AUSTRALIA
The Age
Jonathan Holmes
Did you know Fairfax and the ABC are involved in a concerted attack on religious freedom in general, and the Catholic Church in particular? You didn’t? Well, Senator George Brandis thinks you should.
Two weeks ago, the federal Attorney-General delivered a lecture on religious freedom to the Law School of the University of Notre Dame in Sydney. Freedom of religion is too often ignored, he complained, when human rights and freedoms are discussed and defended. He then launched into an extraordinary attack on Fairfax Media and the ABC. It is worth quoting at some length: “In fact, not only has religious freedom been neglected, it has actually been the subject of open attack from those who dominated much of our political discourse, particularly in the national broadcaster and the Fairfax media. Almost invariably, their targets have been the Christian churches, and in particular the Catholic Church, and people of Jewish faith.
“Indeed, so deaf have we become to attacks upon religious liberty, so accepting have we been of the open scorn with which their tenets, their liturgy, their customs, their clergy and their congregations have been derided, that the great Dyson Heydon, delivering the Acton Lecture in April of this year, was moved to describe anti-Catholicism in modern Australia as ‘the racism of the intellectuals’.”
Did Brandis offer his listeners a single example of this onslaught against religious freedom? Did he quote one program on the ABC, or one article in a Fairfax newspaper, that treated Catholic or Jewish tenets, liturgy and congregations with scorn? No, he did not. Not one. Which prompts me to wonder what the hell he was talking about.
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