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jethro's picture

Free Speech, Racial and Religious Discrimination in Australia and New Zealand, or an essay on Bigotry

I have written this essay offline before posting it because I didn’t want to fall foul of the error I believe most posters on social media have, and that is of writing in haste, the social media equivalent of opening your mouth before putting your brain into gear. I am as guilty as the next. This essay has been exhaustively analysed and edited before posting. Of course, there will still be errors and flaws. I hope you will be polite enough to point them out to me.

I am a New Zealander by birth but Australian by residency and choice.

What is free speech?

We don’t have a constitutional right to free speech in Australia. However, there is an implied freedom of political communication. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/freedom-information-opinion-and-expression. Of course, different locations have different rules and practices, and some regimes even have great restrictions on what their populations may or may not say. I think however we may be able to agree on some common ideals, even if they are actively discouraged and even persecuted in some regimes. Here in the democratic Australian and New Zealand societies at least we believe these rights exist, and we welcome those refugees from harsh climes who escape to our freer society.

Free Speech does imply the right to criticize but not to engage in violence, to disagree but not to hate, to stir up action against opposing schools of thought but not to incite violence as a method of protest. If we consider the act of war as the failure of diplomacy, then equally demonstrating with violence is akin to a failure to communicate.

What is not allowed is Race discrimination or religious discrimination.

The Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 defines discrimination as:

(a) any distinction, exclusion or preference made on the basis of race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national extraction or social origin that has the effect of nullifying or impairing equality of opportunity or treatment in employment or occupation;[7]

This goes every which way you can think of. Do you ever look at someone with a different skin colour and feel repulsed, or even just “different”? If you see someone wearing a turban, headscarf, cross on a necklace or wiccan pentagram does that make how you thought of them different than if they hadn’t been displaying their faith openly?

If someone makes a post on a social media platform that exposes their religious belief, including atheism or agnosticism (lack of belief), does this make your reconsider how you would approach them for a job, or as a prospective employee? What about as a customer or a purveyor of their services?

Do you even just think of “them in that suburb, those who frequent that restaurant, or those of that skin colour or those who practice that faith. I think if so you are dangerously close to the point where you discriminate.

What is bigotry?

Recognising a distinction is fine. We all associate with tribes, be they genetic, familial, faith or activity based. Discriminating based on tribal association is the first step towards intolerance. Being intolerant of other people’s opinions and ideas based on these “artificial” discrimination points is bigotry.

Bigotry is defined as an intolerance towards those who hold different opinions. From https://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigotry “stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own.”

As I write this, I must also ensure that I recognize and change any motives or thought patterns I have that demonstrate bigotry. Often bigots are unaware of their bigotry, having learned it from an early age through mimicking their parents and grandparents’ intolerances towards others, or maybe as part of a culture they are currently enmeshed in and do not even recognize.

Bigotry can I think be seen easily in the social media world in “us versus them” type posts. As soon as you see a group of people being different (even if they are legitimately actually different) and then (this causality is very important) make a distinction based on that difference you have taken the first step to wards bigotry. The actual moment comes when you make the comment, post the post, reshare the article or meme, that expresses that distinction and separates the two types of people and essentially classes one as higher than the other. You my friend, have just shown intolerance of someone else’s views based on discrimination and you have just become a bigot.

Congratulations!

There is a road to recovery. Reconsider your intolerance, review your assessment based on the discriminatory difference and view that person as you would your mother, sister, brother auntie or child. Now does it matter what they do, look, or act differently?

What is acceptable?

Discourse, objections and differences of opinions are vital to communication and our humanness. It is part of what makes us human – our uniqueness is expressed visually, genetically, spiritually and intellectually. Of course this is fine. But to call on others to discriminate because of these differences is to both be a bigot and incite others towards the same. And that culture is not acceptable.

What I have also come to realise in the last few days is also not acceptable, is to idly stand by while others engage in bigotry online and in real life. Bigots can change. Your intolerances can be unlearned. You can become friends with a someone from another faith, even an opposing faith. I am a Christian, yet I have friends who are Wiccans, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists. Some even call me friend back!

My challenge to myself and others is to call out intolerant attitudes and speech. Don’t stand idly by and in doing so provide tacit approval for what is essentially hate speech.

Should I cull my “friends” list?

I have thought about this quite a bit. Because my business involves a lot of networking and accepting friend requests from all sorts of people, I have never culled my lists. I have blocked a couple of extremely offensive people, but that is it. I am not sure that I want to cull.

