Leftist hatred of Christianity

Christian doctrine as set out by the Aposle Paul in Romans 2 says that Christians should not condemn homosexuals but that God will punish them because they are evildoers. So any influence drawing one into such evil is clearly to be zealously avoided. Deviants are not being condemned, just avoided as an evil influence. Christians should be entitled to obey their Holy book. Freedom of religion is widely respected but not by the Left. Before the Peace of Westphalia, religious wars killed millions. Tolerance of religious ideas avoids that

The peace of Westphalia ended religious wars between nations. Religious tolerance within a nation was slower coming. The big break came with revulsion against the persecutions by the murderous Mary Tudor. Her successor, Elizabeth I, specifically renounced religious consciousness


This is what happens when the self-appointed preachers of tolerance and respect don’t get their way. LGBTQ activists have covered Citipointe Christian College in foul graffiti.

The school, which made national headlines this month for asking parents to agree to a Christian view of sexuality as a condition of enrolment, has been forced to remove signage to prevent further vandalism.

Staff have received a barrage of abuse, including death threats.

‘Be more respectful, or we’ll destroy your property.’

‘Be tolerant like us, or we’ll kill you.’

It’s a hell of an argument against people exercising their religious freedom.

Speaking of argument, everyone knows opponents of the Religious Discrimination Bill are not really trying to stop children being expelled from Christian schools for being gay. We know this because there’s not a single example of it ever happening. Not one.

What opponents of the Religious Discrimination Bill really want to stop is the LGBTQ worldview ever being criticised in a Christian School. We know this because they have said so. Repeatedly.

It is telling that critics of Citipointe Christian College’s enrolment contract were not satisfied when it was rescinded.

That’s because critics were less outraged by the contract than by the Christian worldview that informed the contract; specifically that homosexuality is a sin, and that gender is a fixed biological reality.

What activists really want is for Christians to agree that Christian beliefs on sexuality and gender are wrong. In short, activists are demanding Christians be less Christian.

A gay former Citipointe Christian College student told SBS that ‘language condemning homosexuality was very damaging to himself and other young people’.

It was so damaging that he completed 12 years at the school. And he wasn’t expelled for being gay. He graduated.

But, you know, the ‘language’!

A Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PLAG) spokeswoman said Citipointe Christian College needed to do more than scrap the enrolment contract and remove the principal, they needed to ‘show that they have changed their thinking’.

‘They need to come out publicly stating that there has been an error in their judgment and their thinking, and they agree that they were wrong,’ she said.

Well sure. But why stop there? Perhaps PLAG could do a full audit of Christian doctrines and advise the Citipointe community which ones they should change. Whatever’s left, after the gays and lesbians have redacted the bits and pieces they don’t like, could be called the Bible.

Just days after the Citipointe College contact became public, The Guardian pointed out that Penrith Christian College had a statement of faith that listed homosexuality and transgenderism as ‘not acceptable to God’.

How this is news, I am not quite sure.

There’s an old adage in journalism that news is not a dog biting a man; news is a man biting a dog. Similarly, one would think news is not a Christian school promoting a Christian worldview; news would be a Christian school promoting the LGBTQ worldview.

The Guardian reported breathlessly that Penrith school’s statement of faith is attached to enrolment forms and parents are asked if they have ‘read and understood’ it.

Rationalist Society of Australia president Dr Meredith Doig described the school’s beliefs as ‘appalling’ and warned that ‘schools like Penrith and Citipointe are just the tip of the iceberg’.

‘Their biblically-based anti-LGBTI views will become much more commonly seen if the Religious Discrimination Bill is passed,’ she said.

In other words, Christian views will become much more commonly seen if Christian schools are allowed to freely express their Christian views. This, rather than the imagined gay child expelled by hateful Christian teachers, is the real problem opponents of the Religious Discrimination Bill have.

Psychologist Paul Martin agreed the problem at Citipointe was not just the controversial enrolment contract but that ‘many people in evangelical Christian communities and even in evangelical conservative Protestant families still hold on to outdated beliefs about homosexuality’.

