The right to expel gay children from school isn't about freedom; it's about cruelty | David Marr

Let’s face it: throwing kids out of school for being gay is disgusting. Not for a long, long time has such an idea been respectable in this country. But in 2018 Philip Ruddock’s religious freedom review has kept it on the table.

This isn’t about freedom. It’s cruelty.

Ruddock’s team should have knocked it on the head instead of recommending a few protections. And politicians calling, pathetically, for no fresh laws allowing faith schools to expel gay kids should be demanding the practice ends right now everywhere in Australia.

Old hymns tell us God moves in mysterious ways. The hullabaloo caused by Wednesday’s reports of Ruddock’s findings has been an unambiguously good thing.

Who cared before yesterday that the law already allowed gay kids to be humiliated in this way?

Critics of church power have been banging on about this for decades with near zero traction. Then suddenly the prime minister was spreading the word. “That is the existing law,” declared Scott Morrison, not once but half a dozen times at a doorstop on the New South Wales central coast.

And was he comfortable with gay and lesbian children being rejected by schools?

“We’re not proposing to change that law to take away that existing arrangement that exists.”

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So ScoMo the Christian is all for putting the boot into gay kids. That’s useful to know, too.

But he’s right: most states and territories – all but Queensland and Tasmania – let church schools get rid of gay and lesbian kids just for being who they are.

In NSW it’s absolutely open slather. There’s no religious test. There’s no test of any kind. Out they can go. No questions asked.

The law applies in NSW as much to a commercial college teaching panel beating as Catholic boys boarding schools. Think of it as purity insurance.

Labor hero Neville Wran made this law as he faced down the churches to decriminalise homosexuality in NSW in the 1980s. It’s barely been debated. It’s a little provision that sits there as concession to Christian ideologues who hate homosexuality. No premier since has been willing to touch it.

“It’s an ugly fact that the NSW parliament has given the green light to active discrimination by private schools for decades, and lets them use public money to do it,” Greens MP David Shoebridge told Guardian Australia.

“What makes that offensive position even worse is that MPs haven’t even had the courage to explain why private schools need the ‘right’ to expel gay students or sack LGBTI teachers. There has never been even a basic attempt to balance out competing interests of so-called religious freedoms and the right to be free from discrimination.”

Busting gay kids in this way is a profoundly distasteful idea for secular Australians. It’s also too grim for most of the faithful in the pews. But as usual, politicians aren’t listening to them, only their leaders. Politics is supposed to be a numbers game, but when religion comes into the picture, politicians lose the power to count.

And despite what archbishops preach about the sins of Sodom, expelling gay kids is a practice too grim for most Catholic and Anglican schools.

Do Catholic schools in NSW expel kids for being gay, the Guardian asked spokeswoman Anita Quigley. “No.” Dr Paul Hine, principal of St Ignatius College Riverview added: “My personal view is that schools should be places of tolerance and inclusion.”

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The Guardian put the same question to Russell Power, spokesman for the hardline anti-gay Anglican diocese of Sydney, and got the same blunt response. “No.”

I checked with Timothy Wright, headmaster of my old Anglican school in Sydney if he expels boys for being gay? “No. Shore does not.”

So why do church leaders insist on this “freedom” when so many of their schools want nothing to do with it? It’s an old game. Religious leaders want laws that show believers the state backs their faith. Even laws that become too awful over time to enforce set a Godly example.

That was the old argument against decriminalising homosexuality and it’s the argument now of men at the top of the churches for hanging on to this relic of old hatreds: the right to expel gay kids. It’s useful propaganda: a declaration of sin on the statute books.

It’s not much to hold onto but the faiths are holding on hard – with the help of Ruddock’s crew, the prime minister and leaders of all the major political parties.

Labor is showing no courage here. It never has. How kids might be mashed up in the process hardly matters.

Mind you, they know it’s too distasteful to defend in plain speech. Few but the most extreme submissions received by Ruddock demand in clear terms the “freedom” to expel gay school children. The heavyweight submissions he received calling for this were carefully coded.

“We have not sought concessions to discriminate against students or teachers based on their sexuality, gender identity or relationship status,” declared Archbishop Mark Coleridge in the uproar over Ruddock’s recommendations.

“Once employed or enrolled, people within a Catholic school community are expected to adhere to the school’s mission and values.”

The key is “mission and values”: being gay isn’t adhering to them whether you’re a gay teacher or a gay student. This formula is extremely clever: it shelters the church, doesn’t alarm parents, allows Catholic schools to offer if they wish – and most do – pastoral care to teenagers discovering their sexuality, while at the same time keeping hardline theologians happy by not giving official comfort to the particularly awful sin of homosexuality.

The churches ask: what’s all the fuss about? This is simply a formality. Expulsions are certainly extremely rare. But the threat is always there and so, sometimes, is the reality.

“Faith communities, including Christian schools, must be able to take action that separates individuals from that community when their actions undermine the community,” Christian Schools Australia told the Ruddock review. More than most faith lobby groups, CSA is honest about the fate of gay kids in their low-fee schools: expulsion when required.

“This option remains a necessary response to situations determined by a community to be a threat to that community.”

Mark Spencer, head of policy, explained the CSA approach: “We say to students who are same-sex attracted: ‘We believe that’s not God’s best plan for you and here’s why.’”

So what is God’s plan for gay kids? “It’s not about endorsing or encouraging it.” The trouble comes if they don’t accept God’s plan.

Not always. “It depends how they behave. We want the right to expel students whose behaviour or conduct undermines the school.” What sort of conduct would that be? “It’s hard to give examples.” Could he try? Spencer offered: an “offensive response” to teachers explaining God’s plan plus “sharing social media posts and encouraging other students to go to events with them”.

When faiths take public money to run schools and hospitals in the UK they have to play by secular rules. The choice is stark: faith or funds

So the kid goes? “It is very rare but it has happened,” said Spencer. “The best interests of the child are served by the child going elsewhere.”

Rather than end this practice Ruddock’s team decided – I understand unanimously – to call for clarity. Faith schools must tell parents, up front, that their children may be expelled. One of several headmasters consulted by the Guardian said: who would do that to enrolments?

That wouldn’t trouble Christian Schools Australia but it threatens a God almighty ruckus inside the Anglican and Catholic churches with embarrassed schools facing hardline theologians demanding they make an open commitment to expulsions. QCs may already be drafting the weasel words.

The second demand of the Ruddock review is that schools must regard the best interests of the child as “the primary consideration of its conduct”. Again that’s not going to worry Christian Schools Australia, but the Ruddock team is quietly confident the prospect of litigation over the best interests of gay pupils will stay the hand of schools keen to expel them.

Perhaps. But the pain for the child …

Not recommended is the British approach. It’s simple. It works. When faiths take public money to run schools and hospitals in the UK they have to play by secular rules. The choice is stark: faith or funds. At this point, the central Christian need for the right to sack gay staff and expel gay kids … evaporates.

Fear of this outcome explains the coded references in so many submissions to Ruddock calling for fresh protections so that the faithful never suffer “financial consequences” for living by their beliefs. As Christian Schools Australia put it with characteristic clarity: “It is essential that protections be provided shielding continued education funding.”

The uproar of the last few days will surely compel the government to release the full Ruddock report and the nation can, at last, have a debate about its recommendations.

For the moment we are being told however distasteful we find the sight of faiths harassing gay pupils – and gay teachers – taxpayers are expected to keep footing the bill.

That’s what counts in the end. That’s freedom.