David Hutt, John Kaye, the Pell and Jensen heresies, and a good day for fairies at the bottom of the garden ...

(Above: loon pond is one with Mr. T. We's pitys the fuels, and haze no time for jiba jaba. Stai in sekular skul childers and don't do drugz).

As Robert Duvall might have said, after a good surf and while squatting on his haunches, I love the smell of squawking roasted Christians on a Sunday morning.

Oh okay, that's going a little far, even if there's good evidence that napalm hasn't done as much damage to this earth as the combined efforts of the world's religions.

But damn me if it didn't tickle me pink as a thought after reading David Hutt's tirade Attacks on religion show Greens not a real alternative.

Without the good Hutt's jabber (and without in any way referencing the worst character in movie history), we would have missed the outburst by Dr. John Kaye in the Legislative Council, happily transcribed into Hansard and put up on the full to overflowing intertubes here.

In it, the good doctor takes an extended swipe at our favourite commentariat commentator Miranda the Devine, berates Piers Akerman, takes a sideswipe at Janet Albrechtsen, and throws in Paul Sheehan to ensure he has as full hand of aces, ready to trump the infidels (with the Reverend Fred Nile always to hand to play Joker).

Paul Sheehan is the final journalist I wish to quote from. He wrote a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald in May 1996 entitled, "The Multicultural Myth". In the article he claimed that SBS television was "a metaphor for the evolving fantasy that Australia should be a cultural federation of glorious diversity". I am not sure what it is about right-wing commentators—they have it in for SBS. Perhaps they have difficulty with the subtitles on some of the movies and it is just too challenging for them. SBS is a media outlet that every Australian can access.

I get it now. Deviant secularists make jokes about movies.

But you have to get right down the page, to find under the header Religious Education and School ethics classes to find the offensive Kaye remarks that got Hutt jabbering, and of course it involves the recent introduction into NSW schools of St James Ethics Centre materials as an alternative to an hour of religious education torture:

Dr JOHN KAYE [11.34 p.m.]: For 130 years special religious education in New South Wales public schools has been operated by an oligopoly. The official gatekeeper is the director general's Consultative Committee on Special Religious Education. However, in reality the Christian churches, the Jewish Board of Deputies and the Islamic Council hold an overwhelming majority of seats and hence call the shots on who is in and who is out. For as long as can be remembered, special religious education has been operated as a self-selecting club that excludes any groups or ideas that do not fit within the narrow field of organised religion. The New South Wales Government and the Minister for Education and Training, the Hon. Verity Firth, are to be congratulated on agreeing to prise open this door by supporting the trial of ethics as an option for students whose parents profess none of the faiths on offer or believe that religion is a private matter.

Yes indeed, the NSW Government did the right thing, even if it is shortly to expire, and even if they couldn't do simple things like organise access to Newtown railway station for prams and wheelchairs for the entire time I've lived in the neighbourhood, preferring to piss squillions away on a Metro that never was, and earning the wrath of Penrith as a prelude to the wrath of the entire state.

But I digress. Remember Clarke is not complaining about all the religious schools erupting all over the place and sucking on the taxpayer teat, be they scientological, exclusive brethren, fundamentalist Islamic or Christian in belief systems. He's talking about what students might get up to while those who sign up for religious instruction endure their ideological torture:

Rather than these children watching videos, reading books or running wild in the playground, the St James Ethics Centre materials provide a meaningful supplement to mainstream education. It was not meant as a challenge to the religious education establishment. While some students inevitably will cross from organised religion to the ethics class, there has always been churn within the religions on offer at any school. In any event, if students or their families find ethics classes more attractive than religious indoctrination, public education as a secular institution should provide that option. The ethics trial has met with a torrent of passionate opposition from many religious leaders and their followers that is out of all proportion to the intent, circumstances or impact of the trial. One honourable exception has been the Uniting Church, whose leaders are to be congratulated on living by their creed and generously welcoming the trial.

