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Tag Archives: Andrew thorburn

That white man’s dystopia

When one belongs to the dominant group, it is very easy to define other people’s wellbeing as trivial. The ultimate identity politics in the west – that of the white Christian man – becomes invisible because it is “normal.” Other people have accents; we don’t. Other people have cultures; we just live our daily lives. Our needs are the only needs. It takes an effort to see beyond these inner certainties, and some strongly resent being asked to do so.

When a white Christian man experiences a career setback, some portray it as “dystopia.”

Andrew Thorburn abdicated from a leadership role at Essendon Football Club when asked to choose between it and another job. His decision to remain leading a church business has created an outpouring of fear and anger in the conservative punditry, and the social media commentariat.

Over and again disingenuous columnists in News Corp pages asserted that Thorburn was sacked for his “faith” or his membership of the church. Neither is true. Thorburn was offered the choice of which business he wanted to lead, as the two institutions, Essendon now felt, were incompatible.

Chris Kenny took the matter further raging that it is only Christians that are “fair game.” He asserts no conservative Muslim or Hindu would be treated in this way. The honest amongst us know that no conservative (or even liberal) Muslim or Hindu will be offered the position anytime soon. We also know that such a candidate with a leadership position at a conservative religious body would not be contemplated for an instant. The reason Essendon did not consider Thorburn’s other job an impediment is precisely because Christianity is dominant and taken for granted here.

Thorburn mourned that “my personal Christian faith is not tolerated or permitted in the public square.” This is incorrect. As he repeatedly pointed out, he manages to keep the less tolerant beliefs that his faith might dictate utterly private if he holds those views at all. It was the leadership role at a crusading church that provoked the temporary uproar and the choice he was given. Barney Zwartz inadvertently underscored this point. By asking why Dan Andrews can continue to lead Victoria as a Catholic if Thorburn could not lead Essendon, he illustrates what is clear to the rational: it is not the faith but the role that was in conflict.

The News Corp Dog Line howled over and over about how the hypocritical “priests of tolerance” were driving us into an almost Stalinist dystopia. Janet Albrechtson ludicrously thundered they would demand a “clean sweep of practising Catholics” from every institution. Kevin Donnelly sited the authoritarian left’s viciousness in their descent from the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror. Andrew Bolt declaimed that the “‘tolerance’ gestapo” and “‘diversity’ thugs” were damning Christians to Hell. Shannon Deery’s column repeats Victorian Opposition Leader, Matthew Guy, querying whether everyone would be banned from attending the services of their chosen faith. Operatic registers of imagined victimhood spilled over thousands of lines of print.

The ABC’s Ita Buttrose bemoaned that what had been a private matter – one’s faith – was now inescapably public. This is not, in general, the case. Leaders in Australian politics, business and social institutions are still mostly men, still mostly white, still mostly culturally Christian. Nobody comments on their church attendance or mere celebration of Christian festivals. The discussion about their faith arises when they are closely associated with a religious institution that would actively impinge on secular society and the rights of others.

Geraldine Doogue hosted a debate on the topic between the IPA Senior Fellow John Roskam and Dr Leslie Cannold. Roskam repeatedly dwelt on his frustration at liberals forcing social institutions and corporations to deal with politics.

The example that provoked one of these outbursts was telling. Doogue gave an example of some big American corporations choosing to pay for employees to travel to have an abortion because their resident state had banned the procedure. This offer might reflect that it is better economic sense for corporations to help employees end unwanted pregnancies, but it also underlines the crisis that Roskam reduces to “politics.”

Abortion is a life-or-death healthcare matter for those with the capacity to become pregnant. Around 800 people die each day from complications in pregnancy and childbirth, with 20 times as many seriously harmed. Some Republican-dominated American states have maternal mortality rates equivalent to the least safe nations. Doctors in Republican states are being recorded refusing to treat a failing pregnancy for fear of being arrested. Women in America have been monitored for menstrual cycles by “conservative” state officials to catch them pursuing a criminalised abortion. Pregnancy can also cripple an individual’s financial situation.

Access to abortion is not politics; bodily autonomy is at the core of our sense of self and wellbeing. The fact that a safe healthcare procedure has been made into a political weapon by men literally selecting the issue as the galvanising force of their Moral Majority political movement illustrates the manipulation. White supremacists and Men’s Rights activists both attend anti-abortion rallies because they know how effectively removing women’s bodily autonomy restricts women’s freedom and opportunities. It is not surprising that the same states banning abortion in America are beginning to talk about banning contraception. Without control of our reproductive functions, women and AFAB cannot be equal.

Anthony Segaert at Fairfax wrote of his pain at the Thorburn debacle. He knew he sounded foolish when he wrote he fears “could I be next?” He is indeed foolish. If an employee insists on expressing views in their workplace that make colleagues feel unsafe such as “Homosexuals are going to Hell,” they might indeed be censured, whatever their motivation. If they keep such beliefs to appropriate settings, nobody gives a damn.

