While Scott Morrison’s religious discrimination bill is designed to propagate a US-derived narrative of victimhood for some of the most powerful institutions and people in the country, in doing so it imports another virus that Morrison and his government may be altogether less keen on.
The hitchhiker is a bill of rights, which Scott Morrison provided the basis for in his otherwise drab speech introducing his religious discrimination bill yesterday (even if he did it unintentionally).
Because Australian right-wingers — mainstream and fringe — import so many of their political tactics, culture wars and conspiracy theories from the US, they tend to forget key differences between our two nations. One of them is the US Bill of Rights.
While the right here regards a bill of rights as some sort of communist plot that would allow unelected, activist judges to prevent Coalition governments from governing as they see fit, in the US the Bill of Rights is cherished on both sides, and venerated by the extreme right, who source their obsession with free speech and gun ownership from it. That they see these rights as only really applying to white Christian right-wingers is just the usual hypocrisy.
But why does Morrison’s bill lead to a bill of rights? He laid out the case when introducing the bill yesterday.
The Commonwealth has a Sex Discrimination Act, a Racial Discrimination Act, a Disability Discrimination Act and an Age Discrimination Act. However, there is no standalone legislation to protect people of religion, or faith, against discrimination … In this age of identity politics where we hear much about how we are identified by our gender, our age, our sexuality, our race, our ethnicity or our level of physical or intellectual ability. These are known as protected attributes, and they should be. We are rightly protected against discrimination in relation to any of these attributes. But Mr Speaker, human beings are more than our physical selves. As human beings, we are also soul and spirit. We are also, importantly, what we believe. For many, this can inform who they are more than anything else. The protection of what we choose to believe in a free society is essential to our freedom.
Those “protected attributes” of course are — except for those who wish to engage in academic debates about social construction of gender, race etc — inherent characteristics people either cannot alter or do not wish to alter, usually derived from genetics, or from life circumstances that cannot be changed.
Religion is fundamentally different. It is not biologically determined or dictated; it is a matter of individual choice. But Morrison and his bill elevate religion to the ranks of those protected attributes which a civilised society must fundamentally protect — or at least pretend to — because people cannot alter them. A socially constructed attribute must be protected in the same way as an attribute created by genetics, or by irreversible accident.
The logic that follows is straightforward. For many people — especially on the right — freedom of speech, freedom from surveillance, freedom from arbitrary power, and a host of other negative rights, inform who they are more than anything else. These fundamental values are closely akin to religious belief — indeed, often confused with them. You heard the man: “human beings are more than our physical selves.” Indeed we are — we are social and political creatures.
And Morrison’s bill sets out not merely to protect the freedom to believe in one socially constructed attribute, but to protect the exercise of that freedom from state or corporate power. While corporations would retain the power to sack someone in relation to their expression of religious belief, professional associations would be prevented from enabling that, and state government laws prohibiting discrimination by religious bodies would be overridden.
Asserting the fundamental importance of a socially constructed attribute, and protecting its expression and its exercise from interference by others, is the basis of a bill of rights that would protect other commonly accepted socially constructed attributes — free speech, free press, privacy, right to due process, right to bodily agency and so on — from government and corporate interference. There is nothing to distinguish freedom of religion from freedom of speech in this argument — and many on the right insist they be held in the same regard.
Without knowing it, Scott Morrison has laid the first stepping stone to a bill of rights, at least in legislated form, rather than in the constitutional form that would properly protect us. Future governments can invoke his precedent and set about protecting other fundamental beliefs.
Australia would do well to have a Bill of Rights instead of a hodgepodge of laws that run foul of each other. Those who oppose a bill of rights are into social injustice. Surprisingly, a number of them are so-called Christians.
Correct Mr Who. We could have constructed our Bill of Rights when we turned republic but PM Howard did a cynical
hatchet,chainsaw, job on that process, setting us back a generation. We can thank the threeversionsfranchises of Abrahamic faiths, (AV0, AV1 and AV2) for the world as it is today. Just remember that science and secularism was born bastard from Christianity, so of the 3 Abrahamic brands, it’s the most progressive and liberal. Just remind the Abrahamics of that.Unfortunately, the more we secularists and scientists remind them of their substantial contribution to evolution which has run its course, and highlight the inanity of faith, the more those with faith dig in. And as their numbers dwindle, they become PVUs – professional victim units. Minorities in a space they feel they created. Dispossessed of control, now the PVUs niggle and annoy. Feel sorry for them.
“… the Bill of Rights is cherished on both sides, and venerated by the extreme right, who source their obsession with free speech and gun ownership from it. That they see these rights as only really applying to white Christian right-wingers is just the usual hypocrisy.”
It may well be hypocrisy, but it goes right back to the origins of the Bill of Rights. The US version was modelled on the English Bill of Rights passed in 1689. The right to bear arms, for example, makes its first appearance in the 1689 Bill. The US version applies to all the ‘people’, whoever they are; that has been the subject of endless arguments attempting to exclude various groups in various ways. The original English version however was explicit. The right to bear arms applied to Protestants. Catholics were excluded. England was a Protestant nation under a Protestant sovereign and anyone else was second class.
So a Bill of Rights that recognises rights only for some is the original model.
Agree yes, he is opening a door but in a really perverted manner. Why? First, because while this purports to be a bill about freedom from discrimination it is actually a bill about freedom to discriminate.
Second rights are historically and philosophically universal, all citizens, all humans and so forth. And the building blocks are rights against power, specifically the state and by extension others with power, such as employers. But in pursuing this nasty populist nonsense, in such a brain dead manner, Scomocchio is setting it up specifically to give a particular group rights, which set out to collide with and override other rights. Now rights by their nature sit in tension with one another in some situations. This is where courts come in. However Scomocchio, no doubt almost unconsciously in step with the totalitarian impulses of the major religions, is a devotee of the “one right to rule them all and in the darkness bind them”.
Perhaps by some wild gyration of dialectics, as people react against its preposterousness, this might get us to a bill of rights but I doubti it. It’s more likely another step away to some sort of bastardised pre-modernity.
The guys who originally put the Jewish religion together were probably smart and well meaning people. They were trying, just as we are today, to explain what is going on and what it all means. They would be quite angry that their work has been prostituted for the benefit of corrupt governments and and an amoral status quo who know full well there isnt a god or heaven or hell except what they create here on earth themselves.
They would be really angry with the fundamentalists. They would say “we did the best we could with the resources we had, but you have ignored all the huge resources in science and philosophy that have been developed since our day and have stuck with our results. Shame on you”. As for Jesus, who had nothing to say on homosexuality, though presumably he was aware of it, he would just kick them out of the temple all over again.
I think BS Iyengar said it far more eloquently:
“As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound.”– B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life