So, Dr Martin believes the problem with many Christians is that they still hold Christian beliefs.

Dr Martin insists that Christianity needs to move with the times, ‘the times’ being a euphemism for ‘fashion’. The problem for Dr Martin is that Christians aren’t trying to be fashionable, they are trying to be true to what they believe is the word of God, which puts their views beyond the times.

The psychologist continued: ‘What has happened at the school is so harmful that it could – for some people – be the trigger for suicidality.’

Speaking of psychology, it would be interesting to study the merits of the ‘change your views to mine, or people will die’ debating tactic. I suspect it is intended to work much the same as the ‘don’t let children be expelled for being gay’ tactic works – as a Trojan horse for banning suddenly unfashionable Christian doctrine altogether.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/02/man-bites-dog/

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"The greater good" as a recipe for Fascism

Every time I hear some middling news reporter parrot ‘for the greater good’ in reference to whatever the next absurd Covid health order is, I am reminded of that famous scene in Hot Fuzz.

A circle of people are discovered in a secret underground lair by the protagonist – torches held beneath their chins and black hoods covering half their faces. They nod at each other chanting ‘the greater good!’ over and over after confessing to murdering half the village to win the coveted ‘Village of the Year’ award. Their addiction to perfection and rules created a superficially idyllic, but ultimately violent hell.

The black comedy is meant to depict a very real ideological horror story where the pursuit of utopia justifies terror.

When civilisation gives up on moral principle and decides to try out ‘moral outcomes’ it leads the government to view individuals as subservient to the collective. Their rights and safety can be ignored so long as the ‘greater good’ is being served. Once the individual is no longer sovereign, any group desire can justify the abuse of rights until citizens become nothing more than depersoned identities. This is the idea that sits at the heart of every collectivist regime and we have seen it quietly gaining popularity within a range of activist movements.

Want to starve a few hundred million people to death? That’s fine, because the regime will survive through their ‘sacrifice’. Want to annihilate an entire race? It has to be done to protect the purity of the collective. Want to reduce an entire nation to slaves? All good. Their misery means that the collective has achieved its promised ‘equality’.

There is no measure to say how much atrocity must be survived before the collective admits failure. Usually, collectivist regimes are overthrown only after shocking levels of violence have been endured.

For thousands of years, Western Civilisation has rejected the ‘greater good’ in favour of individual supremacy. It is only through enshrining the safety and liberty of each member of society – rich or poor – that society has flourished. Respecting the individual, by proxy, creates respect for society at large. While it is not a perfect solution, it has proven enticing enough that people run from collectivist regimes toward the safety of Western democracy. Even liberty’s critics must admit that whatever is going on here is desirable when compared to alternative systems.

Human beings have a general understanding that life isn’t fair. It is, after all, the basis of evolution and the foundation of necessary competition. What humans require is confirmation that life’s rules have some kind of justice to them. Collectivism is a betrayal of this basic need, which is why it facilitates enormous harm no matter what sort of ‘collective’ is being serviced.

The Age of Covid is increasingly being referred to as ‘medical fascism’ because it embraced collectivist thinking.

All manner of civil abuses were permitted in pursuit of puritanical health orders while the messaging put out by the government was fundamentally collectivist. ‘Do this to save others.’ ‘You’re selfish if you refuse vaccination.’ ‘We’re all in this together.’ Their Covid mandates were equally skewed in favour of the collective. Segregation, state-sanctioned discrimination, stalking apps, vaccine passports, state vaccine employment policies – all of these things violated what Australians understood to be their individual rights. This abuse against the population was rationalised by premiers and Chief Health Officers insisting that it was ‘necessary’ to protect Australia as a whole.

Not only was this claim always demonstrably false – it ran contrary to every law and ethical obligation that the Australian nation was built on.