Don’t sit on the sidelines, instead Act

What I want to do instead is make a polite request.

If you make a post that I see and it is intolerant of others, racist, extremist, or degrading of others because of their religious choice, I will comment on it with a link to this article, for you to read and reconsider your statement. It is up to you to deal with it in a mature manner. Recognise your bigotry and change or remain intolerant and have a go at me for daring to suggest you might be bigoted.

I’m going to operate on a one strike rule. You get once chance. If you repeat it, continue to justify your position, argue that you are not a bigot while still sharing intolerant memes, comments and posts, I will block you. If you agree with my essay, then I challenge you to also do the same. Call out the haters. Give them a chance to learn and become compassionate. Then cut them from your lives if necessary.

Conclusion

Intolerance towards others is learned, it’s a behavioural habit, not a genetic bias. It can be unlearned. We can learn to think more rationally, to recognise errors in our thought patterns, attitudes towards others and discriminatory practices and behaviours.

The Christian religion is often misunderstood, and I am not referring to the organised church hierarchies most would associate with the word Christian. Instead I am talking about the personal practice of faith. I think it can be summed up in two statements that Jesus made as quoted from Matthew 22:37-39. The first is spiritual looking toward a deity from a personal point of view. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

Bigotry is essentially the opposite of this. My response to counter bigotry is to learn how to practice the second statement. That comes after learning how to practice the first.

Whatever conclusion you come to, I would be interested in your genuine comments.

jethro's picture

Humans are awesome and dealing with negativity in your life

There seems to be a strong focus on negativity in our world. This is nothing new and I’m certainly not the first person to note it. Our news media sensationalises negative dirt bags and low life scum who prey on the innocent and weak and we love to sit in our armchairs and preach judgement.

Are we really better than them? Do we have the right to judge? Just because we didn’t rape or murder or sexually harass?

Humans are awesome. As the Cycling Maven puts it – cracking humans! I was essentially inspired by his last vlog to write this. You don’t need to watch it – unless you are a cycling fan! In which case it is a must! Subscribe to his awesome vids.

As he succinctly puts it there are a few douches out there but most humans are awesome. I was inspired by the example from his ride in the 2017 Indie Pac when it was cancelled and he was just outside of Adelaide just how many people responded with genuine offers of help.

Recently I have also been inspired by helping some people myself and seeing just how many people also just love to help in some way. We recently helped a lady who had been in a domestic violence situation move from a shelter to her own home. A large group of diverse people largely unknown to each other came together to offer furniture, their time helping, money for a ute and trailer, money for fuel and for no benefit to themselves, just to purely help another human in need.

Humans are awesome.

Negativity sucks. Yet so many people don’t understand this and constantly live in a cesspit of negative emotions, people and scenarios. I’m not pretending to be a guru, but I do not live in that world and I want to be able to help people who do.

So why are people negative? No idea. Really, I don’t. But I do know that negativity promotes and perpetuates negativity. Eh what? I’ll say it again.

Being negative keeps you being negative.

It’s harder in my opinion to be positive than to be negative. You must sometimes force yourself to be positive when it’s easier to whinge at life’s circumstances, other people or situations you find yourself in. But here’s what I have noticed about negative people. The more they complain about undesirable things that happen (and I'm not talking about major disasters (like breaking your nail)) the more undesirable things happen. In fact, the same undesirable things happen over and over – almost every day – to some people I know.

I can guarantee the response to my question of “how’s your day going?” on the phone to one friend – it is ALWAYS “shithouse”. And then he lives out his prediction, and generally the first 60 seconds of the phone call is him telling me what happened that was bad. Its nearly always the same things, traffic, bills, workload, other people dumping things on him, things “outside his control” etc.

These same “bad” things happen to me most days as well. If I choose to drive in rush hour traffic (I generally don’t for a reason) then I choose to accept the fact that I'm in it, find something good to listen to on the radio or use the time to call people, or sometimes just dwell with my own thoughts and wrestle problems over in my mind. I choose to be positive about the time I'm spending in the car (even though I may not actually like it) and not go all negative and complain about it. Essentially, I see it like this. FACT: I am going to be in the car as long as it takes to get where I am going. OPTION: I can choose to grumble and complain about this (including poisoning other people’s lives with my complaining about something that didn’t even happen to them afterwards) OR I can choose to find a positive happy way to deal with the situation. Often, I’ll just be mellowing out to the music on the radio when stuck in traffic enjoying the chance to have a compulsory relax for a while.

