Is Equality Possible, or Even Desirable?

Not all equality is equal 

Everyone should have equal access to the legal system, equal work should attract equal pay and everyone’s vote should be counted equally. But should everyone have an equal right to be accommodated in someone else’s home? The Christian Brethren who operate a camp site on Phillip Island were fined because they were reluctant to provide accommodation to the group “Way Out Youth”, whose proposed program was based on the assumption that homosexual sex was natural, normal and healthy, none of which contentions the Christian Brethren believed (see my article in Quadrant, June 2011). The judge in the case, Felicity Hampel, did not believe that the religious exception clauses in the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act which were created for just such a contingency were applicable.[1]

Should equality mean that all foster parents should tell children under their care that homosexual sex is good? This was the proposition put to experienced foster parents Eunice and Owen Johns by the Derby City Council when they applied to be respite foster carers. “We are prepared to love and adopt any child. All we were not willing to do was to tell a small child that the practice of homosexuality was a good thing.”[2] The UK Equality Act 2010 is preventing Jews, Christians, Muslims and many others from adopting or fostering children.

Should equality mean that people with identical educational qualifications have an equal right to be employed by any company or institution? Indeed does anyone have an inherent right to be employed by anyone against the wishes of the employer? This becomes a problem when it is argued that equal formal qualifications means people are equally suitable for a given task. If companies and institutions believed this, interviews would be unnecessary and the successful candidates could be decided by drawing names out of a hat. People are different—their personalities, ethical standards, and their ability or otherwise to fit in with the ethos of the company or institution vary. These matters are all relevant when choosing the best person to fill a vacancy. Government ministers select their staff from people who share their political views. Christians want their school or their hospital or their charitable organisation to be a Christian community and to reflect their love of Jesus to others, and this will be compromised if any of their staff are indifferent to or in opposition to that goal.

Margaret Thornton, professor of law at the Australian National University, explained equality of opportunity in this way: “A simple metaphor to illustrate the point is that of a race where all are treated equally at the starting points, although the outcome is going to depend on the varying ability of the contestants.”[3] It sounds sensible until you think about it. Don’t the differences between people ensure that this can never happen? Even before an employer has read the job applications or begun to interview applicants, they are not equal, just unknown. Yes, the employer may give every applicant a fair hearing, but they will be assessed up or down according to the type of person that he has in mind for the job.

One of the craziest examples is at the moment under serious consideration by Commonwealth parliamentarians. It’s a kind of linguistic equality, the proposal to call friendship marriage. If it goes ahead, dictionaries will have to be reprinted. Marriage, meaning the union between a male and female which has at is heart the potential to produce children, is a vocabulary item in all the world’s languages. No one really regards heterosexual marriage and the relationship of two people of the same sex as identical relationships, so why should the state attempt to make them so? As an item of vocabulary marriage will not convey much more meaning than “relationship”, so people wanting more linguistic specificity would be reduced to using adjectives, producing terms like heterosexual marriage and homosexual marriage.

There seems to be two kinds of equality. One is a kind of symmetric equality in which two people are related equally to a third entity or person. Equal work ought to be rewarded by equal pay by an employer no matter the sex, ethnicity or any other distinguishing feature between the employees. Every vote should be given equal value by the Electoral Commission regardless of the person who dropped it in the ballot box. While this democratic axiom had its origin in ancient Athens, only male citizens could vote; women, non-citizens and slaves were considered inferior and could not. It wasn’t until Jesus came that barriers between people were broken down. Christians believe that because God loves all people and has created them to respond to him that all are important in his sight whatever the differences between them. Paul said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”[4] Christians also believe that God treats everyone impartially, as Peter said, “Pray to the Father who judges men by their actions without the slightest favouritism.”[5] Our legal system seeks to do the same. The philosopher David Stove once remarked, “As an actual force in history, the ideal of equality has its roots in Christian not classic ground.”[6]

Another kind of equality might be called asymmetric equality. This occurs when an individual believes he has an equal right to something that properly belongs to someone else. Into this category fit people who believe they have a right to be accommodated in some person’s house or be employed by some person without that person’s approval. It would also apply to those that believe they have an equal right to have their same-sex relationship defined as marriage even though the term properly and practically universally is applied to people of different sex who have committed themselves to each other. These asymmetric equalities are considered by Christians, Jews and believers in traditional ethics as breaches of the Tenth Commandment (against covetousness) and the Eighth (against theft). Indeed asymmetric equality is not equality at all, but merely unreasonable demands rebadged as an equality issue. 