The government’s only role in a respiratory pandemic (where it was known almost immediately that the spread could not be contained) was to offer medical intervention for those that wanted it and to funnel public resources into offering protective equipment and necessary aid.

While organisations like the World Economic Forum were off brainwashing our leaders into collectivist responses at their yearly pandemic simulation events – this is not the reason Australia wound up as a medical fascist state.

At the outset, all levels of the Australian government made the crucial political error of assuming personal responsibility for the pandemic. They came out and promised that they could ‘keep Australians safe’ – hoping, no doubt, that their pledge to protect would translate into a winning election strategy.

Predictably and dangerously, this made government actively responsible for the progress of Covid.

As the virus did what it was always going to do – work its way through society in waves – governments saw increasing cases as a reflection on their performance. Public backlash blamed the government for the spread of the virus instead of the understanding that it was an unavoidable biological reality. This is the fault of the government for inviting the comparison.

In order for governments to protect themselves from public backlash, they drafted and implemented ever-more tyrannical health orders to bring the pandemic (and their reputation) under control.

Suddenly, the rights of citizens to make informed and free choices about their health were treated as ‘selfish acts’ by a government desperate to enforce mass compliance to their public health plans. Any form of contrary debate or conversation that challenged the ‘science’ sprouted by the Department of Health had to be erased – not discussed.

There was nothing scientific about how Covid unfolded. Australia played host to a landscape of dogma and entry-level propaganda that manipulated public responses. Society was dangerously incited to hate dissenters to the point where actual harm was caused not only by police, but by members of the public.

The government’s desperation to protect itself in the face of an uncontrollable crisis is how we ended up with civil liberty being defined as ‘terrorism’.

What is less clear is why the media, tasked with holding governments to account, decided to assist in the erosion of civil rights. Generally speaking, it seems that this was done willingly by a class of journalists terrified into collectivist behaviour by personal fear. They believed the propaganda put out by their publications and were happy to silence the public, hide information, mislead, and outright lie about protesters.

Truth has a way of surviving. With every week that passes, the narrative peddled by the government sheds more armour. It is becoming easy to hurl pitchforks into the open policy wounds and watch ministers relinquish their unlawful control one health mandate at a time.

This collapse of Covid will probably result in the return of our liberties (eventually), but it is doubtful that the wider public will recognise the dangers of collectivist thinking and how easily they were led into supporting ruthless authority.

The unvaccinated, and those that were coerced into vaccination, will remember what it felt like to watch family and lifelong friends turn on them overnight to the point that they were perfectly happy to report them to government authorities. Strangers assaulted people over masks and lamented on social media that police didn’t shoot Freedom protesters with real bullets. Many continue to cheer premiers like Mark McGowan for using sick children to emotionally bully their parents, and how many rejoiced in the sacking of unvaccinated colleagues or sneered at those left standing outside businesses with a big red ‘X’ on their phones? We fell so far as a civilisation that we allowed pharmaceutical companies to endanger children to make adults ‘feel safe’ while denying them access to a normal education and social life.

As with every collectivist regime in history, most of the terror was perpetuated by ordinary people against each other.

Australians lost their humanity during Covid after being led easily astray by fear. If we fail to acknowledge this failure in ourselves, it will happen again. The climate change cult is already moving in to replace Covid with the same collectivist message. ‘We’re all in this together.’ ‘Individuals have to make sacrifices to save the planet.’ On and on it goes. The poor will freeze in their homes. Millions will starve. Citizens will own nothing while the rich collect more super yachts. The fear of apocalypse will be used to justify the removal of rights and this time the pandemic of fear won’t end because there is no apocalypse. It is a dateless bargain with a global collective.

In serving ‘the greater good’, you are constructing a grander evil. One that, once established, will become inescapable.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/02/the-greater-good-or-a-grander-evil/

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Pandering to grievances threatens justice

Bumbling PM

Two big challenges face parliamentary workplaces. First, those little fiefdoms of MPs that have operated as the wild west, with few rules and no clear lines of accountability, need to change. Immediately. Parliament must be brought into the real world to protect staff from workplace misbehaviour. The Jenkins review into parliamentary culture, instigated by Scott Morrison, is an important part of that reckoning.

