Election '07: What's in it for secular democracy?

You will be aware by now that a federal election has been called for November 24th--an election anticipated with a faint whiff of hope by those of us on the latte left, and undoubtedly with dread by those on the Nescafe right. (A recent poll indicates that Labor has an eighteen-point start on the Coalition.)

Now, the reasons for voting out the Coalition government are manifold: Workchoices, the underfunding of public education, teacher-bashing, material support for the Burmese military junta's repression of pro-democracy groups, homophobic marriage laws (and opposition to civil partnership legislation), its disgusting treatment of asylum seekers, its equally disgusting policy on African refugees, the politicisation of the public service, the injustices meted out to David Hicks and Mohammed Haneef, the AWB scandal, and the intimidation and attempted silencing of its critics. By no means is that list exhaustive--I'm sure you can think of more reasons.Actually, I can. There can be no doubt that the Howard years have been--to say the least--detrimental to the health of liberal democracy in Australia. And one the main vehicles of the Howard Government's assault on liberal democracy has been its alliance with the religious right--modelled, surely, on a similar alliance between the GOP and the (Christian) religious right in the US that, until the 2006 Congressional elections, proved to be a successful formula. The alliance has manifested itself overtly at times: Government figures falling over themselves to address megachurch congregations and endorse Christian Right initiatives like the National Day of Thanksgiving. (Sadly, Labor figures have also jumped on the bandwagon.) At other times, the religion-baiting has been more subtle: witness the "values debate" regarding public schools, for instance, or the school chaplaincy programme. Furthermore, the Howard Government has not been above backroom deals with sects at the more extreme and ultraconservative ends of the Catholic and Protestant spectra: Opus Dei and the Exclusive Brethren.

Surely, for the secularist, there can be no question regarding who not to vote for on November 24th. But how secular-friendly--and therefore how democracy-friendly--are some of the other parties?

Labor: On various issues--most notably the 2004 Federal ban on same-sex marriage--Labor has marched in lockstep with the Howard Government, and has been--probably for reasons of political expediency (though Labor still got its arse handed to it on a plate in the 2004 election)--equally keen to kowtow to Christian fundamentalists. Kevin Rudd, however, has sought to reposition, or perhaps re-emphasise Labor as a party of the religious left: his Monthly article "Faith and Politics", besides marking his own entrance onto the main stage of the Australian political scene, brilliantly undermined the dominance of conservative voices in Australian Christianity by reminding Christians of the social-justice traditions of their faith. (And in retrospect, his appearance at the Australian Christian Lobby's Fundython in August probably needs to be seen in that light.) If The Australian's Paul Kelly is to be believed, a Rudd Labour government--given the willingness of its leader to wear his Christianity on his sleeve--does not bode well for secularism in Australia. But I don't know. I daresay that, on the whole, the religious left is certainly more secular-friendly than the religious right--despite the boneheaded remarks of Jim Wallis--and Rudd's brand of religio-politics would surely be an improvement over the Howard model (and a damn sight more cerebral).

The Greens . . . well, it is difficult to find much on the Greens wrt secularism, and that is probably a good sign. They are strongly in favour of abortion rights, stem cell research, and LGBT rights, for starters, and as a consequence have found themselves the subject of attacks by the Christian Democratic Party, Family First , the Catholic magazine AD2000, Sydney Anglicans and the Exclusive Brethren. Their education policies in particular are--on the whole--sensible and fair, but I'm especially impressed by their call to "extend to private schools the anti-discrimination measures that apply in public schools." Two thumbs up.

The Australian Democrats: Of the "major" minor parties, the Australian Democrats stand alone in openly advocating the separation of church and state. They have also called for a Bill of Rights. Therefore: three thumbs up, since on many other issues that have some bearing on secularism or the relationship between religion and politics, their policies are very similar to the Greens'.

Family First: Erm . . . how did they get in there?

One Nation: What the hey?

I should also give a shout-out to the Secular Party of Australia, which will be running for Senate election in the upcoming election.



Fun fact: A 2006 study found that "Less than half Australia’s young people say they believe in a god, and many believe there is little truth in religion." Read more!

