Here is news – the Folau case, which we all have heard so much about, is not a conflict between traditional religious morality, and the new sexual morality of the current regime, but … something else:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/courts-must-go-where-politicians-fear-to-tread/news-story/31e0a00c507be17ab92ff77db7c8e170
“The Folau case is not, then, an attack on religion as it first appears. It is a sectarian dispute¬ between faiths. Clyne’s moral compass points in one direction, Folau’s another. Folau stands by what he believes to be reveale¬d truth and thinks the postmodern cant of diversity and inclusion is mumbo jumbo. Clyne thinks the opposite. One believes the reward for unrepented sin is damnation. For the other it is to be cast into the darkness to dwell among the wretched who will never score a freebie to the Bledisloe Cup or a seat in the Qantas Chairman’s lounge. Once we imagined that the decline in religious¬ affiliation would end the pronounced sectarian divide that governed social¬, political and workplace encounters. Instead, the 6.9 million Australians who declare¬d affiliation to “no religion” in the 2016 census have coalesced into communities of believers with shared moral codes frequently in conflict with established religions.
Like the 12.2 million who declared themselves Christian, only a minority are possesse¬d by evangelical zeal. Most are only passively attached and have no problem rubbing shoulders with the other. Sectarianism has been at its weakest when this live-and-let-live attitude prevailed. Today such decis¬ions are increasingly forced on the courts, where the empire of the law has been -expanded to accommodate them. People seem less able to work through differences. Representative democracy, which in the past could be remarkably good at settlin¬g these things, has grown weaker. Matters¬ of religious freedom, as Scott Morrison is finding, are devilishly difficult to settle in a parliament where passions run high on both sides and seldom obey party lines. How much easier it must seem to hand these matters to judges, who score higher than politicians on the indexes of public trust and are not constrained by the need to retain Higgins or Longman at the next election.
These trends are familiar in the US and Britain and are explored by Jonathan Sumption in this year’s BBC Reith Lectures. Sumption, a retired British Supreme Court justice, points to a growing moral and social absolutism that turns to the law to impose conformity. The courts are also the arena in which the modern fetish for safety is satisfied. Both are present in the Folau case. For his part, Folau appears meekly to accep¬t the fate of Christians across the centur¬ies, a believer in but not of the world led by his own conscience. Persecution gives reason to rejoice since Jesus declared the reviled and persecuted to be blessed. The pressure to impose uniform moral judgment in areas where we once contemplated a diversity of view comes largely from secularists. “We are afraid to let people be guided by their own moral judgments in case they arriv¬e at judgments which we do not agree with,” says Sumption. The censorious instinct¬s of our time are unmatched since the evangelical movement transformed the moral sensibilities of the Victorians. That was the sentiment against which John Stuart Mill was railing in On Liberty, a book often quoted in defence of the right to free speech that has been withdrawn from Folau.
Sumption notes the ability of social media to generate a powerful herd instinct that suppresses not only dissent but also doubt and nuance. “Public and even private solecisms can destroy a person’s career. Advertisers (pressure) editors not to publish controversial pieces and editors can be sacked for persisting … These things have made the pressure to conform far more intense¬ than it ever was in Mill’s day.” Sumption, similar to George Brandis, is a courageous champion of the rights of the bigot with little time for the concept of hate speech. “There is no nonsense that people should not be allowed to spout if they are foolish enough to want to do so,” he says. It has been a while since I have felt compelled to recommend anything produced by my former employer, the BBC. Sumption’s lectures are a shining example of what public broadcasting was supposed to be under the model devised by John Reith, the BBC’s Scottish Presbyterian founder after whom the series is named. It is available as podcasts.”
Yawn, the same old stuff. No, this is not a secular dispute, but a fundamental philosophical one, embodied in a clash of world views. Traditional Christianity is incompatible with the new sexual morality and gender agenda. True, many Christians today are too liberalised and deracinated to care much anymore about almost anything, but a few diehards are dying hard. As well, not all religions intend to bow to the secular Gods of the new morality, and mass immigration is going to be producing some real surprises for the guilt-ridden white liberal new class elites in the future, as they see out the final days of the West, nervously watching from the discomfort of their wheel chairs.