Peter Costello has written a fascinating article about Victoria's legal attempt to prohibit religious organizations from acting outside the anti-discrimination legislation.
I'm interested in people's feelings about the issue, and then their considered thoughts.
Here are mine:
1. I'm annoyed at the Victorians for being so liberal.
2. How dare non-Christians mess with the church.
on consideration...
3. Christians will have to send their kids to public schools, a good thing a think.
4. Not cool if churches loose the right to making moral choices concerning their ministers.
5. Costello has a good point about human rights charters being anti-human rights.
6. ???
'Faithful Politics' podcast interview
3 days ago
5 comments:
re point 6: Exactly! It makes absolutely no sense that non-Christians (the ones who are supposedly being discriminated against) would even want to be in a Christian school! I honestly don't understand why they even care!
As to sending kids to public schools, possibly a good thing... but I wouldn't be where I am at the moment (let alone alive) if it wasn't for some very awesome teachers at a Christian School...
The whole thing seems like cheap point scoring against the 'intolerant Christians'... Costello is right:
The human rights industry begins with grand promises and ends up intervening in non-problems. We are led to believe that the purpose of such charters is to stop arbitrary arrests, guarantee a free press and guard against dictatorship. In practice, what does it do? It complicates the life of religious schools and open lawsuits against the churches.
Christian schools exist because the dropout rate of Christian kids from the faith has a lot to do with pumping them full of secular humanism for 30 hours a week and then expecting a 20 minute fluffy Bible talk to undo the damage. A generalisation, but true.
Can you imagine the uproar if any non-Muslim teacher sued a Muslim school for being discriminatory in rejecting their application for employment?
God holds us personally accountable for the education of our children. For many, this means Christian schooling.
Freedom is a myth. This demonstrates what happens when one person's freedom collides with another's.
As a tongue-in-cheek response, I would ask the Victorian Labor Party whether, if it intended to stop Christian schools employing non-Christian teachers on the basis that it is discriminatory, whether it should stop refusing to admit to its membership someone who holds the views of the Liberal Party views on the basis of their political opinion.
Somehow I think they wouldn't want members who don't accord with their own views and beliefs. I don't think that even from a non-Christian point of view the two scenarios are all that different.
touche! ow
Thanks guys. My other thought is Costello is a complicated man.
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