The second, related challenge is how to avoid a crazy pendulum swing. Parliament risks moving from one wild west to another if due process and other principles of basic fairness are discarded when dealing with allegations of wrongdoing in the workplace.

It is a dark omen, then, that the Prime Minister chose to throw the most fundamental principles under the bus on Tuesday in his public statement acknowledging the trauma caused by bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault in political offices.

Speaking on Tuesday about the allegation by former Liberal staff member Brittany Higgins last year that she had been raped in a parliamentary office, Morrison said: “I am sorry. We are sorry. I am sorry to Ms Higgins for the terrible things that took place here … the place that should have been a place for safety and contribution turned out to be a nightmare.”

Higgins made an allegation. A very serious one. But an allegation that will be, and should be, tested in the ACT Supreme Court in June given that the accused has denied raping Higgins, or any sexual intercourse between them.

The more serious the allegation, the more important it is that we abide by principles that underpin our justice system, including the presumption of innocence until proven guilty by court of law.

How can an accused be assured of a fair trial when the Prime Minister has publicly prejudged the guilt of the accused?

Only after grave criticisms to that effect by senior silks, and the accused’s lawyers, did Morrison try to argue that his statement was “by no means a reflection on the matters before a court”. But surely the damage was done.

Some context reveals how Morrison carelessly swerves from one position to another to suit the politics of the day. First, Morrison made a hash of the situation early on when he said he understood the importance of the rape allegation after speaking to his wife and considering his daughters.

From that clumsy position, Morrison chose a politically cynical one by siding with Higgins so comprehensively that the accused’s right to a fair trial is now in question.

Whoever drafted that Tuesday statement has determinedly pushed the workplace pendulum to a different version of wild west where untested allegations are presumed to be true, with not a scintilla of concern for the accused’s rights.

Rather than throw principles under the bus of politics, the Prime Minister could have said: “These are very serious allegations that a court of law must resolve. I cannot comment on a case that is before the courts. To do so could possibly prejudice the outcome. Our justice system must be respected; it is what protects us from injustice. Rest assured that, beyond this unresolved case, we are committed to making parliament safe for women, setting up careful and fair processes for those making allegations and for those who stand accused of workplace misbehaviour.”

Instead, the Morrison government appears to be signalling a new order where federal parliament will follow corporate Australia. If so, we will get a bum steer because companies, especially the biggest ones, are rife with misguided practices to regulate workplace behaviour.

Indeed, I am routinely swamped with growing concerns from people at all levels inside companies who are too afraid to speak out about dreadful prac­tices of HR departments. Many are too afraid to expose the malign influence of HR executives as powerful and capricious arbiters of culture, where mere allegation is enough to end careers. Too afraid to point out how easily HR departments can bully a chief executive, board and employees alike.

“Human resources” doesn’t get to the heart of what these depart­ments do now. They have become corporate police departments armed with vaguely drafted internal codes of conduct to enforce, often capriciously, their version of morality.

Many of these departments are staffed overwhelmingly by women. Those who propagate diversity are the least diverse. They are the only corporate groups immune from gender quotas but paradoxically might benefit most from different perspectives, the best kind of diversity.

What increasingly happens in workplaces across Australia is a far cry from best practice when regulating workplace behaviour. For example, nowadays it is common practice for corporate employees to store away, with written notes, a few allegations of bullying or sexual harassment against a boss or co-worker in case of need.

Overlooked for promotion? Pull out the bullying allegation against the successful candidate, anonymously if necessary. Having difficult conversations with your boss about performance? On the way out? Time to re-heat the old sexual harassment allegation – this will, at minimum, delay matters, and maybe even secure a big payout.

Some will object that this is far-fetched, that it is so stressful to make allegations of harassment or bullying no one would ever do it unless it were true, particularly if the allegation is sexual. Hence, HR departments have joined the chorus saying we must believe a woman who makes an allegation.