Secular Equality 

In Rerum Novarum (1891), Pope Leo XIII said: 

There naturally exists among mankind innumerable differences of the most important kind: people differ in capability, in diligence, in health and in strength, and unequal fortune is a necessary result of inequality in condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous … Social and public life can go on by the help of various kinds of capacity and the playing of many parts, and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which peculiarly fits his case. 

Equality is not part of the natural human condition. Every attempt to create it will involve some type of force, as the French Revolution with its slogan “Liberty, equality, fraternity” and the various communist regimes with their goal of distributing the products of human activity equally to all, have illustrated. In fact, attempted coercive equality has been responsible for the greatest mass murders in history. Despite this, equality as a central organising principle of state ideology has been a dream of many ex-communists and secularists for years. People of this stamp are in positions of power in educational institutions, the judiciary and in the intellectual classes of Western democracies. They believe they know what is best for others and gradually they have been introducing their ideas into educational curricula and legislation.

Discrimination was once a good word meaning a superior ability to choose. A discriminating person was a person who was able to accurately assess the worth of things and people. Now discrimination is being painted as wholly bad, never right in any context. To oppose it, states have passed anti-discrimination legislation and appointed equal-opportunity commissioners to enforce it. While this legislation has righted many wrongs, there is much that is unfair in these acts and in their operation. The Victorian Racial and Religious Tolerance Act does not allow truth to be a defence and puts the burden of proof not on the complainant but on the person who is said to have offended. Complainants may unfairly damage the reputations of others and yet suffer no penalty. The Equal Opportunity Commission takes sides by entering the case as an advocate for the complainant.

Christians and others are being punished for their views because, it is said, community standards have changed. And yet the legislation embodying these so-called community standards has generally been enacted with little or no reference to the community. The Victorian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities 2006 didn’t come about as a result of a referendum or an electoral mandate. It was enacted between two elections with George Williams, a well-known rights advocate, heading a specially-selected, unrepresentative consultation committee. The committee was established in April 2005 and reported in December that year. It was a casebook example of how to enforce the will of the few on the many, as the Charter has subsequently demonstrated. James Allan wrote, “Consultation committees of this sort are simply a smoke-screen to give you the answer you already want.”[7] The interpretation of this and other acts has been taken care of as well, because many of the top jobs in the Victorian judiciary have been filled with people of a similar bent, three coming from Liberty Victoria. Suspicion is gradually growing into certainty that there is a bias against persons of faith, especially Christians, among some of the judiciary.

As well, people have very different views of ethics. There is the traditional view held by Christians and a large portion of the community who believe ethics are fixed and do not change with the years. There is the view of progressives that ethics are evolving in some kind of Darwinian way. Professor Patrick Parkinson said, “Sometimes, I wonder whether the only prohibition that still exists in Australian life is the prohibition on discrimination. Most other moral values have gone by the wayside. Certainly anything goes in sexual relationships as long as its consensual …”[8]

Two separate inquiries have recently been conducted into a possible Commonwealth Human Rights Bill. In a submission, the Sydney Anglican Diocese said, “Human Rights are essentially about moral claims and therefore the balancing of human rights (typically abstracted at a high level in charters) is essentially about making moral judgements.”[9] There is no mathematical non-partisan way to balance and weigh one concern against another. The ethical weights given will depend to a large extent on the ethical views of the judges. Lord Camden said: 

The discretion of a judge is the law of tyrants. It is always unknown. It is different in different men. It is casual, and depends upon constitution, temper, passion. In the best it is sometimes caprice; in the worst it is every vice, folly and passion, to which human nature is liable.[10]  