The Myth of church-state separation in Australia

National Day of Secularism
May the 26th

“The Myth of church-state separation.” Google that phrase, and you invariably come up with historical revisionist articles claiming that America’s Founding Fathers were strict Biblical literalists who intended the US to be a Christian Nation ™. That’s because, however devoutly the American Christian Taliban wish it to be otherwise, the First Amendment has repeatedly been interpreted to have established a “wall of separation” between church and state. Probably the most significant legal ruling to be based on such an interpretation was Kitzmiller v. Dover.

In Australia, many of us take it for granted that a similar wall of separation exists in our democracy. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t.

In a 2005 issue of Australian Humanist, Max Wallace points out that there are only two places in the Australian Constitution in which religion is mentioned—in the Preamble and in section 116:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

As Wallace’s article demonstrates, High Court judges and constitutional law experts alike have been unanimous in insisting that a notion of church-state separation cannot be inferred from the wording of section 116, much less from anywhere else in the Constitution. This interpretation was crucial in the 1981 Defence of Government Schools case, in which the Federal Government’s funding of church schools was challenged.

Justice Sir Ninian Stephen said s.116:

... cannot readily be viewed as a repository of some broad statement of principle concerning the separation of church and state, from which may be distilled the detailed consequences of such separation.

That is pretty unequivocal. The day after the case, none of the newspapers reporting the case published what the judges had said. Also, in many histories of Australia, these words, and the subject of church and state, do not appear. Textbooks on politics in Australia do not discuss it. We have an Australian Republican Movement that is arguing for a republic with no mention of church and state on their website. This is despite the fact that separation of church and state is the foundation stone of two of the leading republics in the world: the American and the French.

It is, in other words, the elephant in the room of Australian democracy. It places us, Wallace suggests,

somewhere between democracy and theocracy. I suggest that is an unacceptable state of affairs for a modern liberal democracy. We can hardly criticise regimes that refuse the distinction when we have not formalised it ourselves.

Indeed. On this National Day of Secularism, it is truly sobering to consider that the separation of church and state in Australia is even more tenuous than it is in the maniacally-religious US. You can just imagine what might transpire if the Religious Right (whether it’s the Opus Dei Liberals or the Pentecostal megachurch Liberals leading the parade) ever attains the same level of influence here that it has attained over there.

Other resources on this topic:
"Separation of church and state?" (Michael Hogan, University of Sydney)
"Church and state in Australia" (also by Max Wallace)
"Church and state" (Anglican bishop Tom Frame, who has also written a book on the subject)

UPDATE: May 26th also marks the tenth annual National Sorry Day, and it has been remiss of us not to have mentioned it earlier.

So the Australian Prayer Network just happened to select this date for their National Day of Thanksgiving? How interesting. I wonder who they think the members of the Stolen Generations should be thanking. See Simmo's post. Read more!

Blog Against Theocracy: National Day of Secularism May 26th

The National Day of Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and in an election year you just know the pious frauds on both sides of politics (but let's face it, mainly the Right) will be screaming more loudly than ever about religion, values (which, as we all know, only the religious possess) and the "spiritual emptiness" that is the hallmark of a secular democracy (apparently).

Well, as Bruce has declared, enough's enough.

Bye-bye, ta-ta, theocrats take your disingenuous political stunt with you. You
haven’t fooled me or anyone else with a functioning brain.

That's right, fundies--the evil secularist babykilling hordes are fighting back. Let May 26th henceforth be known as The National Day of Secularism!

National Day of Secularism
May 26th

This is a tagging meme, so I'll let Bruce tell you the rest:

How the “meme” works
This “meme” works in two steps; first the “Tagging stage” and then the “Blog against theocracy stage”.

Tagging stage
If you are tagged by the meme, then it’s the same old format; mention this entry so
people can see the rules and then tag five other bloggers (preferably Australian given the nature of the NDoT.) You can link back to these rules and display the above (rather modest) banner by inserting this code at the end of your entry

(Check Bruce's post for the code--Blogger won't let me post it here)

Feel free to copy the PNG file to your own host and alter the code accordingly, and remember when entering the code to enter it into the “code” window of your blog editor (blogger and wordpress users, I know there is a tab for this above your editing window)!

This meme does however have somewhat of a difference; an additional stage…

Blog against theocracy stage
If you have been tagged (heck, even if you haven’t, it doesn’t bother me) then in addition to tagging others, it is also hoped that you will write a blog entry about the separation of Church and State in Australia. It could be a critique of Pell’s “normative democracy”, the historic anti-democracy sermonizing of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, inevitable discrimination by the funding of (approved) chaplains in public schools, the state backed imposition of bans on forbidden women’s dress or whatever Church-State issue you find important.

