ACL launches ‘Save our Schools’ campaign to fight for discrimination exemptions

ACL launches ‘Save our Schools’ campaign to fight for discrimination exemptions
Image: Australian Christian Lobby Managing Director Martyn Iles.

The Australian Christian Lobby has launched a campaign to preserve religious schools’ ability to discriminate against LGBTI students and staff called ‘Save our Schools’.

The ACL said they launched ‘Save our Schools’ in response to the Senate inquiry into exemptions to discrimination laws afforded to religious schools.

“It’s critical that the voices of concerned parents are heard over the activists,” said ACL Managing Director Martyn Iles.

“The orchestrated push to shut down freedom for religious schools is ultimately an attack on their Australian way of life.

“Any changes to the Sex Discrimination Act would be based on the lie that religious schools are expelling students simply because they are gay,” Iles said.

“The devil is so often in the detail when it comes to legislation, and the situation is no different here.

“The existing law goes a long way to protecting the integrity of faith-based school communities which so many parents choose for their kids.

“But it is not used to disbar same-sex attracted children. That simply isn’t happening,” he said, ignoring the degree to which the exemptions have been used to instil fear and justify discrimination even if they haven’t often been acted on in a literal sense.

“To erode the freedoms that so many parents hold dear in the education of their children over a lie is untenable. The government should not countenance it.”

The ACL says that ‘Save our Schools’ is designed to give a platform to “parents and grandparents whose voices have been pushed aside in the school freedoms debate” according to their statement.

“They are the people who work hard and make sacrifices to send their children to schools who hold to a religious ethos and biblical principles.”

The ACL’s website encouraged parents, grandparents and even students to sign an open letter to be sent to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has routinely made use of rhetoric similar to the ACL’s in his infamous public comments about trans and gender diverse young people, as well as Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

“Knowing that my school has the legal protection to safeguard its Christian ethos is very important to my family,” reads the form letter students are encouraged to sign.

“Please do not dishonour the sacrifices my parents have made so that I can be part of a Christian school community.”

This new ACL campaign bears striking similarities to a ‘Parental Rights’ campaign launched in August, which saw the far-right lobby group launch a petition against Labor’s proposed banning of conversion therapy.

More recently, Iles hit out at anti-bullying program Project Rockit and the LGBTI Australians behind it.

Though the ACL suggests that religious “counselling” over issues of gender and sexuality does not align with its media portrayals and that anti-LGBTI discrimination does not exist in schools, they continue to fight doggedly for the preservation of legal rights to enact both.

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2 responses to “ACL launches ‘Save our Schools’ campaign to fight for discrimination exemptions”

  1. Some of these “Christians” don’t seem to understand the “love thy neighbour” bit.

    But, if they want to have their rights to discriminate, it’s fine by me, so long as no taxpayer money goes to their schools.

    I, for one, object to subsidising their prejudices.

  2. Wow, I thought ScoMo had zero sense of political timing but trust the ACL to arrive at the last minute ready to make the situation worse.

    The schools involved will, if asked, distance themselves from the ACL’s position. So that’s embarrassing for a start for the ACL. And it’s not making the Liberal Party’s day any better either.

    But the real embarrassment for the ACL is that their entire idea of living within a religious ethos is to bag out the gays. They are essentially saying that the central position of Christianity is that the gays are second class citizens but nobody else has ever been discriminated against by Christians. It simply defies history.

    The grandparents of today’s religious schoolkids attended religious schools at a time when they could exist within the bubble of an ethos. Not only were there no openly gay students or teachers, there were no unmarried pregnant students or teachers, no atheists, no communists, no Aborigines, and if you were Anglican there were likely no Catholic teachers or students and if you were Catholic there were no divorced teachers or parents. That was everyday life at one of your better class of religious schools in the 1950’s.

    Try recreating that now. Even with the existing exemption in the law that the ACL are dying in a ditch over, you’d be sued immediately for discrimination. Yet for the ACL the only “ethos” is “no poofters”. Disgusting for most Australians including a great many Christians.

    Nobody hates like a religious zealot, even if your religion proclaims love and acceptance.