Parliamentarians can be voted out at the next election, but the position of judges is secure. The “equality” that anti-discrimination legislation creates relies on force and is more likely to create hypocrites or martyrs than believers, to harden attitudes rather than to change them and to accentuate the natural divisions in the community rather than to heal them. As Michael Novak writes, “the dream of equality is necessarily coercive. By nature and by nurture, human beings are unique. Each personality is different from any other.”[11]

C.S. Lewis wrote, “I do not think equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill …”[12] All adults should vote, not because the majority is always right, but because it is dangerous to concentrate power in a few hands. It is harder to corrupt thousands of people than a few decision makers. Complete equality under the law is impossible not just because few can afford the huge costs involved but because no judge can ever be completely impartial however hard he or she tries, and some, perhaps without even knowing it, allow their prejudices to intrude into their judgments. Our institutions were created by people who believed in original sin. The separation of powers, the rigorous application of the law to all no matter how powerful or wealthy and the election of governments by democratic vote, attempt to limit the effect of this all-pervasive moral weakness upon our national life.  

Equality’s beneficiaries and victims 

Most people are happy to live and let live. Christians wouldn’t want to work in a gay bar and an atheist presumably wouldn’t want to work as a teacher in a Christian school. Fortunately there are plenty of options and so there is no need for anyone to force themselves into situations where they are not wanted. As Patrick Parkinson notes, there are of course “provocateurs who apply for jobs or seek services from those who disapprove of their lifestyle with the intention of being discriminated against in order to start a court case”.[13] Mark Mullins, a Christian lawyer in Great Britain, was asked in July 2004 to represent a homosexual who was seeking to join his partner under new immigration rules. He referred him to another barrister. Action was then brought against Mullins for discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, he was convicted and could have been deregistered but was a given the lowest possible penalty—a reprimand. It seems that he was deliberately targeted in an attempt to destroy his career.[14]

Peter and Hazelmary Bull, who own a guesthouse at Marazion in Cornwall, were fined £3600 for refusing two male homosexuals, Martin Hall and Steven Preddy, a room with a double bed for the night in September 2008: 

Our double-bed policy was based on our sincere beliefs about marriage. It was applied equally and consistently to unmarried heterosexual couples and homosexual couples, as the judge accepted … We don’t expect everyone to agree with our beliefs, but we do want the freedom to live by our own values under our own roof.[15] 

The couple said that the guesthouse was not only their business but their home. They had to pay for the legal costs while the taxpayer-funded Equality and Human Rights Commission supported the two men. The Bulls, who had been struggling to pay debts, were faced with financial ruin. Although there was no way it could be proved, there is a strong possibility that they were victims of an orchestrated attack. The gay rights group Stonewall had written to the couple criticising their policy a month before Hall and Preddy arrived. The couple denied it was a set-up. Speaking of the men, Duncan Walker from Sumai in Thailand wrote in the Daily Mail Blog on January 19, 2011, “They demand that people accept their lifestyle and choices, yet when it comes to showing tolerance to other people’s beliefs and life choices they show none.”

May Helou, a member of the Executive of the Islamic Council of Victoria, who was employed by the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission to ensure people from Muslim and Arabic communities were aware of their rights under anti-discrimination law and under the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, asked three Muslim converts, Jan Jackson, Malcolm Thomas and Domenyk Eades, to attend a seminar conducted by Daniel Scot, a Christian of Pakistani origin, in March 2002. David Palmer, a minister in the Victorian Presbyterian Church who closely followed events as they unfolded, said, “The intention of the seminar was to inform Christians about core Islamic teaching, including jihad, in the wake of the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center. In effect, three Muslims were sent undercover to report on the proceedings of this seminar on Islam.”[16] Their visit led to the Islamic Council of Victoria launching legal action against Daniel Scot and Danny Nalliah, the pastor of a Pentecostal Group called “Catch the Fire Ministries”.

