I’m not a great fan of our tax funded religions in Australia as you might have guessed. I think we are “establishing a religion” if we give money to religions to push their ideology.
But this story: Gay teachers in Catholic schools hide sexuality really brings it into the spotlight just what we’re doing by our “no conditions” tax-system funding of religion.
We are publicly funding organisations that require people to live a lie and pretend to be a different sexuality in order to keep their jobs. This is appalling.
”We set up our house with two bedrooms so if any colleagues came over we could pretend we were just flatmates,”
It seems that being immersed in the catholic system has somewhat altered the language this guy uses “lifestyle”.
”He’s not able to take a day off work if I am sick. He has to be very guarded as to who he reveals his lifestyle to.”
Wow. That’s not like keeping it a secret that you choose to vote for Tony Abbott or prefer dogs over cats – that’s having to keep your entire sexual preference a secret lest you lose your job. I know that a lot of gay people keep their sexual preference kinda quiet with new workplaces because they might not know the people – but they have protection under the law if they received any sort of discrimination or harassment in the workplace. But in the Catholic sector (education/health/finance etc), funded by Australian taxpayers via an enforced tithe, they can freely choose to harass or outright sack you for being gay. That’s on top of the usual Catholic coverups of child abuse via various “pioneering” non-legal means.
Religious freedom is ability to persecute sinners by misusing government funding. From this reddit post.
Catholic hit-list of “sinners”
It’s not just gay people either:
- bisexual people
- transgender people
- unwed mothers
- unwed fathers
- divorcees
- anyone engaging in out of wedlock sex (e.g. essentially the whole adult population)
- atheists
- people of other religions (too many to list here – but let’s say around 2/3 of the people on earth do not share a Christian faith)
So what ANY of the above has to do with your ability to teach maths in a school is beyond me. What someone’s sexual preference has to do with their day to day tasks in any job other than someone writing an auto-biography on a gay person really.. and even then, you could call it fiction and be done with it.
What can you do?
Currently there’s an attempt to replace the state level discrimination laws with a national approach. It’s already come under fire and some wording has been scrapped - so there’s a GetUp campaign to put pressure on ministers to fix the wording in the discrimination laws. I will post up my letter as a separate post.
You can refuse to fund religion (but this doesn’t cut off the billions they get a year via direct govt funding and via tax free concessions) – and if you have kids in a religious school – write to them and bring it up at the P&C meetings that discrimination of this nature is completely unacceptable. If you are involved in Church circles – raise it with them to condemn such discrimination and to write to MPs/Nicola Roxon urging action to remove this from the National discrimination laws.
You can raise awareness of the current shameful discrimination exemptions – as most people don’t know about them and how they’ve already been used to sack pregnant women.
[...] via the Getup – campaign about the anti-discrimination laws. I’ve mentioned it in an earlier post if you want the [...]