John Howard warns against ‘politics of discrimination’ in religious freedom debate
Image: Image: Channel 9 / 60 Minutes.
Former Prime Minister John Howard has said the “politics of discrimination” against LGBTI students has stymied debate on religious freedoms.
Howard slammed the debate on the issue as “maddening” while insisting that schools be allowed to “teach the ethos” of their religious affiliation.
“Nobody wants to expel gay kids and to my knowledge it’s not happening. I mean, this is the greatest red herring imaginable,” Howard told The Australian.
“Surely everybody agrees, of course, you don’t expel gay kids. That’s ridiculous and unfair.”
“[But] a faith-based school should be able to teach the ethos of the school. That’s why people send their children to Jewish schools or Anglican schools or Catholic schools.
“If a teacher tries to undermine that, well, they should be able to let them go.”
In an interview at the National Press Club, Howard also spoke out against the “curse of identity politics” which he described as “an absolute evil thing for rational political debate”, while reiterating his stance against same-sex marriage.
“I think one of the things the Liberal Party should do is more vigorously bang on the head these prescriptions ‘far right’,” he said.
“What’s far right about having a conservative position on a social issue? It’s not far right. It’s just conservative.”
Howard said that the current government should have dealt with the issue of religious freedoms already.
“I think this issue should have been dealt with a year ago. It should have been fixed at the time,” he said.
The former Prime Minister, who instituted a formal ban on same-sex marriage, said the discussion of discrimination around religious freedoms had “become so potent” that it was preventing those involved from reaching a “commonsense solution.”
“If someone is teaching at a Catholic school and they start ridiculing the Catholic religion, well of course the school is entitled to arc up about that.”
As part of his submission to the religious freedom review, Howard said religious schools should be given an affirmative right to discriminate in staffing decisions rather than a “potentially temporary reprieve from dragnet anti-discrimination legislation”
Howard also suggested that schools with mandatory education on sexuality and gender should be stripped of funding.
Parliamentary debate over discrimination against LGBTI students and teachers has been pushed to 2019 after politicians failed to meet the year-end deadline Prime Minister Scott Morrison set for the issue to be resolved.
Further reading: ‘Labor should defend us this time around’: why religious freedom is the new Howard marriage ban‘
You May Also Like
Who would even think of, let alone decide to, send their children to any School run by any religious organisation – be it Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu etc> – or any if the sects connected to any of them?
There have been so many instances of Proven Claims of Pedophile attacks on Boys and Girls, so many Proven instances of Teachers, Priests, Bishops, Archbishops, Brothers, Nuns and Lay people employed by these corrupt organisations who have either participated in Child Sex Abuse or deliberately covered-up that abuse by their mates only the near-brain-dead would risk sending their children to one of their schools.
Sorry to see that even John Howard is again mis-defining the meaning of Conservative. Conservative in the British sense (who’s system we copied) means they strongly support among other things “the family unit in all its forms” and that is why Mr Cameron said in the UK Parliament when putting through SSM “I support this not in spite of being a Conservative but because I’m a Conservative”. Sadly here, some in the Liberal Party are anything but Liberal in their views and confuse real Conservatism with outright ignorance and bigotry. Abetz, Bernardi, Christiansen, Ruddock, Abbott, Feranti-Wells, Hastie, Corman and Cash will never fit the real Conservative definition – they are just ultra-right bigots.
Howard is a dinosaur. He grew up in the forties and fifties. He opposed Asian immigration during the 80’s, he called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, he has no idea at all about the modern world and that’s just the way he likes it.
His culture wars during his Prime Ministership were the start of the reactionary US-style hard right trends we see among the hard edge of today’s Liberal Party. They were a move away from the decent Liberal politics of a Sir Robert Menzies, and which are exemplified in the modern conservative world by the likes of leaders like David Cameron in the UK or John Key in NZ. When Howard was an upcoming dry in the Libs there were many wets too. It’s said by the end of his term in office, all the wets had been drowned.
He’s easily ignored by anyone living in the 21st century.