Section 7(2) of the Victorian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities states that rights should co-exist. In a society as varied as ours, there are multiple options for those seeking accommodation or looking for employment. In the case of Way Out Youth versus the Christian Brethren the rights in question were the right of homosexuals to have a consciousness-raising weekend and the right of the Christian Brethren not to have it occur on their premises.[17] The rights could not co-exist at the Christian Brethren Adventure Camp at Phillip Island. Without denying the Christian Brethren their rights, the Way Out young people could have enjoyed their rights at Koala Park, another Phillip Island camp suggested by the Christian Youth Camp representative, and they did enjoy them at Camp Dewar, run by the YWCA, where they got an alternative booking without any trouble. Despite the judge’s efforts to exaggerate the inconvenience experienced by the Way Out young people, it was not much more than the one we experience when the first shop doesn’t have what we want and we have to go to a second. But Way Out Youth turned this minor inconvenience into a court case and Judge Hampel agreed with practically every argument they advanced. 

Take your pick—equality or freedom 

In The Lessons of History (1971), Will and Ariel Durant, after an exhaustive study of history, concluded: 

Inequality is not only natural, it grows with the complexity of civilisation. Every discovery or invention is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger and the weak relatively weaker … Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn, and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically as in England and in America in the 19th century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality liberty must be sacrificed. 

This is proving to be the case with anti-discrimination legislation throughout the Western world. Even though this legislation usually has exception clauses for religious and other bodies, some judges are finding ways to render them inoperative.

Sometimes evidence supporting freedom of religion is put at a disadvantage. This is done by rejecting expert witnesses submitted by Christian organisations and accepting those of competing organisations. Terry Lane in the Sunday Age[18]speaking of Judge Higgins in the Scot and Nalliah case said, “‘Expert witnesses’ called by the Islamic Council of Victoria are believed and praised by the tribunal for their academic qualifications and expertise. The ‘expert witnesses’ called by the respondents are ridiculed for their mendacity, lack of academic standing and bias.” Judge Hampel in the case against the Christian Brethren rejected the evidence of the expert witness selected by the Christians, and praised Way Out Youth’s expert witness, whose views were similar to the homosexual community’s and presumably the judge’s own views.

Little or no credence is given to Christian organisations when their adherents testify to their beliefs. We have Judge Hampel, for example, telling Christian Brethren witnesses, in opposition to their own statements of faith, what their Christian group believes. Even Gilbert and Sullivan would never have envisaged such a ludicrous scenario, and even Carolyn Evans and Beth Gaze acknowledge that it “is a fraught issue because it requires legislatures or courts to make an assessment of religious practices”.[19] The Ad Hoc Interfaith Committee in a submission to the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission said: 

The state is the servant and guardian, not the master of the communities of allegiance in which free persons express their identity and solidarity with others. Defining what is an acceptable manifestation of a person’s religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance flies in the face Article 18(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.[20] Persons and more particularly communities define their own religion: this is not the role of Governments.[21]  

This sensible policy has been followed in other jurisdictions. In a long-running case in which two homosexuals alleged discrimination when their application to be foster carers was rejected by the Wesley Mission in Sydney, the evidence of the superintendent and the CEO was relied upon to establish that in 2003 the Wesley Mission held that “monogamous heterosexual partnership within marriage is both the norm and the ideal”.[22] A report produced by Chris Sidoti, a former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, for the Commonwealth Attorney-General said that “the state and state institutions are entitled to rely upon what religious believers say are their doctrines, tenets, beliefs and teachings. Indeed they have no option but to do so.”[23]

There has been an attempt to divide religious activities into core and peripheral. Core activities gain the advantage of the exception clauses, peripheral activities don’t. It is argued that it is only necessary that staff who specifically teach religion in Christian schools should be Christian, as if Christianity was something restricted to people’s minds. Christians believe that faith that does not issue in loving action is not Christianity. James 2:14–17 says: 

What good is it if a man claims to have faith but does nothing? Can a faith like that save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed”, but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action is dead. 