This is nonsense to those with real experiences of what is happening inside workplaces, and to anyone who understands that human nature is messy and imperfect. People can and frequently do make false allegations of harassment and bullying.

Importantly, each bogus accusation steals power, time and energy that should be devoted to genuine claims of workplace bullying, harassment and discrimination. Instead workplace safety has become a game.

HR departments have enabled this poisonous war inside corporations and benefited enormously from them. The growing tide of claims are the equivalent of an annuity stream for HR executives, their raison d’etre, their reward and reason for bosses to become dependent on them. And so, HR departments feed these internal wars by promulgating ever more virtuous, yet ever more ambiguous and uncertain codes of conduct prescribing employee conduct and founding employee complaints.

Like the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, HR departments stride around corporations on guard for infractions that feed their power. No longer limited to complaints about bullying or harassment, the new rules have enabled a modern-day Stasi to jot down notes about staff members in all matter of moral and political conduct. Policing swearing, off-colour jokes or risque comments has given way to enforcing the puritanical standards of inner-city liberals on matters such as race, sex, gender and occasionally politics.

If federal parliament follows in these footsteps, a different, equally rotten kind of wild west will take hold.

Best practice dictates that clear, transparent and final consequences flow from any disciplinary process. Here again, corporate Australia is a lousy role model. The latest wheeze by HR departments and their lawyers is to deliberately refrain from giving unambiguous advice about the impact of disciplinary proceedings on prospects of promotion or to lie about it.

In a world short of talent, HR departments often tell their chief executives and boards to keep a one-way option on a worker who has been disciplined. To keep them, at least in the short term, an employee might be told that if they reform their ways, serve their time and keep their nose clean for a set period, the disciplinary infraction won’t be relevant when promotion is considered.

Simultaneously, HR departments are telling their bosses that even after having served their time, errant employees can be punished again by denying promotion if “community expectations” have changed. Just look at what Cricket Australia did to Tim Paine. In other words, the employee can be punished again for the original offence, having been misled into staying with an employer by a promise their offence will eventually be spent. HR departments, chief executives and boards apparently seem to think this kind of dishonesty and deception is clever.

Getting rid of self-appointed and freely roving morality police in HR departments will not of itself cure the dire state of Australian workplaces, but it will go a long way. Cui bono – who benefits – is a good rule of thumb. Get rid of the beneficiaries of the war and the war will at minimum become less bloody.

There is no question that federal parliament needs a safer, more accountable workplace culture. But it must be done carefully, with a sense of proportion, and respect for our most basic principles. By following corporate Australia and treating an accusation as evidence of guilt, Morrison is taking the parliament, and the country, down the wrong path.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/hr-morality-police-wont-make-parliament-safer/news-story/644b4ee402ff7a927d61a889418987b6

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Gender controversy embroils Australian Girl Guides as sacked CEO warns of ‘cancel culture‘

A sacked Girl Guides executive has blasted the organisation’s “cancel culture’’ for opening membership to anyone identifying as a girl or woman.

Karyn Lisignoli was dumped just days into her new job as chief executive of Girl Guides Western Australia after seeking legal ­advice on changing the membership rules to “biological females”.

Her dismissal spotlights the tension between freedom of speech and the legal obligations to protect transgender Australians from discrimination.

The Guides’ decision to let members self-identify as female could also set a precedent for ­enrolment at single-sex schools, following the Morrison government’s botched attempt to change discrimination laws this week.

The Girl Guides WA constitution defines a girl as “any person under the age of 18 years who lives their life as female”, and a woman as “any person aged 18 years or older who lives their life as female”.

The wording alarmed Ms Lisignoli, who used Twitter to message women’s rights lawyer Katherine Deves, the head of Save Women’s Sport Australia, to seek legal advice.

