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Keywords: Intolerance

  • AUSTRALIA

    Spit decisions: DIY tests endanger DNA data

    • Jacinta Bowler
    • 28 June 2019
    6 Comments

    When One Nation puts forward a policy to DNA test Aboriginal people, DNA databases are solving crimes abroad, and commercial ancestry kits are as popular as ever, it's important to ask what we're giving away when we get our DNA sequenced. You'll only ever have one set of genes and once that data is out there it's very hard to get it back.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    NZ shooter: The myth of Australian values

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 19 March 2019
    24 Comments

    Penny Wong dismissed Tarrant as un-Australian, a dangerous point given that Australian values have been rather flexible in their deployment. The same treatment is reserved for Anning: 'He does not represent who we are.' The painful truth is that Anning and Tarrant are representative of an aspect of Australian national identity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Religious freedom is not a zero-sum game

    • Joshua Badge
    • 18 October 2018
    12 Comments

    Religious freedoms extend only so far as they do not contradict the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. While all Australians should enjoy religious freedom, they also bear the right to non-discrimination and to the highest attainable standard of health. It is also unclear how positive discrimination is related to practising a religion.

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  • RELIGION

    When religious language turns public

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 August 2018
    10 Comments

    When conversation in a community is restricted to the public language of broader society, its power to engage community members is diminished. That has happened in the development of a theology of religions within Christian churches. It often emphasises themes that unite religions and are less specifically and distinctively Christian.

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  • RELIGION

    Religion and human rights

    • Frank Brennan
    • 20 July 2018
    4 Comments

    'I voted 'yes' in last year's ABS survey on same sex marriage. As a priest, I was prepared to explain why I was voting 'yes' during the campaign. I voted 'yes', in part because I thought that the outcome was inevitable. But also, I thought that full civil recognition of such relationships was an idea whose time had come.' — Frank Brennan, 2018 Castan Centre Human Rights Conference

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    A painter's lament

    • Clotilde Lopez
    • 21 May 2018
    1 Comment

    If you listen carefully, the sound of each colour can be heard, the scrunch of each mineral discerned, each cadence, a trace of its former life, a finer distinction. Relieved of its cumbersome form, it becomes lighter and mixes with white spirit like a cocktail blast of violets, mauves and ochres, ground to a fine powder and wet with new life.

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  • RELIGION

    Finding my religion in Indonesia

    • Erin Cook
    • 04 May 2018
    9 Comments

    The church has always been more about family than religion to me - my grandmother's grandmother did it all in Latin, but isn't it cool that we went through the same motions? - and I thought it always would. Then I got lucky: I moved to the world's most populous Muslim country.

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  • RELIGION

    A fine line between tolerance and freedom

    • David Holdcroft
    • 23 March 2018
    16 Comments

    As Australia moves to a post-Christian state, there are numerous tendencies to see limits on the expression of religion as some kind of necessity. But religions remain legitimate voices in the political process and life of the community, and the space that permits the hearing of these voices is one of the marks of a healthy democracy.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Are Israel boycotts really anti-Semitic?

    • Na'ama Carlin
    • 14 February 2018
    12 Comments

    When New Zealand singer Lorde cancelled her 2018 concert in Israel, she joined the ranks of artists who boycott Israel to protest its occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement is contentious in Israel/Palestine activist or Jewish circles, with some calling it anti-Semitic.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Ending the toxic ripple effect of prejudice

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 30 November 2017
    17 Comments

    Governments can't legislate against hatred and intolerance. A friend stated on Facebook that 'No law can change human biology. No law can make natural what is unnatural.' Such rhetoric is a reminder that the realm of human rights is still a bloody battlefield in which certain groups continue to proclaim superiority over others.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Ahok is innocent and Indonesia needs him

    • Pat Walsh
    • 15 May 2017
    11 Comments

    Did he denounce Islam as 'evil' like the American evangelist Franklin Graham? Did he publicly denounce God as 'stupid' like Stephen Fry? On the contrary. Ahok is deeply respectful of Islam and has many Muslim supporters. The affair has done a serious disservice to Indonesia, presenting it as fanatical, racist and sectarian. While these perceptions are unfair, the affair also reveals some aspects of contemporary Indonesia that are obscured by Canberra's often lavish praise of our important neighbour.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Striking Syria and the vagueness of humanitarian intervention

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 10 April 2017
    5 Comments

    Absent a Security Council resolution, the US had operated independently, adopting a policing and punitive stance against the Assad regime. 'This action,' House Speaker Paul Ryan insisted, 'was appropriate and just.' If humanitarian intervention is supposedly engineered to punish a regime in breach of obligations to protect the civilian population, it starts looking, all too often, like an act of regime change. At what point is the distinction on such matters as proportion or necessity even credible?

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