All employers, not just Christians, need the right of positive selection. Anglicare Sydney, in a submission to the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission, said they: 

cannot employ at any level, someone who is hostile to or unsupportive of its mission, vision or values … Religious charities such as Anglicare Sydney also maintain the right, provided this is done in good faith, to decide whether some or all of the positions offered by it carry a “faith dimension”.[24] 

It has become clear that many judges and Equal Opportunity Commissions philosophically oppose religious and other exemptions. Helen Szoke, the former Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner in Victoria, believes that the only exemptions should be those that positively promote equality.[25] This has also been the way Judge Hampel has played it. In the Way Out Youth case, the homosexual young people got the benefit of any doubt, real or imagined, that found its way into her mind. For example, she gave a wide interpretation to the phrase “any other detriment” in section 42 (1c) of the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act, construing it to mean the hurt feelings of the Way Out young people when their booking was denied.[26] She even believed that it applied to the apprehension the Way Out young people may have had about rejection of subsequent bookings.[27] If such apprehension existed, it proved to be groundless, but was made to count against the Christian Brethren. Lord Justice Mumby and Justice Beatson barred Eunice and Owen Johns from being foster parents in the United Kingdom because they believed that the right of homosexuals to equality should take precedence over the couple’s right to freedom of religion.

The categorisation of the right to religious freedom as an exemption to the anti-discrimination right has two effects. It puts the right to religious freedom at a disadvantage and gives the impression that it is a special privilege graciously granted by the state rather than a fundamental human right acknowledged as such in international human rights documents—something our Christian ancestors achieved after they had suffered considerable persecution, some of it at the hands of the state. Recent legislative moves by the state to impose its ideology on all its citizens are a move towards totalitarianism and have already in the Western world resulted in punitive measures against Christians.

It is becoming common to accuse Christians of imposing their beliefs on others. Judge Hampel did this in the Way Out case, and Tom Calma, the Race Discrimination Commissioner, said on ABC radio in September 2008, “There is a balance to be struck between the freedom to practise a religion and not pushing those beliefs on the rest of society.” He added there was evidence of a growing fundamentalist religious lobby, in areas such as same-sex relationships, stem-cell research and abortion.[28] His comments were directed at the mainstream Catholic and Protestant churches. Why he called them “fundamentalist” only he can answer, but it puts traditional churches on the same level as mindless bigots and Islamic terrorists. But there was more. Mr Calma and the bureaucrat Conrad Gershevitch began a conference paper with the words, “The compatibility of religious freedom with human rights is the subject of the most comprehensive study ever undertaken in Australia …”[29] Contra the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and various associated covenants to which Australia is a states partner, these two men are not sure whether religious freedom is a human right and whether other human rights can exist if the right to religious freedom is upheld.

The result of the inquiry in relation to which their comments were made was published early in 2011 and titled “2011 Freedom of Religion and Belief”. It was written by Professor Gary Bouma, Professor Desmond Cahill, Dr Hass Dellal and Athalia Zwartz from the Australian Multicultural Commission under the auspices of the Australian Human Rights Commission. It invited submissions from and held consultations with interested individuals and bodies. The report concluded that: 

This research found that many are concerned about freedom of religion and belief and the role of governments and believe that … the greatest threat to freedom of religion comes not from other individuals but from the State [30]…

Legislation was perhaps the biggest issue to emerge during the research process. This was expressed as concern, if not a suspicion, regarding legislation—distrust of and opposition to any legislative change was the strongest sentiment expressed. This opposition was primarily to protect exemptions for religious groups from anti-discrimination legislation.[31]  

The doctrine of separation of church and state means in the eyes of some that Christians should keep out of public debate, but not that the state should keep out of the affairs of the Christian churches and other religious organisations. It is said that the state should have the right to require the church to pay wages to people they don’t want to employ and to force property owners to accommodate guests in their accommodation they don’t want to accommodate. It is reasonable for the state to do this in the buildings it owns and in the organisations it runs—but not in buildings and in organisations run by private citizens for reasons of their own.

