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To say, as Aung San Suu Kyi did, that both the Muslim Rohingya and the Buddhist Arakanese had breached human rights laws in the current conflict is akin to saying that whites as well as blacks violated human rights in apartheid South Africa. The Australian Government, in its treatment of asylum seekers, has lost the moral legitimacy to speak up for oppressed groups such as the Rohingya.
Free speech is fundamental to democracy because it protects public discourse and freedom of religion. But while the right to free speech must to be respected even if it causes offence, we need to question what purpose is served by Alan Jones' attack on Julia Gillard, and the French cartoons.
How does a German teenager, the daughter of a Nazi perpetrator, face up to the fall of the Third Reich, and the revelation of the regime's true nature? 'It wasn't like the war ended, Hitler committed suicide and everybody stopped loving him,' says Australian-Jewish filmmaker Cate Shortland.
'The common law leaves a gap between the mandates of the law and the conduct that we choose to engage in according to our individual moral standards. We call that gap 'freedom'. The challenge is determining the width of that gap for groups bound by religious faith which differs from the Australian majority.' Frank Brennan launches Carolyn Evans' Legal Protection of Religious Freedom in Australia. Full text
The homosexuality debate in church and society is an uneasy and often destructive conversation that should not be entered into lightly. Both sides thus need to beware: ‘Conservatives’ if they slip from opposing homosexual acts to opposing homosexual people. The ‘liberals’ for frankly writing, as Michael Kirby admits, ‘very easy pieces’. Well before Malcolm Fraser, Jesus said (Christian) ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’. Kirby, and the FUP authors, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, are cheapening grace.
Have you ever thought about what life would be like for people who saw everything as if looking through a blue-tinged lens? For these people, everything in the world would be a shade of blue. Their car would be a shade of blue. It's one thing to be deceived, another thing to be physically unable to perceive the truth. Should we pity the blue people of this world?
Poverty is the unpaid rent of 200 years of colonisation. Poverty leaves a kid to her own solitary devices in the corner of a one-bedroom unit. It is pensioners eating canned excuses for a decent meal. Poverty is what happens when I don't care about you and you don't give a toss about me.
'The challenge to a Christian living in a largely Buddhist society has some similarities to the challenge to a Christian living in a society where the public square is largely the preserve of those who argue and agitate with a secularist mindset.' Fr Frank Brennan SJ's address to the gathering of church and NGO workers convened in Siem Reap by the Jesuit Refugee Cambodia on 12 May 2012.
As we drove through the village of Prek Sbeuv in Cambodia, the parish priest who accompanied me, Fr Jub Phoktavi, matter-of-factly pointed to Pol Pot's old house. I remain in awe of Cambodians who have been able to be reconciled, committing themselves to the common good of their nation.
The publication of photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghani insurgents has provoked a lively exchange of opinion in the media. Just as in Afghanistan, American and Australian soldiers fighting the Japanese saw themselves pitted against an opponent who acted by a different — inhuman — set of rules.
Just about every reporter and would-be opinionator wants Rudd to mount an open challenge to Gillard. Her spack-attack on the Chief Justice of the High Court after he scuttled the Malaysia solution was bitterly disappointing. But I have had to reconsider my feelings about her leadership.
Michael Gill, former editor in chief of the Australian Financial Review, is suing his former employer Fairfax for age discrimination. I will be praying that the provisions prohibiting age discrimination in equal opportunity laws around Australia are exposed for the pathetic non-protections that they truly are.