I'm pretty sure I am a better person when I get out of the car at the end of that drive for it. I remember road rage and its ugly.

So back to the humans are awesome thing.

There are some douchbags and dropkicks out there gaining media attention and making it seem like the world is a crummy place. That’s a negative way to look at it. I think there are lot more awesome people out there being awesome, giving up their time, money and resources to help others, being positive and showing positivity in bad situations and not dwelling on the negative things.

I want to encourage you to be an awesome human today.

I'm going to tell just one little story, partly because I'm really proud of my photography, and mostly because Michelle is an AWESOME human.

I met Michelle years ago and photographed her when she was a super fit young mum. See the first photo. Since then she has had breast cancer, had a double mastectomy and of course suffered through the hell associated with chemo and all that goes along with that. Negative stuff. Happens to lots of people. Nothing overly special there. Michelle is however an inspirational person who took it upon herself to liven up the chemo place with her neon tutu, and is now using the power of the tutu and positivity to help and encourage others also going through the tough times of breast cancer. She really wants to help women not feel pressured to have reconstructive breast surgery. She has chosen not to and understands there is a real societal pressure for women to have breasts.

So, we got to do a wonderful photoshoot with her and a male friend of mine Russell who has also had breast cancer and had a mastectomy.

So why not be an awesome human like Michelle and think how can I find the good, the positive, the best outcome from this situation or place I'm in? How can I be a joy to others and not a wet blanket of misery?

2011-02-27 PoleGym Shoot 499v2bw2017-12-23 Michelle and Russell 0162017-12-23 Michelle and Russell 0572017-12-23 Michelle and Russell 1682017-12-23 Michelle and Russell 210

I think it was an interesting title for this post – at least I hope you think so, and I hope I explained it as well. In part this post was an attempt to write something personal once again on this blog. I write so much technical stuff (mostly not on this blog anymore) that I don’t seem to have time to write something non-technical. Nowadays social media rules so much that often personal information is given in unrelated disjointed twitter size sound bites.

So hopefully you are going to be an awesome human and go splash some positivity around you – especially to the negative people in your life – it might just rub off!

jethro's picture

What is it like to have a daughter who is engaged?

The second one just proposed to her boyfriend – and he said yes.

Interesting times.

There are now rings on fingers, lots of conversations and plans being made for weddings – even though the projected date is September 2018.

Here are some pics I did for them to commemorate the engagement.

2016-09-09 Jadeen and Josh Engagement 0092016-09-09 Jadeen and Josh Engagement 0252016-09-09 Jadeen and Josh Engagement 0442016-09-09 Jadeen and Josh Engagement 0622016-09-09 Jadeen and Josh Engagement 0692016-09-09 Jadeen and Josh Engagement 078

jethro's picture

I really am a good guy you know

This poem was written to my wife in the year 2000. It speaks for itself.

 

Subtitled My Bride

I really am a good guy you know

I just didn’t understand the meaning of go slow

I took no prisoners, made all the fast breaks

I didn’t realise I was making mistakes

 

I chipped all the corners, scratched all the edges

Like a maniac attacking a pair of box hedges

Without concern for the bed I was making

I roused up the dragon, from sleep she was waking

 

Like lightning striking from a clear cloudless sky

I was hit! “why me?” was my responsive cry

“what did I do?” or “was it my lack?”

but no answer was forthcoming back

 

I pleaded, cajoled, ranted and raved

It was like talking to oneself in an empty cave

The dragon lay brooding, considering my case

And I unaware was making mistakes

 

I should have known better, should have learnt from the past

But sometimes that’s tricky when life’s going so fast

To take time to think – why how would that leave

Time for the rest when you live life at speed

 

The answer came like a brick from the sky

Smote me on the forehead, right between the eyes

Just shut your big gob and listen you lout

Maybe that way some things you’d find out

 

About this passionate warm loving creature

She isn’t a dragon just about to eat you

But rather a fragrance, a gentle breeze

The sort that can appear then disappear with ease

 

To find her is rewarding, like uncovering treasure

She’s challenging, my mate, she’s sure got my measure

And if I take the time and effort to discover

She’ll probably morph into a passionate lover

 

I guess what I'm saying is that it’s not always easy

Sometimes I live like everything’s breezy

I really should be stopping to think and to ponder

How I can nurture my soul mate and wonder

 

Why do I hurt her when I only ever

Want to love her with all my endeavours

This lady this special girl by my side

Hey there gorgeous, will you still be my bride?

 

© 2000 Timothy Miller