“I’ve noticed our constitution panders to this ideology,’’ Ms Lisignoli wrote, in reference to Ms Deves’ tweet about the UK ­Supreme Court ruling against gender-neutral passports in December. “Can I DM (direct message) you to find the legal standing on this? If we change it back to biological female are we breaking the law?”

An LGBTI+ website, OUTinPerth, noticed the tweet and published an online article exposing the new chief executive’s criticism.

The next day, Ms Lisignoli was given her marching orders in a ­letter from Girl Guides WA chairwoman Yvonne Power, who terminated her employment because the tweet had “exposed the organisation to serious reputational risk’’.

“Your conduct has caused a ­serious and imminent risk to the reputation of the organisation,’’ said the letter, dated December 18.

“You made external statements that undermine the policy of the organisation and were made without due consideration of our governance structure.

“We consider that your actions constitute serious misconduct warranting summary dismissal.’’

Speaking for the first time about her dismissal, Ms Lisignoli said she was seeking legal advice because she worried about the safety implications of girls sharing tents with men or boys identifying as female. She insists the definition of girls and women used in the Girl Guides WA constitution is “ideology not biology”.

“This is a classic case of cancel culture,” she said on Friday. ­“Inclusion has been taken too far.

“If we include trans girls who are biological males, they can go to mixed-sex school camps.

“There is a reason why there are certain situations in which we say men can’t be present. Do parents know when they send their nervous and shy 12-year-old girl to Girl Guides that she might be camping in a tent with a biological boy of the age of 15? They might identify as a girl but they are a biological boy.’’

Ms Lisignoli said the inclusion of transgender members, staff and volunteers was causing problems for Girl Guides in Britain.

Girlguiding UK revealed last November that it was investigating Instagram photos of a transgender Girl Guide leader dressed as a dominatrix and wielding what appeared to be a fake assault rifle.

Girl Guides WA is the only state or territory branch to give a definition of girls or women in its constitution.

But the national headquarters has drawn up guidelines on ­inclusion and gender diversity, which state that “an individual is to be considered the final authority on their own gender identity’’.

They state that “the girl will participate in the same activities as all other youth members of your unit”.

“This includes sleeping in the same area as the other youth members,’’ the guidelines say.

Denying transgender people access to bathrooms is a form of discrimination, the guidelines state.

But if a girl transitions to ­become a boy, they must quit Girl Guides.

“As an all-female organisation, (Girl Guides) are no longer the right place for members who have transitioned to male,’’ the guidelines state.

Girl Guides Australia chief commissioner Rosemary Derwin said the guidelines had been drawn up to comply with state and territory anti-discrimination laws in 2018.

“There was never a push from the transgender community telling us to do that,’’ she said. “Girls and women who identify and live in the community as female are welcomed in our organisation.’’

Ms Derwin said she did not know how many transgender children or adults belonged to the organisation.

“We don’t ask parents: is your daughter a transgender girl or a biological girl, as that would be discriminatory in itself,’’ she said. “All people are treated equally and with mutual respect regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. If a transgender girl goes to school as a girl, and her friends go to Guides, it’s important they can come too, otherwise it’s discriminatory.”

Ms Derwin said the Guides’ policy on gender had been publicly available before Ms Lisignoli took the job as chief executive.

“I think a CEO who comes into an organisation and is fundamentally against your membership ­criteria, that’s a little bit challenging,’’ she said.

Ms Deves said Ms Lisignoli’s dismissal showed the difficulties of harmonising a range of rights and freedoms.

“It seems to me that the former CEO gave primacy to the precautionary approach to young girls’ safety. That was certainly an approach reasonably open to her, for which I don’t think she can be properly criticised,” Ms Deves said.

A Girl Guides WA spokeswoman said the organisation stood by its commitment to providing a “respectful, open, and safe environment where all people are treated equitably and with mutual respect regardless of their background, ethnicity, culture, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or level of ability”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/gender-controversy-embroils-girl-guides-as-sacked-ceo-warns-of-cancel-culture/news-story/7966eeac265b10e88b52a1f41ecedf7c

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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