Tolerating the Intolerant Grows Harder
I love Australia. I’ve lived here all my life. But in the past decade a few things have had a negative impact on my enjoyment of this beautiful place. Let me list just a few.
- People being stabbed in the name of a religion.
- People being held hostage – same motivation.
- Plans laid to blow people up.
- Fortunes spent each year by governments to keep a lid on zealotry.
- ‘Experts’ telling us people who do these things are mentally unstable, marginalised or poorly educated, even when that is clearly not the case.
- Needing to be ‘alert’ but not ‘alarmed’ to potentially catastrophic threats.
- People who refuse to stand in court.
- Special treatment and dedicated religious amenities for some at public facilities.
- Women shrouded in garments testifying to their status as mere possessions.
- Being called upon to know the difference between a burqa and a niqab, when each is equally offensive.
- Watching a publicly funded broadcaster accept and implicitly endorse arranged and consanguineous marriages.
- Being distressed by bollards sprouting in public places.
- Having to pay extra for everyday food because manufacturers are held to ransom.
- My taxes being given to a specific community to encourage participation in a sport.
- Having my bag and person searched at public events.
- ‘Honour’ killings.
- The unlawful practice of female genital mutilation.
- A welfare system that indulges the practice of polygamy.
- Witnessing the subjugation of women and a veritable Stockholm Syndrome among oppression’s defenders.
- Watching my government fete a minority community, but only one minority community.
- Taxi drivers who decline to carry guide dogs for religious reasons.
- People seeking to advance the secular authority of their religious laws, rather than accepting the law of the land.
- Being told that Islam is basically the same as Christianity when it is the diametric opposite.
- Being told by ‘experts’, especially those seeking further grants, that deradicalisation works when it obviously does not.
I don’t want to accept these things. I don’t want to accept that a small, noisy, discordant minority is changing the way I live, and changing it for the worse. And I particularly will not accept that a concern for women’s rights and being appalled by clerics who call for the death of homosexuals makes me “intolerant” or consumed by bigotry.
Oh, and one last thing: I loathe being smeared with that ridiculous confection “Islamophobia” when I suggest that, as a secular Western society, we should never, ever tolerate the intolerant.
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
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