Religious schools at risk of losing right to pursue their faith, by Paul Kelly.
Australia risks falling into an epic change that would gravely jeopardise the ability of religious schools to pursue their mission and uphold their faith, the Morrison government warned yesterday.
This follows Labor’s decision to act unilaterally to protect gay students, with Attorney-General Christian Porter issuing the warning: “Labor’s bill represents radical change because it provides no legislative ability for schools to act in accordance with their beliefs and the tenets of their faith.
“It completely removes the ability of religious educational institutions to maintain their ethos through what they teach and the rules of conduct they impose on students. This is because Labor’s bill would, for the first time, expose religious schools to litigation under the Sex Discrimination Act merely because they impose reasonable rules such as requiring students to attend chapel.” …
Every sign is that the religious schools are broken and prey to radical change. Their will to defend their centuries-old, faith-based teaching mission is compromised by their terror of being labelled homophobic, while their parental communities do not comprehend what is happening.
There is universal agreement that the law allowing schools to remove students because of sex or gender be repealed. That is not the issue, though it is constantly presented as the issue. The real debate is about the remaining protections for religious schools. …
Porter repudiates Labor’s claim that nothing in its bill threatens religious education. “Labor has failed to listen to the genuine concerns of religious educational institutions and their more than one million families in what amounts to a radical approach to such a fundamental overhaul of exemptions that Labor inserted in 2013,” he said.
Could this really be happening? To take a wider perspective, Marxists have always hated Christianity as the main impediment to creating a model society as they saw it. Now they are using gay activists and homosexual rights to gradually marginalize and outlaw Christian teaching.
Jesus Christ was the world’s most influential politician, whose teachings over the last two thousand years moved the world away from the “might is right” politics that existed before. The notions that we are all equal in the eyes of an omnipresent creator, and that this life is but a prelude to another so we’d better act honorably, eventually led to the end of economic and sexual slavery, for instance.
Do the left realize the nature of the Pandora’s box they are opening? Perhaps they take the benefits of the modern world for granted, and think it is OK to carelessly pick at the underpinnings?
hat-tip Stephen Neil