Western states are beginning to develop ideologies that they embody in legislation and then attempt to impose upon their citizens. Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter has said, “The idea that the state should not only create a set of meanings, but try to alter the structure of institutions that do not match it, is ultimately destructive of democracy.”[32]

A legal Rubicon was crossed when the Victorian Racial and Religious Tolerance Act rendered truth irrelevant as a defence. Pastor Daniel Scot was taken to court by the Islamic Council of Victoria because the Council objected to much of what Scot taught about Islam in a seminar at Surrey Hills. Pastor Scot was a Pakistani who knew far more about Islam than the three recent Muslim converts who were sent to monitor his seminar, and he backed up what he said by quotations from the Koran and the Hadiths. It was very difficult to find anything untruthful in what he said and the Islamic Council of Victoria chose instead to try to silence him. The Ad Hoc Interfaith Committee said of this legislation, “The cost of such legislation has already been shown through the Victorian experience to be too great, both to free speech and religious expression.”[33] Freedom of speech to mean anything must include the right to offend. Offence and hurt feelings are part of the trials of life for ordinary people and they have learnt to live with them. But now these matters are being brought before judges with the purpose of punishing verbally and financially those deemed to have offended. The Rationalist Society of Australia in a submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission said, “the right to freedom of opinion and expression (Article 19) is threatened and even perhaps infringed by religious vilification laws in some states”. The Australian New Zealand Secular Association wants the Victorian Act repealed and said, “the only sanction against free speech should be where it advocates violence against others”.[34]

Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress filed complaints against Maclean’s magazine with three Canadian Human Rights bodies for publishing eighteen “Islamophobic” articles, one of which was an extract from Mark Steyn’s book America Alone. Elmasry and others claimed to be offended at the negative things said about Islam, although none of them were found to be untrue. Mark Steyn said: 

For me the problem is not the book, the problem for me is Canada, and I will never think of the deranged dominion in quite the same way again. It has made me understand just how easily and incrementally free societies, often for the most fluffy reasons, slip into a kind of soft, beguiling totalitarianism.[35]  

In such a repressive environment people keep their thoughts to themselves. Mark Steyn said, “I’ve grown tired of the number of Canadian members of Parliament who’ve said to me over the best part of a year now, ‘Oh, well of course I fully support you, I’m fully behind you, but I’d just be grateful if you didn’t mention my name in public.’”[36] The Islamic Council’s action failed, so the open support of the politicians was unnecessary.

In Victoria, doctors who believe that abortion is the moral equivalent of murder are required to refer women seeking an abortion to doctors who have no moral objections to it.[37] This is a flagrant abuse of freedom of conscience that ought to have brought assistance from the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. Father Frank Brennan said: 

In my opinion this was the first real test of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities and it failed spectacularly to protect a core non-derogable ICCPR human right … The Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission simplistically dismissed freedom of conscience … We need to do better if faith communities and minorities are to be assured that a Victorian style charter of rights is anything but a piece of legislative window dressing … being perceived as a device for the delivery of a soft left sectarian agenda—a device which will be discarded or misconstrued whenever the rights articulated do not comply with that agenda.[38] 

Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the British Equality and Human Rights Commission, in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph commenting on the disbanding of Catholic adoption agencies because of their refusal to place children with same sex couples, said, “We can’t have a set of rules that apply to one group of people simply because they think it’s right.”[39] But why not? Isn’t this what freedom of conscience is? Isn’t this what celebrating diversity is supposed to mean? Same-sex couples can adopt from state-based agencies, so they are not discriminated against. What we have here is the imposition of an ideology on free citizens that has no rational or evidentiary basis, coupled with penalties that have no purpose other than to punish anyone holding honest contrary views.

Studies have shown that all things being equal, children are more likely to be happy and fulfilled with a heterosexual couple than with any other arrangement. The Australian in October 6, 2007, said: 

The British Office for National Statistics has published a definitive proof that married couples live longer, enjoy better health and can rely on more home care in old age than their divorced, widowed, single and cohabiting peers. Children who live with their married parents are also healthier, and stay in full-time education for longer, whatever their economic background … Children’s risk of long term illness was highest in the care system and in single-parent households. It was lowest in married-couple households. 

