Right to challenge religion

BY SHANT FABRICATORIAN
Religion is touchy dinner party conversation at best but an Australian Human Rights Commission inquiry on the right to freedom of religion in Australia found no lack of people willing to voice their objections to the status quo.

Among these is the Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA) which submitted its objections to the ‘Freedom of Religion and Belief in the 21st Century’ project.

RSA spokesperson Ian Robinson said a key issue was laws that ‘stifle robust criticism of religion’. The RSA argues that religion secures ‘protected status’ for itself ‘by the sleight of hand of yoking itself with race, so that racial and religious vilification are presented as similar’.

‘Race is really a different area [from religion] and they shouldn’t be linked together,’ Robinson said. ‘A person is born into a race and cannot change it. Religious beliefs, however, are a choice, not given.’

The RSA submission also argues that the guaranteed ‘right to freedom of opinion and expression’ is threatened, and perhaps infringed, by religious vilification laws in some states and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s (HREOC) proposed Commonwealth Religious Freedom Act.

In 1998, what was then the HREOC recommended nationally proscribing ‘the advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence’, with exclusions granted for artworks, public discussion, or media reports. Proposed wide-ranging caveats resulted in an apparently innocuous law that, on the face of it, does little more than reinforce existing legislation.

HREOC recommended that penalties for contravening its proposed religious vilification laws ‘should be…similar to those provided for in the racial hatred provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975’.

But Robinson said if a person was concerned about the harm religions inflict, it was justifiable to feel and to wish to incite ‘hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule’ of that religion, which the current law forbids.

‘To allow condemnation of religion only for ‘academic, artistic, religious or scientific purposes’ is to curb free speech. One’s purpose may be to rid the world of religion altogether and that view ought to be permitted free expression in a liberal and secular society,’ he said. ‘Race is quite unlike religion, and racism, unlike religious vilification, is never justified. Racism’s ramifications are broad and deep and may require special preventative measures beyond those provided by other laws.’