In Brisbane, an Anglican boy’s private school is refusing to let any of its gay students take their boyfriends to the forthcoming school ball.

The Anglican Church of Australia is legendary for its backwardness, compared to our own, far more convivial, branch of the Anglican Communion. Our own Anglicans first ordained women back in 1976, while it took the fragmented Australian Anglicans until 1993 to get around to doing so. We’ve already had one Anglican female bishop (Dunedin’s Penny Jamieson), and Christchurch looks as if it’s about to select our second, although unlike the US Episcopal Church, we don’t have a female primate/archbishop as yet.

In this country, some Anglican bishops ordain openly lesbian and gay ministers, although we don’t have a gay bishop like Gene Robinson, as yet. In the case of Australian Anglicanism, there tends to be considerable infighting between progressive Melbourne Anglo-Catholic liberals and fundamentalist Sydney “Anglicans” over the issue of LGBT ordination. The inverted commas tend to be because some mainstream Anglicans wish the backward Sydney fundamentalists would stop calling themselves Anglican when they’re unwilling to engage in collegiality with the rest of the communion, or indeed the Anglican Church of Australia as a whole.  Indeed, one Sydney fundamentalist Anglican minister made an extraordinary outburst when openly gay (Anglican) High Court Judge Michael Kirby met with SMH gay journalist David Marr to discuss issues of religious tolerance and male homosexuality. 

Against this polarisation, what about Queensland Anglicans? Unfortunately, I suspect that many of us may remember that former Queensland Anglican Bishop Peter Hollingsworth served as a Howard Governor General until it was disclosed that he had apparently concealed a case of clergy paedophilia against several female children, and consequently, he later resigned from the position.

Unfortunately, too, Queensland’s anti-discrimination laws have an escape clause for religious institutions which are engaged in primary and secondary education, as does that of New South Wales. However, the Queensland Anglican clergy paedophilia case should highlight a warning signal when it comes to granting special privileges and exemptions from compliance with national or provincial/state anti-discrimination laws.

While religious organisations should have freedom of belief, conscience, worship, practice and assembly when it comes to the general tenets of religious freedom and church/state seperation in a pluralist, secularist and multifaith society, and also have the freedom to chose to ordain whoever they want, they must not be regarded as completely exempt from generic citizenship responsibilities, either, including compliance with anti-discrimination laws or other forms of public accountability and transparency legislation. If they are, then predatory individuals may exploit those loopholes and exemptions for their own pernicious objectives.

Back in the seventies, I attended Middleton Grange, a Christchurch-based fundamentalist private school. It was a homophobic hellhole, and yes, Graham Capill was one of the other students there- his dad Don was one of my teachers.  Now, Don was relatively decent in some areas- he certainly believed that anti-Semitism was beyond the pale, to his credit. Unfortunately, life at Middleton Grange taught Graham Capill some poor lessons for later life. As a fundamentalist Christian, he was a supposed moral exemplar, one of the Calvinist elect, and because of that, important lessons of co-existence and inclusion were definitely never learnt from that quarter. 

Eventually, his unchallenged self-perception of moral primacy and absence of accountability led him to make a devastatingly wrong decision when he raped three little girls and was justifiably imprisoned for nine years. So, don’t tell me that somehow being “religious” should exempt conservative Christians from meeting the same standards of accountability, legal liability and personal conduct as the rest of us when it comes to life outside their private enclaves for worship and religious observance. 

 If the aforementioned Queensland Anglican Church boy’s private school fails to teach their male students this, then it is providing a poor basis for the future co-existence of those students with gay male fellow citizens in later life, and in training for civic responsibility when they go out into the wider world. They could start through giving credence to pluralism and co-existence when it comes to the sexual orientation of some of their students, and instituting policies against homophobic bullying if there’s any negative fallout from homophobic dropkicks.

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Courier Mail story:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23545129-952,00.html