Fair enough. A far more balanced and rational assessment than what stout hearted secularists on the pond might offer, given the squawks and yelping from the Christian establishment to a simple educational initiative, which also happens to challenge their oligopolistic power.

But then Kaye goes on a mild offensive:

The form and nature of the responses raise a number of important issues. The first is jurisdiction. Organised religions are seeking to exert control over what happens to students who are not members of their faith. This is a dangerous precedent whose violent historical antecedents were resolved only by the doctrine of the separation of church and state. Parents who want their children gainfully engaged in the one hour set aside for special religious education must be wondering what business it is of unelected, unrepresentative churches to determine what happens to their children. These families and students will be justified in telling Archbishop Pell, Archbishop Jensen and the other church opponents to butt out. Some of the responses have themselves displayed an extraordinary degree of unethical behaviour. On ABC's Stateline on Friday 28 May the Catholic Bishop of Wollongong, Peter Ingham, told two downright lies in relation to the legality of the trial. The bishop said:

Legally, you know, the Government is committed to this since the early days of Henry Parkes' Education Act.

The interviewer challenged this assertion and asked:

Where in the Education Act does it say that no lessons should be offered in competition with SRE?

Stumped by the stark fact that the Act does not contain any injunction against the trial—indeed if it did I am sure there would have been a legal challenge by now—the bishop dug himself in even deeper and replied:

It's enshrined in the Constitution.

Now thanks to the wonders of the intertubes, it's a simple matter of googling this up, and you can find the questions and the answers here at the ABC's Stateline (with video) under the header School ethics classes spark debate. Indeed you can also find the reporter Sarah Dingle's comment on this remark in the same place:

SARAH DINGLE: In fact, the Education Act says religious education should be provided for those students who want it and lays out who should teach it. But the requirement that no lesson should compete with SRE, including ethics, is a State Government policy. A spokeswoman for the Education Minister, Verity Firth, said that policy is a technicality and isn't set in concrete.

Yep indoodie. It's an act, not the constitution, and it isn't enshrined, so much as enacted by Government, with a requirement. As Kaye politely points out:

Of course nothing in either the Constitution or the Act itself makes the trial unlawful. There is no legal mandate to require children to waste their time. However, Bishop Ingham saw the need to fabricate all the way to the Constitution. The bishop himself could benefit from the St James course and learn about the values of truthfulness. But unethical behaviour is not limited to the bishop's side of the reformation. This morning Youthworks, the youth arm of the Sydney Anglican Church, was caught organising a stack of public school parents and citizens associations with the stated aim of undermining the future of ethics classes. Its "SRE on trial" website page entitled "Whose P&C is it again? Why Christians need to be involved in the local P&C" warns:

Issues such as the current ethics trial are being discussed there. If we are "missing in action" from these groups they will have no Christian perspective on this trial. In one local P&C Christians found themselves in the minority on this issue. As a result unconditional support was given to introduce ethics on a full-time basis.

Under the section "What to say and do in your P&C meeting" the page suggests:

1. Join your P&C today, as you may not be able to vote on important issues unless you do.
Youthworks is promoting the special religious education on a trial site using a viral email that asks parents:

Help protect SRE—Join our local P&C

It appears that the Sydney Anglicans have taken a leaf out of the worst behaved Labor Party branch stackers. Stacking, lying and selfishness are hardly ethical behaviour. However, it seems that the end justifies the means when an organised religion's stranglehold on special religious education is challenged.

And indeed if you head off to the Youthworks site, there you will find the Jensenist nepotics beavering away, with Dr. Peter Jensen offering up The Archbishop writes: Ten reasons the ethics trial is not a good idea.

There is of course only one really good reason - the dominant churches want to continue to be given an opportunity in state schools to ideologically indoctrinate the young, free of any competition.