Preferably, such a blog entry would be published on the 26th, but I’ve been lazy in getting around to this and I’ve left people little time so there is no deadline as such.
Just a couple of caveats; 1) the church-state anti-theocracy blog entry should mention the phrase “National Day of Thanksgiving”, possibly mentioning that the entry is a response to the NDoT, and 2) feel free to add the (again admittedly modest) banner.

I, in turn, tag the following: A Churchless Faith, BeepBeepIt'sMe, Smogblot, Super Simmo and The Dog's Bollocks.

UPDATE: We haven't spoken too soon, evidently. John Howard courted uber-fundies Catch the Fire in January; now Kevin Rudd's at it. Now let me get this straight. They umm and aahh and fiddle with their diaries when it comes to meeting the Dalai Lama, but they're falling over themselves to court an organisation whose leader claims to have personally met Jesus "face to face on 21st July 1997 at 3.40am (He spoke to me for 2 hrs. 20 minutes.);" who in the run-up to the 2004 election called on his followers to pull down "Satan's strongholds," including brothels, gambling places, mosques and temples; and who in 2005 addressed a meeting of the Australian League of Rights.

What's going on here? First the Exclusive Brethren, and now Catch the Fire? Has the batshit insane fundie vote really become that significant?

Read more!

Does Australia need a National Day of Reason?

In response to President George W. Bush's declaration of a National Day of Prayer in 2002, atheist, humanist and secularist organisations in the US have endorsed May 3rd as a National Day of Reason.

Many who value the separation of religion and government have sought an appropriate response to the federally-supported National Day of Prayer, an annual abuse of the constitution. Nontheistic Americans (including freethinkers, humanists, atheists, agnostics, and deists), along with many traditionally religious allies, view such government-sanctioned sectarianism as unduly exclusionary.

A consortium of leaders from within the community of reason endorsed the idea of a National Day of Reason. This observance is held in parallel with the National Day of Prayer, on the first Thursday in May (3 May 2007). The goal of this effort is to celebrate reason - a concept all Americans can support - and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship.

Bush's 2007 National Day of Prayer proclamation calls on "the citizens of our Nation to give thanks, each according to his or her own faith, for the freedoms and blessings we have received and for God's continued guidance, comfort, and protection." However, as the Chicago Tribune's Eric Zom points out,

the National Day of Prayer does not embrace diversity. It's now basically a Christian observance, with more than 30,000 events nationwide promoted by the National Day of Prayer Task Force, an organization that requires its volunteer coordinators to agree to a statement that reads in part, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the only one by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God."

The National Day of Prayer Task Force describes itself as "the Judeo-Christian expression of the National Day of Prayer"--a "Judeo-Christian expression," as Zom wryly observes, that excludes Jews. "Reason would tell you," states Zom, "that government officials at all levels ought to distance themselves from such blatant sectarianism."

A similar National Day of Prayer was declared last year by the National Council of Churches in Australia for November 26th. Though it was ostensibly a response to the drought, it does signal a worrying tendency among Australian churches to attempt to ape the intermingling of church and state that has been the hallmark of Bush America, and an inevitable consequence of the Republican Party's strong identification with the Religious Right.

Thus far, however, the Australian National Day of Prayer doesn't seem to have the official status of its American counterpart. The National Prayer Breakfast, on the other hand, held each year on November 26th in the Great Hall of Parliament, ought to be more of a concern for those paying attention to the increasing tendency to mix religion and politics under Howard--especially when Bill Muehlenberg is crowing about the event being part of "God at work in Canberra."

So is the trend away from secularism in the years since the Howard Government came to office reason enough to declare an Australian National Day of Reason on November 26th?

UPDATE: Perhaps the National Day of Reason ought to be moved ahead in the calendar. Bruce reminds me that the Australian National Day of Thanksgiving--an event which has historical roots in 17th century America but absolutely no tradition in Australia (the Australian franchise was established last year)--will be held on May 26th. The involvement of the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in this event should at least raise questions about church-state separation.

Bruce has posted on this topic previously. Read more!