No man believes he can do what a woman can do, nor can women do what men can do. Men and women are not equivalent in child procreation and nurture and no legislation can make them so. If these biological realities are ignored, children will suffer.

Mr Phillips also said that “old-time religion” was “incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic multicultural society”.[40] It wasn’t compatible with Soviet communism either, or with any other form of totalitarianism.

It has all been cleverly done. No one would have imagined twenty years ago that secularists could have caused good and bad to legislatively change places. Not only that, Christians and others living by traditional morality can now be punished for doing so.

Of course it will not work. Like the long march to impose atheism in Russia and the removal of Christian missions from Aboriginal communities so that imaginary long-lost Aboriginal paradises could be recreated, this particular ideology will prove disastrous for those most closely enmeshed in its grinding gears, but this won’t be realised by the decision-makers for some time and by then most of the harm will be irreversible.

Today freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech can make little headway against anti-discrimination rights. It is possible however to discriminate against Christians and traditionalists of all varieties. The Bulls running their boarding house in Cornwall said that Christianity had been pushed to the margins of society, and pointed to themselves as exhibit A. There have been and will be plenty of others. Lillian Ladele, a registrar of births, deaths and marriages with the Islington Council in London, was sacked for refusing to perform homosexual partnership ceremonies. She lost her appeal against the decision on December 15, 2009.[41] Patrick Parkinson, Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, said of her: 

No one would have been discriminated against if some accommodation had been made for her beliefs—there were more than enough colleagues who would happily celebrate same-sex partnerships. No one would have suffered for her genuinely held beliefs. She had begun in her occupation at a time when the job did not involve celebrating same-sex partnerships. Yet she was dismissed, and that dismissal was upheld by the Court of Appeal despite Britain’s Human Rights Act.[42]  

Lord Justice Munby and Justice Beatson, who ruled that Eunice and Owen Johns could not be foster parents because of their Christian beliefs, then said, “No one is asserting that Christians—or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims—are not fit and proper persons to foster or adopt. No one is contending for a blanket ban.”[43] Dr Sheila Matthews was sacked as an adoption adviser because her Christian beliefs together with research findings convinced her that children did best with heterosexual parents and that same-sex parenting was “not the best, most healthy environment in which to raise children. The overarching principle is to seek the best interests of the child who has already experienced disadvantage.” It was a surprise to her and many others that the regional employment judge John MacMillan concluded that there was no evidence that she was discriminated against because she was a Christian.[44] It’s hard to follow the judge’s logic. It’s like saying that a man was locked up because he was mentally ill, but not because he was insane.

All of this is causing polarisation in Western societies, with Christians, Jews, Muslims and other ethical conservatives on one side and a group led by a mixed bag of progressives on the other. At the moment the traditionalists have the numbers, but the progressives have the legislation and the judges. Once the secularists started prescribing what Australia’s citizens should believe and interfering in the internal affairs of the Christian churches, confrontation was inevitable. If or when gay marriage becomes law, the situation will reach a new level of mutual distrust. It is likely that Christians will refuse to be married under state law and will marry under ceremonies and according to rules prepared by the various denominations. This will have no economic or any other adverse consequences because in such areas any other type of couple already has parity with married couples. Some married Christians may even seek to see if there is some way their state marriages may be annulled, but, whether they can or not, they may seek to be remarried under church ceremonies and regulations.

Christians are slowly waking up to the fact that tolerance is a thing of the past. In the old days there was no need for an Australian Christian lobby, but now there certainly is. Christians and secularists are putting in contradictory submissions to government inquiries, as secularists are constantly seeking to change the legislative architecture. Christians are facing a determined enemy that is working very hard to remove every trace of the Christian faith from the public square and are seeking to make life difficult for Christian institutions. Since Christians are not going to change their beliefs and their opponents, having seen how easy it is to get legislative acceptance of their views, are likely to be pushing for things even more unacceptable to Christians, the polarisation in our society will only get worse. 

Dr Peter Barclay wrote on the Christian Brethren resort case in the June issue. 

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