For LGBTQI people, however, the fears are real. Neo Nazis conducted a protest with Nazi salutes at a park in Moonee Ponds in Melbourne recently. They were intimidating a youth Queer event, signalling their intent to bring the Christian Fascist terror from America to Australia, to drive LGBTQI people back into the closet (at least worst). The American politicians that share their beliefs are trying not only to reverse marriage equality but make homosexuality illegal. For LGBTQI Americans, the question is genuinely becoming “could I be next?”

After the marriage equality vote success, LGBTQI Australians spoke of the simple pleasure of being able to hold their partner’s hand in the street without feeling unwelcome or endangered.

Such trivial everyday actions are taken for granted by men such as Roskam. Other people’s life and death issues are just “identity politics” for them. The gains of the civil rights era and beyond impinge on their right to dictate hegemonic truths and that feels like an assault. Other people asking them to respect different lived experience is an imposition and threat.

A private faith can be succour and guidance, and a blessing. That kind of faith is not a matter for public discussion. It is a disingenuous tool of the culture war practitioners to cry foul, disguising a new more theocratic ideology as that “private faith.”

By preventing discussion of the religious and post-liberal right’s oppressive aims, they intend to muddy debate and allow the creeping threat to grow into the nightmarish situation so many Americans are facing.

We “others” exist, and we demand that our life and death struggles be considered without the usual suspects exploding into outraged expostulation that they are being forced to live in a diversity dystopia.

 

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Do The Saints Keep Losing Because Jesus’ Father Didn’t Marry His Mum…

Look I know that Essendon are the Bombers, but the Saints made a better headline and like the mainstream media I’m more concerned with sounding good than actually conveying accuracy in my headlines.

By the way, I loved the front page that I saw today: CHALMERS OFFENSIVE. I’m presuming that it was meant to be a play on the phrase “charm offensive” even though there’s no suggestion that the Treasurer is launching one. The paper managed to get easy with calling Dr Jim offensive without any link to what they’d written. Where’s “Mad As Hell” to use that one and say just a bit of fun, eh? The actual piece was about how abolishing the Stage 3 tax cuts was going to hit teachers, nurses and tradies. I could write a whole piece about how the Stage 3 tax cuts could be manipulated a bit so that, not only were they fairer, but they could be made less costly without abolishing them entirely. It’s interesting though, because the media is wildly speculating that Labor are “softening us up” for a change and then complaining bitterly about their broken promise… which mightn’t actually happen. Labor may actually mean it when they say that they intend to go ahead with them.

Whatever Labor end up doing, I’d like to suggest that while it’s good to keep promises, reassessing a situation closer to the time is always important. I’m sure that nobody would argue that Barry should keep his promise to drive his mum to church this Sunday even though it means dragging her out of the hospital where she’s on a respirator.

But before I got distracted by the whole tax cut thing, I was going to comment on that poor guy who lost his job because of his religious views, Now, if you read the original version of the Bible you may end up a wee bit confused…

No, not just because it was written in a foreign language…

Was it originally written in Hebrew, Latin or some other language?

Whatever, it certainly wasn’t written in English so there’s a whole range of things that may have been lost in translation.

Anyway, in case you haven’t followed the news, Andrew Thorburn was asked to resign from the job that he’d been given after an extensive search by Andrew himself, after which he concluded that the best person for the job was him. (Yes, yes, shades of Morrison, but stop interrupting and making me lose my train of thought!)

Andrew Thorburn has an impressive track record in the corporate world where he told the Banking Royal Commission that he had no idea what was going on and that dead people were being charged for financial advice that they weren’t receiving. In some cases, this was because they were dead, but as Mr Thorburn believes in life after death, he may not have seen it as a problem… unlike all the problems he acknowledged as problems even though he had no idea they were going on because he was just the CEO, so how could he be expected to know what was happening?

Let’s just pause a minute here and look at the way things are meant to work in a secular, inclusive society according to those outraged by Mr Thorburn’s sacking/resignation:

  • Nobody should exclude anyone from a job on the basis of their religion, unless the body doing the employing is religious itself, in which case they shouldn’t be forced to employ someone who doesn’t adhere to their values.
  • Nobody who’s religious should be excluded from a job based on the position of their religion on certain topics, even if that position is in direct conflict with some of the views of the organisation employing him, her or them.
  • Schools don’t open on Christmas Day, indicating a refusal to celebrate Christmas and all schools should be celebrating Christmas even if the teachers employed there have a religious objection.
  • Australia has the right to insist on certain values and people who don’t adhere to Australian values should go back to where they came from, even if their objection to the value is religious in nature.
  • If the people not adhering to Australian values happen to be non-migrants who are just doing things like calling January 26th Invasion day, then they should be sacked from any job they hold because they don’t appreciate how lucky they are, because if the British hadn’t invaded then it would have been the French and that would have been a bigger problem because most of us don’t speak French.

Peter Dutton thinks that Andrew Thorburn should be re-instated, and not just because Dan Andrews thought that removing him was a good idea. No, it’s like I said: religious institutions have the right to consider religious views when hiring and firing, but nobody else does.

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