The Australian Christaliban zombies are lurching out of the graveyards again, spurred by federal Government plans to extend anti-discrimination protection to sexual orientation and gender identity.
They are currently on a high, having consumed the brains of two state Attorneys-General in the last week alone.
The appalling Victorian Liberal Attorney-General Robert “Homosexual male pedophiles … molest hundreds … heterosexual pedophiles molest only a few” Clark has announced he will reverse Labor’s modest reforms of the Equal Opportunities Act.**
While this is regrettable, it will make very little difference for GLBTIQ folk, since we had already been sold out by Labor before the last state election.
Under a deal brokered by former Attorney-General Rob Hulls, ‘faith-based’ hospitals, schools, aged homes, breakfast cereal manufacturers, celebrity-endorsed cults and other businesses, would no longer be able to discriminate on the basis of race, disability, age, physical features, political beliefs or activity, or breastfeeding.
But their right to discriminate against female, gay, bisexual, unmarried, single parent, or transgendered people was allowed to stand, provided they could prove it was against their religion for a single mum to clean their toilets, for example, or a gay man to prune their roses.
This divinely-inspired piece of cowardice from Labor led significant numbers of both gays and religious to take their votes elsewhere, and helped bring Labor down. God moves in mysterious ways.
Clark’s restoration of ‘religious freedom’ has been greeted with jubilation — though quite why people who call themselves Christians are dancing on the altars at regaining the right to discriminate against Aboriginals, seniors, lactating women, amputees and others dear to Jesus isn’t clear.
I’m sure they have a Bible verse or two to cover it.
Meanwhile the equally abysmal NSW Labor Attorney-General John Hatzistergos is busy making a Hulls-type mistake, refusing to strike down a 30-year-old law which allows private schools to abuse same-sex attracted students.
Under this fusty relic, which someone somehow forgot to repeal when homosexuality was legalised, ‘homosexual’ students can be refused a place at a private school, or expelled from one, for no reason other than their sexuality.
Brigadier James Wallace (ret) of the Australian Christian Lobby thinks this is a loving thing to do to a child, “unless the child is prepared to accept that it is chaste, that it is searching for alternatives”.
You just can’t help adore a fine upstanding Christian gentleman cheerfully calling a bullied, vulnerable queer or questioning schoolkid ‘it’, can you? The charity of it fair takes my breath away.
The ACZ are becoming so bold they are even looking for fodder in areas where the pickings are demonstrably slim.
They’re hunting Peter Garrett for trying to partially secularise the schools chaplaincy program, through which schoolchildren are infected with rapture, creationism and other brain-tenderising pathogens.
They can’t be that hungry, surely?
**Hansard
