Don’t be so anti-sects

Once you start beating up on religion – not just a particular faith, but the very idea of religion – it can be hard to stop. Old hatreds and bitterness, and deep-seated anti-religious prejudice, can take a long time to die.

Universities have form when it comes to hostility to religion. But we would normally expect religious schools to stand by — and teach — the doctrines of their faith.

However, recent events show the antagonism is spreading from the university sector to schools, with staff — at both Sydney’s UTS and Strathfield’s Santa Sabina College taking being anti-Christian to a new level as they wield the weapons of sexuality and gender fluidity.

Marriage equality is now long-settled. However, one UTS course coordinator claims the “heated political climate” around the vote demands that Sydney’s UTS “redouble support” for LGBTQI people on campus.

Dr Timothy Laurie refused to use a church as a temporary off-site lecture theatre while major campus reconstruction is carried out.

He decided that even to step inside the building of St Barnabas’ Anglican Church in Broadway to attend lectures was just too toxic for UTS students.

As a result, UTS has ended up showing ‘support’ for LGBTQI students by cancelling their first week of lectures altogether, leaving them dumbfounded by the disruption to their education.

Of course, Dr Laurie’s arbitrary, “supportive” grandstanding flies in the face of UTS’s Equity and Diversity policy which calls for respect for “the culture, language, and religion of others.”

But this prejudiced assumption that any Christian church stands to persecute and vilify all LGBTQI people — including UTS students and staff — also makes a mockery of tolerance; especially since the university had informed staff that all temporary off-site locations met its expectation of respect.

And by extending an invitation to UTS to use its facilities, St Barnabas’ is implicitly extending a welcome to all students and staff regardless of sexuality.

An astute student labelled the lecturer’s vetoing of the venue as “political posturing” but when warriors of diversity, like Dr Laurie, start sniping from the sunlit uplands of their own moral superiority, almost nothing can induce them to disarm and re-join the rest of us.

Of course, they defend themselves by couching their behaviour in the language of vulnerability and fragility, intending to ‘protect’ students who might crack at any moment.

The rise of this therapy culture, fuelled by an anxiety about wellness and the provision of ‘safe’ spaces, thrives on the idea that the ‘vulnerable’ are susceptible to emotional injury.

And in the view of our ‘culture therapists’, it is religion — and Christianity in particular — that inflicts the greatest emotional injury. “Keep the vulnerable away from the church!” they cry.

They don’t stop at attacking the church from the outside. Even from within, the bastions of Christianity must be assaulted and breached.

This explains the fury currently engulfing Santa Sabina College, the Catholic Dominican school in Strathfield, where the principal decided it was time to address gender fluidity.

“Gender is a social process,” declared Maree Herrett who is propounding the controversial concept of gender fluidity as part of the anti-bullying program known as ‘Safe Schools’.

Santa Sabina, founded in 1894, wants its students to live by the Catholic Dominican pillars of prayer, study, community, and service — an explicit commitment to Christian principles.

But there are those determined to force religious teaching and practice to adapt to their own view of the world. For them, religious principles are not acceptable and must be subverted.

At Santa Sabina, the principal sought to introduce gender fluidity to a school that serves a devout Maronite Catholic community. But at other schools, the pressure comes from outside.

Last year, for example, Al-Faisal College, a Muslim school in Sydney, was attacked by secular critics for its strict uniform policy which requires girls to wear the hijab from Year 4.

Yet one reason parents send their kids to faith-based schools is to escape the secular tyranny of ‘tolerance’ which tries to impose theories of gender discrimination and bias on everyone else.

Those who fret about lack of the gender fluidity for their six-year old ought not to send the kid to a Catholic school. And if you want your son to wear a skirt to class, don’t send him to a Muslim school. Simple.

After all, there are plenty of secular schools to choose from — many of them staffed by teachers only too willing to embrace a gender-neutral, one-toilet-for-all vision of society.

One key mark of a truly diverse multicultural society is a healthy tolerance of those who are religious and who want to base their lives on the doctrines and practices of their faith.

It’s time for the anti-religious tyrants of tolerance to lay down the cudgels of correctness and stop trying to beat their therapeutic vision of society into the heads of those who disagree with them.

Peter Kurti is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies