Dave Pellowe
davepellowe.com
The headline to an article on “10 daily” claims, “I have to hide my identity around religious people now.”
The article itself tells a masterfully woven story about how a homosexual, Arab Australian got into an Uber with a Christian Lebanese driver. The driver assumed his passenger shared culturally-typical opposition to homosexual relationships and undefining marriage. Lebanon is 54% Muslim and 40% Christian so it wasn’t a wildly improbable supposition. It’s hard to assume the 6% of other or no religions would all deviate from that cultural norm.
Ignoring the post-modern myth that your sexual feelings and behaviours define your identity assumed as fact by the article, it’s otherwise a long regurgitation of irrational feelings completely devoid of significant facts to support extravagant claims and justify his own implicit bigotry.
The author admits a cross hanging from the rear view mirror was the first thing he noticed – the thing that might divide, rather than things shared. He describes how the driver’s traditional views about marriage made him feel “trapped” and “unsafe” to say he’d been living in a homosexual relationship for seven years – with no explanation of anything the driver actually said or did which was objectively hostile or aggressive. He effortlessly implied the driver might even target his home if he “came out”.
The author claims he felt oppressed in a perceived inability to express his “true” self.
He mocks the claims that Christians feel unable to express their religious views by noting some voices are syndicated in media outlets across the country. Yet his colourful story about allegedly being voiceless is published in a national media website!
He then pejoratively casts the Religious Discrimination Bill as enabling Uber drivers everywhere to “oppress” homosexuals and outrageously sustain free expressions of their own true identity. For the author, it seems impossible to envisage a world where homosexuals and Christians can permit each other to equally express their beliefs and “true” selves. Only one group may reserve that right, and he coincidentally feels it should be his at the cost of the other’s.
Remember, the author was discomforted before any conversation even began by the very symbol of Christianity in the driver’s workplace, a “big wooden cross hanging from the rear-view mirror.”
If there was any actual evidence of oppression I cannot fathom why he would have elected to leave that out of his article, but there’s none mentioned. The author projects his own unwarranted assumptions upon his Christian Arab Uber driver, presuming deprivation of dignity by simple disagreement on the definition of marriage. He dramatically assumes the driver would have debated his “equal citizenship” based on nothing more than debate of traditional sexual ethics.
This is the strategy of LGBTIQAX+ activists: to confuse their incurious audience into seeing hate and bigotry where nothing but a difference of opinion exists. They then weaponise normal emotional responses to such ugly accusations in attempts to deprive the target – Christians – of the very thing they claimed was denied to them: equality, dignity, true identity.
This is not merely an anecdote from a random citizen. The author is the Legal Director at Equality Australia – an outspoken, professional activist with a national platform implementing a preferred vision of social revolution and obviously vested interests in seeing the Religious Discrimination Bill defeated. He is not in the least bit unable to express his “true self” in today’s Australia. His discomfort in the presence of an openly Christian person is more likely to be explained in my opinion as evidence of Christophobia than by his own convenient conclusions.
There is no better strategy to preserve the legal system currently weaponised against Christians than disinformation. That’s why the author’s employer generously self-labels their battle as being over false notions of “equality” rather than promoting punitive censorship of dissenting (Christian) opinions.
The author wants laws to criminalise being “disrespectful”, an incredibly low bar of legal language akin to “offend” and “insult”.
The author would that Christian Uber drivers and all Christians in general never publicly displayed the symbols of their faith and were denied the ability to express their “true” self as long as such expressions disagree with his own beliefs. This suggests to me that he may not want equality of citizens after all, but simply for Christians to get back in the closet, or even better the catacombs.
He ironically describes the statement of a biblical view of marriage as “polite bigotry dressed as religious belief.” I say ironically, because such behaviour is in fact anti-religious bigotry dressed as justified concern.
Given the “progressive” inclination to undefine words to suit their elitist narrative, it bears reminding readers that bigotry is defined as “intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself.”
The bigotry, therefore, isn’t the desire to preserve or protect the natural freedom to express a dissenting opinion, or to actually hold a different opinion, but is the desire to eliminate or criminalise the expression of a dissenting opinion, as the author and his lobby group is openly advocating.
The Religious Discrimination Bill is not intended to censor anyone, but is intended to prevent censorship. The bigots aren’t those Christians daring to dissent from status quo ideas, but those LGBTIQAX+ activists refusing to tolerate Christians who hold a different opinion to themselves.
Don’t let them confuse you. Of course, Christians hold a different opinion to the world’s ideas about marriage. The bigots would have you instead wrongly believe Christians refuse to tolerate different opinions about marriage, when the evidence is clearly abundant that it is Christians having to answer time and again before tribunals for having and expressing a different opinion.
Make no mistake: the creative story about a powerful homosexual man who allegedly felt terrified for his safety and citizenship by an openly Christian, Lebanese Uber driver is camouflaging an actually sinister agenda of intolerance towards anyone who holds different opinions from himself.
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