Indeed, the hysterics of the hard heads even saw them introduce a special website SRE on trial We Can't Afford to Lose it, full of all sorts of dire warnings and declamatory nonsense. The site is of course "Powered by Youthworks", and it shows just how hard the church hard hats have been fighting for their oligopoly of power and the right to inflict religious instruction on a captive audience, while flinging those who resist into an educational wilderness.

It also shows all the worst excesses of the NSW Labor party's hard right campaign tactics - as recently on display in Penrith by suggesting that the Liberal was an outsider come in to take the local yokels for mugs when it was the Labor candidate who resided outside the seat, and thereby compounded the folly of the electoral pounding they were due to get. And got.

And so should the Pellites and the Jensenists for their politicking, amply on display in the Jensenist case throughout the Youthworks website. Give me a child before seven, said the Jesuits, and I'll give you the Inquisition after lunch.

By golly, I see that in all this fuss, I've quite forgotten about the jibber jabber of David Hutt. He somehow finds it in his Christian heart to forgive the Bishop of Woollongong:

He accused the Bishop of lying about the legality of the Keneally Government’s trial ethics programme. It is one thing to pull the Bishop up on a factual inaccuracy; it is another thing entirely to ascribe to him sinister motives and to accuse him of lying.

Okay, we'll settle for him being factually inaccurate, a foolish fop of a fellow, if you will, who made a misrepresentation of reality on television, and copped a legitimate stiff arm for his folly.

But then Hutt tries to go on the attack, and it's a pitiful, tragic thing to see, rather, my partner assures me, like the Australian soccer team in action:

The most astonishing thing about Kaye’s rant is that he is a member of a political party that is trying to position itself as the third force of Australian politics.

However no Australian political party can try to pass itself off as being mainstream as long as it ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of Australian’s profess to hold religious beliefs.

Profess to hold a belief? What a quaint phrase, what a quaint concept.

Nowhere of course does the jibbering of Hutt address things like the feeble Youthworks web site and the regular campaigning by the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies against the new ethics classes. Instead he adopts the paranoid pose of persecuted Christians:

Trying to shut people out of the debate because they hold to a particular religious world view is neither helpful nor practical. Kaye’s outburst raises serious questions about the Greens’ commitment to religious freedom. Unfortunately it is a trend being repeated continuously by the Greens across Australia.

For example in Victoria, the Greens were behind a push which began in 2008 to have the Government remove the ability of Christian and other faith-based organisations to hire people who share their faith and values.

Had it been successful, such a move would clearly have been a backward step, undermining religious freedom in this country. It is not a policy worthy of a credible political party.

Actually, so long as the churches line up to dip their paws in the pockets of taxpayers, as a way of supporting their failed business model as cash from the faithful dries up, it is a policy entirely worthy of a credible political party dedicated to the notion that religious freedom shouldn't involve a capacity for discrimination, and that gated communities of iron clad cults and cliques is the last thing Australia needs.

If the Greens hope to be taken seriously by the Christian constituency in the lead up to the Federal, Victorian and NSW elections, all three due within the next ten months, they will need to do a lot of work to convince people they are not “anti-faith”.

Putting an end to vitriolic and personal attacks on church leaders under parliamentary privilege would be a good start.

Um, actually, I haven't paid much attention to the Greens, but if they keep launching vitriolic and personal attacks on the Pellist heresy and the Jensenist nepotism, it'll be a good start, and with a bit of luck, in due course they might convince people that they're anti the cavortings of the current flock of fundies in power in the Christian churches (not to mention all the others now pouring through the cracks in search of government funding).

Funnily enough Hutt starts off with a paranoid fantasy, imagining bishops in a dimly lit cigar smoke-filled room holding a secret conference.

Not since Niccolò Machiavelli walked the earth has there been such a gathering of calculating and ruthless political minds ...

...This is of course an absurd, paranoid image. Fairies at the bottom of the garden stuff really.

Silly goose. As everybody knows the fairies are at the back of the church. They're called angels ...

(Below: a new trend in geek nerd Christian art. Warrior angels. Always first with the loonacy is loon pond).