Puritanical left puts new NSW leader Perrottet in pillory. By Janet Albrechtsen.
NSW has a new leader, a smart young man, married, with children, who hails from the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. He is also a Catholic. …
Even before Dominic Perrottet was elected on Tuesday, his religion featured in ABC headlines so everyone understood a “conservative Catholic and father-of-six … will be NSW’s next premier”. Oh my, a family man with six kids? Would five kids warrant this headline? What about four?
Mock concern for religiousness as a partisan cudgel:
The ABC’s 7pm news turned to Jane Caro to tell us Perrottet’s Catholicism is a problem for women. I’m a woman and not a Catholic, and Perrottet is not a problem for me. That is sloppy journalism.
ABC’s AM program on Tuesday presented another dire warning about his religion.
When Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister, ABC headlines didn’t focus on his Catholicism, presumably because staff members were thrilled their secular Messiah had replaced Tony Abbott. It was the same when Joe Biden, another Catholic, became US President.
After Abbott became prime minister in September 2013, the ABC’s The World Today asked: “So how will Mr Abbott’s Catholicism influence his term as prime minister?” Unlike Turnbull’s Catholicism, Abbott’s faith featured in endless ABC musings about keeping religion out of politics. …
Anti-Catholicism was in full swing when The Sydney Morning Herald ran a piece on Monday by Stephanie Dowrick, a self-described social activist and minister, warning readers “within a day, it is possible that NSW, the most progressive state in the federation”, might have a premier with “views that represent the most extreme end of a rigidly male-dominated institutional church”.
Dowrick’s views are shared by many on the left who likely would never stoop to attack a political leader for being a Muslim, Sikh or Buddhist. …
The author’s swingeing attempt to paint Perrottet’s Catholicism and Scott Morrison’s Pentecostal faith as non-mainstream ignores the fact millions of Australians – 61 per cent according to the last census – regard faith and spirituality as important to their lives. Twelve million Australians call themselves Christian and 43 per cent of them are Catholic. Pentecostalism has 644 million followers worldwide and about 500,000 in Australia. …
The mote in the left’s eye (aka projection):
With no sense of irony, Dowrick said: “Fundamentalisms vary greatly. What they have in common, though, is a narrowness of conviction that cannot be challenged by logic, evidence or appeals to reason. In private life, this causes sometimes irredeemable rifts between friends or family members. In public life, it drives attitudes and often policies that may be severely at odds with the central demands of democracy.” And: “Fundamentalist thinking is also highly divisive. The world consists of ‘us’ – and the rest of you. High levels of conformity are demanded; to doubt, self-question, is unwelcome or forbidden.”
I’m not religious so I won’t quote the King James version of the Bible. The World English Bible will do just fine: “You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
The left has little self-awareness of the fundamentalism within its ranks. Shaming an entire race for their alleged white privilege is much weirder than believing in the Bible, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in loving God, your friend, your neighbour, your fellow man and woman as you would yourself.
So transparent. Shame there isn’t a large, taxpayer funded organization to argue for the non-left to the same extent that the ABC promotes the left.
