today to get your first 12 weeks for $12 and get the journalism you need to navigate the spin.
Peter Fray
Editor-in-chief of Crikey
Leave a comment
Whatever “rights” they claim for themselves they also gift to the mooslums. Should be bags of fun to watch.
The fun to watch was how much the elite left still under estimate the feelings of devoted Christians. Jokes on you guys!
Folau made headings being formally sacked Friday night prior to the election. Shorten tried to tie Morrison’s faith to it. The next morning POW Labor loses and the smug look on all those abc “impartial” tax payer funded presenters is wiped off! Lol rofl.
I can assure you it changed many votes in my church. Many pro asylum seeker votes flipped immediately. While we are a minority now. We feel very strongly about our faith!
Go fund me 700 000 in 2 days. They cancel the account. 2 000 000 in two days! Again a puzzled abc presenter expression.
This stuff is worse than the Chinese government!
NRL say Folau put them in disrepute! WTF!!!
Something like 29 off season charges for domestic violence etc. They make the CFMEU and john Sekta look like girl scout.
As for breaking the contract. How is paraphrasing the bible now a hate crime?
What business has a football team in interfering in a faith post on a unrelated face book page.
Then WTF the other morally challenged corporate with no morals shown from the royal commission otherwise known as the ANZ goes after his WIFE!
All this after elite left said it’s not about your faith it’s about marriage equality in the referendum. So untrue.
He did break his contract. He doesn’t dispute that. That is why he was sacked. That is legal. He is now making a hypocrite of himself because he said he would walk away and he is not walking away. I don’t care what he wrote, but if I break my contract I get fired. Why shouldn’t he?
The religious right should be encouraged to gob off with their puerile ideas and skin deep faith. That way you know just who you’re dealing with.
I don’t anyone is doubting Folau deep faith…except maybe you.
No, quite right. It’s the sincerity of his faith that allows him to overlook the great whacking beam in his eye and condemn the motes in others’.
The religious right should be encouraged to gob off with their puerile ideas and skin deep faith. That way you know just who you’re dealing with.
You switched to the party that delivered SSM in government? No wonder the religious right get their arses kicked so much lately.
What has the NRL to do with his contract with Rugby Australia?
Mind you, none of your other comments make any more sense than this bit of silliness does.
I’d still like to know how much money those who donated the millions of dollars to the millionaire Folau, gave in compensation to the victims of their pedo-shamans. Especially the Australian Christian Lobby (who initially donated $100,000 to Folau) who’s ‘raison-d’etre’ is to work to better their political power base.
Yeah, that’s why Shorten lost the election….. *spinning eye roll*
Couldn’t have put it better myself! I didn’t realise Bias Detector was such a wack job!
Excellent display of faux christianity – 11/10.
It’d be a complete accident, but it would be nice if this results in stripping the hiring discrimination off them. But I suspect it’ll be the one thing they get to keep.
It’d be harder for them to keep it if Folau won his case. A shame that so few saw this as an opportunity for clawing back some employee rights. I understand that the guy is a turd, but it isn’t every day you get a chance to push back against employer rights, with the aid of your enemies. I can’t speak for every queer on the continent, but I would personally let him loudly tell me I am going to hell, to my face, if it meant people can leave work and live their lives without their boss training the Eye of Sauron on them the entire time.
Hell yeah. That’s the thing that saddens me about this whole affair – we can laugh at the right’s hypocrisy, but all the while the left are happily putting up the white flag on one of the key workplace rights issue of our time in order to win a minor culture war and get to call Folau a flog. Big-picture political thinking: who needs that?
An Islamis receptionist might be problematic on national security grounds, but an Islamic receptionist not wanting to shake hands with opposite sex is more relevant to your arguments.
I meant Islamist…
I’ve thought the same thing ever since this footballer thing turned up on our doorstep.
When these loonies yell “religious freedom” they really mean “christian intolerance”, but they can’t frame the argument exactly like that. So, given that there are hundreds of religions out there, and all of them packed with the weird and wonderful, they will be able to plead against any number of religious biases. The sky is the limit, and Guy’s examples are only the beginning. What is a school board get’s stacked with one of the religions who don’t fancy pigs all that much? Bacon is off the tuckshop menu. What if a Scientologist wants to conduct “audits” of fellow employees during their lunch break – forget employee contracts – Religious Freedom Baby. There are thousands of other such examples.
I’m with Guy – this thing has unanticipated consequences smeared all over it. Bring it on.