GAY TRUTH

The Northern Territory government has released a discussion paper called  Modernisation of the Anti-Discrimination Act  (Sept 2017). It invites comments by 3 December 2017. You can almost get the tone of the paper from the title! After all, who in this fast-changing age could oppose anything called “modernisation”? But there are a number of concerning recommendations and comments made from the law and religion perspective, and there are some real doubts whether the proposals properly reflect religious freedom principles. My colleague  Dr Alex Deagon  from QUT has graciously provided a guest blog post in which he outlines his comments on two major concerns with the proposals to amend the Act. Those who are interested in the interaction of discrimination law and religious freedom should find them very helpful, and may wish to make their own comments in response to the discussion paper. There are other controversial proposals in the paper which may be the subject of future post

Australian parliaments regularly pass laws without sufficient protections for religious freedom . It is common for Australian courts and human rights officials, when having to decide between protecting religious freedom and any other claim, to decline to protect religious freedom. By way of example, Archbishop Porteous of Hobart was subject to an anti-discrimination claim for distributing a booklet explaining traditional Catholic teaching on marriage. Although ultimately discontinued, the court action was not dismissed as trivial or lacking foundation at the outset. And Christian Youth Camps (CYC), owned by the Christian Brethren , was successfully sued for discrimination in Victoria for politely declining a booking of its camping site by an organisation for rural gay and lesbian youth. The CYC declined the booking because it did not wish its premises to be used in the promotion to young people of a view of sexual morality at odds with the Christian Brethren faith. In 2013, a

CANBERRA,  – An Australian court has “reserved judgment” on whether a proposed law to allow “homosexual marriage” in one state is unconstitutional and has decided to wait until five days after it is to come into effect. Currently, federal law specifically bans “homosexual marriage” and a law proposing to allow it in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is scheduled go into effect on Saturday.  The High Court, that has the authority to strike down the law, said it would consider the case again on December 12th. The ruling came yesterday after the federal government told the court in Tuesday’s hearing that a change to the law to expand marriage to include homosexual partnerings is unconstitutional. The block against “homosexual marriage” at the federal level is due to wording placed into the Marriage Act by the Howard government in 2004 that defines marriage as only existing between one man and one woman. In addition, the amendment added wording specifically to exclude homo