It's not just about sacking gay teachers, the church has a long list of sinners it wants to punish

This is not just a fight over gay teachers.

The faiths are battling to hang on to laws that leave them free to bar and sack a long list of sinners – men and women they claim might undermine the ethos of hospitals and charities as well as church schools.

So who is on the list?

Keeping up to date here is essential. It’s foolish to typecast churches as old fashioned. They’re all the time monitoring fresh challenges to the Christian mission of their agencies.

The lists of the forbidden are long and keep growing. Gays and adulterers head all the lists. But transsexuals were recently added to those who might be sacked and barred by the Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church.

Bishop Michael Stead assured me last year they would not all be sacked. Not automatically. “That would require looking at on a case-by-case basis.” But he would guarantee none of their jobs in Anglican church agencies. Ditto an administrator, clerk, nurse, doctor or teacher who took advantage of new laws to marry one of their own sex.

That would lead, said Stead, “to a discussion”.

Not on most lists are the intersex. Most faiths let them off lightly and Philip Ruddock’s religious freedom review calls for their complete protection: “Jurisdictions should abolish any exceptions to anti-discrimination laws that provide for discrimination by religious schools in employment on the basis of race, disability, pregnancy or intersex status,” reads Ruddock’s sixth recommendation.

So why let gays and transsexuals be sacked but spare the intersex? It’s obvious when you think about it: God made the intersex that way. Physically. (Trigger warning.) You can point to their parts.

Where Catholics bishops go to ground and hide their human wreckage behind shimmering rhetoric, Anglicans are honest enough to say who they target. Stead laid out the list: gay men and women in relationships, open adulterers, the unchaste generally, men or women in de facto relationships and unrepentant single mothers.

It should be noted that everyone on the Anglican list of shame can save themselves – and their jobs – by being seen to wrestle with their sins.

“We’re not seeking the right to terminate employment in all these circumstances,” Stead explained. “It’s more a question of where a person’s practice or advocacy might cause issues of conflict with the religious ethos of the institutions.”

But in hospitals? The intrinsic point of a Christian hospital, the bishop explained, is not to cure people but “to do that in accordance with the teachings of Christ”.

By punishing homosexuals?

“I wouldn’t agree with the punishment of homosexuals.”

To lose a job is not punishment?

“The intention is not to punish.”

Some faiths also have divorcees on the list of the forbidden. Not, these days, the Anglicans. But Catholic schools have shown themselves unhappy continuing to employ teachers who divorce and remarry without first obtaining an annulment. Particularly susceptible here are kindergarten teachers in country towns.

Representing sacked private school teachers is the work of John Quessy of the Independent Education Union. He said in a statement on Monday: “It’s pretty amazing that in this day and age teachers and support staff cannot openly discuss getting a divorce, being a single parent or seeking IVF treatment, let alone being in a single sex relationship, with their employer.”

Scandalously late in 2013, the Commonwealth extended anti-discrimination protection to sexual orientation and gender identity. The job fell to Julia Gillard who gave in to the churches without a fight. The bishops and preachers were content with the exemptions Labor granted. So was the Coalition.

At the time I called it a bigots charter. But perhaps Gillard should be praised for her bravery for she was legislating fearlessly against all women who, like her, are living in sin.

Should the former prime minister wish to work some day as, say, a cleaner in an Anglican hostel her way might be barred under the law she passed 2013 so long as she remains unmarried to her partner Tim Mathieson.

It’s all about the ethos of the institutions …

Back then I sought out Stephen O’Doherty, spokesman for Christian Schools Australia. I wanted to know which sinners were on the forbidden list of those little Christian schools. Again, gays and adulterers headed the list.

What about masturbators, I asked. O’Doherty didn’t roar with laughter as I’d hoped. He took my question perfectly seriously. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a teaching on that issue,” he said. But he wouldn’t rule it out.

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