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

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to roll back modern, Enlightenment, post-religious restraints on heartlessness until discrimination law has been replaced by the Ten Commandments.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.