Minority fundamentalists threaten the very freedoms they oppose

Equality is the new standard of inclusive justice — and it is being vigorously policed by the ‘minority fundamentalists’ whose battle cry it has become. Falling short by failing to ‘treat people the same’ is tantamount to an egregious secular sin often punished by the courts; where legal sanctions are brought to bear on those who deviate from the nostrums of political correctness.

These new fundamentalists will use any tactic in their playbook to punish those who think differently in their struggle to liberate the ‘oppressed.’ But identifying the ‘oppressed’ can be harder than it looks. Is ‘oppression’ defined in terms of race or gender or sexual orientation? Or religious belief? It can be hard to tell.

Take, for example, advocates of same-sex marriage and gender diversity. When they face criticism from a Christian bishop proclaiming the church’s traditional teaching on marriage and sexuality, diversity warriors resort to vilification and legal action. They’ll try to use the full force of anti-discrimination laws to win ‘justice.’

But they fall strangely silent when confronted by other kinds of criticism. The armory of self-righteousness is discreetly set aside — and calls to storm the barricades of prejudice fall silent — when criticism comes from, say, the president of the Australian National Imams Council Shady Alsuleiman in setting out Islam’s teaching on human sexuality.

This yawning paradox became apparent after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had extended the hand of friendship to Australian Muslim leaders by hosting an iftar dinner to mark the end of the holy season of Ramadan. It was a generous gesture and Sheikh Alsuleiman was on the guest list. But then it turned out that he was also on record proclaiming traditional Islamic teaching about homosexuality.

If, on the one hand, you were a secular, western liberal, you might well describe the teaching as ‘homophobic.” And that’s precisely how the Prime Minister did describe it. “I condemn, I deplore homophobia wherever it is to be found,” said Turnbull, who seemed to think the sheikh was venting his private views. But if you were a faithful and devout Muslim, you’d probably recognize the sheikh’s pronouncement for what it is: traditional Islamic teaching.

This was just the point made by Australia’s Grand Mufti, Dr Ibrahim Mohammed, who came to Alsuleiman’s defence. “That which Sheikh Shady has said regarding homosexuality is simply a conveyance of religious fact,” said Dr Mohammed, “which is known to every practicing person in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.”

Leave to one side the question of whether or not the Grand Mufti is qualified to declaim on Jewish and Christian theology. The point Dr Mohammed was making was both simple and important: Sheik Alsuleiman was not expressing a personal point of view but rather the mainstream position of Islam and sharia. As one commentator remarked, “Telling the sheikh to reject the sharia is like telling a pope to get over the virgin birth.”

Some religions do have puzzling teachings: many Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse all blood products, even to save the life of a child; many Roman Catholics eschew the use of contraceptives, even when condoms reduce the transmission of disease; and many Muslims have religiously-based attitudes to women and marriage, even though they don’t always sit well with mainstream western values.

Religion often marks off its followers from the practices and customs of wider society — precisely one of the reasons why religion can seem so odd to non-believers. “Why would you believe that?” the secular atheist often asks.

Yet in Australia, all religious believers have the right of freedom both to believe and to practice openly what their religion teaches; as long as they do not break the law in doing so. Furthermore, federal and state anti-discrimination laws offer specific protections from discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation and gender. Does that protection not extend to Sheikh Alsuleiman?

The Grand Mufti certainly thinks it does — or ought to. He was quick to turn the anti-discrimination tables on the sheikh’s critics saying they were “igniting fires, dividing our society and spreading hatred” as well as “intellectually terrorising” some Muslims by criticising traditional Islamic teaching.

The original purpose of anti-discrimination legislation was to eradicate racism by making it illegal to preference one person over another on grounds of race. But provisions proscribing these forms of behavior have got out of hand. Now they are also used to inhibit the expression of opinion or disagreement — the most egregious example being s18C of the RDA.

Minority groups have become adept at using anti-discrimination laws to silence dissenting views. Australian Marriage Equality uses them to prevent Christians propounding a traditional view of marriage; and the Grand Mufti has found them an effective way of stifling any questioning or criticism of Islam.

Far from protecting freedoms that we have long taken for granted, the new tactics of identity politics are actually eroding them. The very protections intended to be a buttress against tyranny, in reality, threaten to foster it.

Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. He is the author of The Democratic Deficit: How Minority Fundamentalism Threatens Liberty in Australia published by the CIS.