'Inequality in a dog collar': how the Religious Discrimination Bill hands more power to the powerful

The Religious Discrimination Bill, and the "religious freedom" movement from which it sprang, are not about protecting religion, stopping discrimination or enhancing freedom.

They are about giving power and privilege to those who already have them, at the expense of those who don't.

The Bill overrides existing discrimination law by giving health practitioners, who already have significant power, extra power to withhold their valuable services from those most in need, as long as there's a religious reason for it.

The Bill overrides fair work laws by giving every budding workplace bully free rein to treat their colleagues and customers like dirt, so long as they can frame their ill-treatment of others in terms of a "statement of belief".

The Bill overrides Tasmania's anti-discrimination provision against offensive, humiliating and intimidating language, a law that protects traditionally stigmatised groups - people with disability, LGBTIQ people, racial minorities, single parents - from those powerful members of society who stigmatise them. Meanwhile, the federal Bill leaves in place all the many laws that protect politicians, the powerful and the wealthy from being defamed, offended or insulted.

The Bill will appoint a Religious Freedom Commissioner, despite the Ruddock Panel finding no evidence religious freedom is being violated, and despite there being no sexuality or gender identity commissioner to provide some balance.

False narratives

What is the rationale for punching all these holes in so many of the existing anti-discrimination protections that have protected vulnerable Australians for half a century?

How do proponents of the Government's appalling Bigots' Charter justify granting special legal privileges to religious people and their beliefs that are not available to other people and their beliefs?

And why will Australian churches have a government-appointed and taxpayer-funded defender, apologist and attack dog.

When explaining themselves, the Bill's defenders repeat the name of a wealthy celebrity rugby player, Israel Folau, who had his contract cancelled after he deliberately and repeatedly broke its terms, terms he had agreed to, by damning LGBTIQ people to Hell.

For good measure they throw in the name of a Catholic Archbishop, Julian Porteous, who was asked to attend a conciliation over a booklet he issued suggesting same-sex partners aren't whole people and "mess with kids". When he refused to change even a single word the case against the booklet was dropped.

Of course, most people don't hear these stories as I've told them because supporters of Folau and Porteous spin misleading narratives in which these two men are the helpless, blameless victims of a web of politically correct regulations and secular officials.

But as absurd as this myth-making is, it matters.

If these false narratives are allowed to carry the Religious Discrimination Bill into law, two powerful men who believe they should be above the laws that apply to the rest of us will have caused a multitude to suffer.

Reasserting the power of pastors and prelates

That is the "religious freedom" movement in a nutshell.

Its proponents want you to believe it's about classic Enlightenment freedoms like freedom of religion and free speech.

But it is really about freedom for powerful pastors and prelates, slyly posing as faux victims, to force their views on the rest of us.

Consider those bishops who shouted about their freedoms being curtailed when we have marriage equality. They were the very same bishops who punished and silenced those among the faithful who spoke out in favour of that reform.

Consider the pastors who clamoured for state schools to be free from "transgender ideology". They insisted no-one should interfere with their power to exclusively teach their own brand of "gender complementarity" in their (government-funded) religious schools, and even insisted on their right to teach their ideology in state schools (which the Religious Discrimination Bill gives them).

Consider the conservative "Christian" advocates who frighten their base with tales of litigious homosexuals taking Christian bakers to the cleaners. They now demand those multi-million dollar religious corporations that provide health and aged care have the right to sack any employee or turn away any client who doesn't conform to traditional "Christian sexual ethics".

Consider the attitude of the religious establishment when lone, unaffiliated religious individuals are taken to court for inciting hatred and defend themselves by claiming "religious freedom". The hierarchs and their media cheer squads are silent then.

Powerful religious figures do not care about the principle of "religious freedom". They have no respect for the freedoms of others, religious or otherwise. They only endorse "freedom" insofar as it gives them license to do what they want.

And what they want is for the state to help them reassert their influence over society.

Yes, they say they want they want their rights guaranteed so they are protected from the state interfering in their lives, but what they actually want is to use the power of the state to increase their control over the lives of others.

If they are given the right to discriminate they will use it to re-impose the shame they think should attach to being gay, trans, a single mother, a divorcee, a person with disability, and maybe even an interracial couple.

Invigorated by their success in rolling back discrimination law, and wielding their new power and status, they will seek to punch holes in other important reforms and stop new ones.

They will pull the classic trick of theocrats and authoritarians everywhere; having gained access to status and power through the door marked "freedom and rights" they will slam that door on everyone else.

Freedom for the few

They will be particularly tyrannical towards their own congregations.

Don't be fooled by religious leaders who claim to be acting on behalf of those congregations: "Religious freedom" is for the clerical 1%, not their flocks.

Sure, "religious freedom" and "free speech" are sold to everyday parishioners as being to their benefit.

But the deregulation of faith-based hate only benefits the religious few who decide what doctrine to impose on others, not the many who have neither the means nor desire to stigmatise their fellow citizens.

"Religious freedom" is like tax cuts for billionaires. Very little trickles down.

Instead, it is about the Big End of Church elevating its power over, and enforcing greater doctrinal conformity on, everyday parishioners.

Just ask those many Anglicans asked by Archbishop Glenn Davies to "please leave" the church because they respect LGBTIQ people. So much for their religious freedom.

Clearly, "religious freedom" is about freedom for the few.

Not surprisingly, the "religious freedom" movement is avidly supported by those conservatives and right wing libertarians who see discrimination law as yet another rope thrown over great Gullivers by the Lilliputians of the Left.

U.S. Vice President, Mike Pence, may be much more religious than neo-liberal Australian Senator, James Paterson, but they are as one on religious freedom.

I don't know if libertarian folk think bishops are latter day Ayn Rand heroes, or if they just enjoy handing the powerful more power.

Maybe they see discrimination laws as an expression of "the dangerous delusion" that people are improvable.

Given quite a few conservative clerics share that view, what we may have here is an alliance of convenience: Prelates and pastors uniting with libertarians and conservatives to roll back modern, Enlightenment, post-religious restraints on heartlessness until discrimination law has been replaced by the Ten Commandments.

To see the "religious freedom" movement as widening neo-liberal inequality in a dog collar, is to see how we can defeat it.

All those groups of people who fall foul of traditional religious beliefs and who have been picked off one by one, must knit together in an alliance that is stronger than the apologists for clerical power.

All those people whose dignity and rights have been bulldozed by "religious freedom" must find their voice and speak to their fellow citizens about the damage done in religion's name.

All those people of faith who cannot bear their religion of love being invoked to justify hate must unite across denominational boundaries.

Not least, we must reassert the true and original meaning of those values distorted by the "religious freedom" movement.

I'm talking about when freedom meant freedom from the caprices of the powerful, not for them; when rights meant rights for all, not some; when liberalism meant personal autonomy and social pluralism, so long as there was no harm to others; when protection from discrimination meant ensuring equal opportunities in life for everyone, not restricting those opportunities to the few.

I guess I'm talking about going in search of liberty, equality and fraternity and their origin in the struggle against power and privilege.

The abuses of "freedom", "rights' and "anti-discrimination" by the Religious Discrimination Bill, and by the "religious freedom" movement more broadly, provide us with an opportunity to re-discover what those noble ideas really mean.