barryqwalsh
Gold Member
- Sep 30, 2014
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- BRENDAN O’NEILL
- THE AUSTRALIAN
- MARCH 26, 2016 12:00AM
When you hear the phrase student radical, what image comes to mind? A freewheeling warrior against The Man? A fighter for the right to party? A dandily dressed agitator for the powers-that-be to get off youngsters’ backs?
If so, you need to update your mind’s image bank. For the days of student leaders ripping up rule books and flirting with libertinism are long gone. Today’s student leaders tend to be stiff, illiberal and vulnerable to an attack of hives at the mere mention of words like fun, freedom or sex.
In the US, student rads have screamed controversial speakers off campus and set up “safe spaces” where students wounded by words can take refuge. Some of these spaces play soothing music and have colouring books, to make students feel warm and childlike. Seriously.
In Britain, student leaders have banned everything from Israeli representatives to lads’ mags to the wearing of sombreros (apparently that’s offensive to Latinos). More than 30 student unions have banned Robin Thicke’s song Blurred Lines on the basis it makes female students feel undervalued. Remember when it was Christian ladies with blue rinses, not students with purple dye-jobs, who banned raunchy pop to protect dainty women?
Now student leaders at the University of Sydney have threatened to deregister a student society called the Evangelical Union on the basis that its requirement members believe in Jesus is discriminatory.
Yep, that’s right: the world of student politics has become so instinctively illiberal that even the idea of a Christian society being made up only of Christians freaks out these bossy bureaucrats. So unversed are today’s student radicals in the history of freedom that they think a group of like-minded people getting together to share their beliefs is a foul form of separatism when actually it’s a little thing we like to call freedom of association.
The EU’s constitution says members must sign a statement declaring faith in “the Lord Jesus Christ as my Saviour”. And according to the University of Sydney Union, limiting the membership or leadership of societies to “those who ascribe to a particular faith” is exclusionary. It goes against the union’s ethos of “accessibility and inclusion”.
Basically the union is saying: “You are not being inclusive, so we are going to stop including you.”
If there were a prize for the most Orwellian action of the year (there really should be), the USU would surely win.
The student union has given the EU until March 31 to overhaul its constitution. But the EU is fighting back: this week its members voted by a whopping 71 to 1 against changing its membership rules to suit the tastes of the interfering union.
The student union is right that the EU is excluding certain people, people who don’t believe in Jesus. But that is a key part of freedom of association. We rightly oppose discrimination in the public realm of work and public services. But in the private realm discrimination is not only acceptable, it’s essential.
Catholic groups must be free to say only Catholics may join them. Left-wing parties must be free to exclude right-wingers. Gay men’s saunas must be free to tell straight women to go somewhere else. If such groups are not allowed to say what is required of members, and to reject those who fail to live up to those requirements, then the whole ideal of freedom of association falls apart.
If ruling bodies, whether the state or a student union that wields power on campus, can use pressure or threats to make private associations rewrite their constitutions, which is the soul of all institutions, then we enter into very dark territory indeed. We arrive at a situation where the authorities can dictate whom we may link up with and what we may believe.
Enlightenment thinkers knew the importance of free association. John Locke, in his 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, wrote about “spontaneous societies”, groups based on beliefs. He said, “The right of making its laws can belong to none other but the society itself.” If an official tried to tell a “spontaneous society” what it should believe or whom it should embrace, then the whole notion of freedom fell apart, Locke said.
This is happening today. And not only at Sydney Uni. From the Tasmanian anti-discrimination officer’s investigation of the Catholic Church for publishing a booklet upholding traditional marriage to controversies over Victoria’s Equality Opportunity Act and its potential impact on the freedom of religious groups to employ people of their religion, the use of inclusion to bash freedom of association is widespread.
The Sydney Uni controversy suggests students aren’t reading classic Enlightenment texts, for if they were they’d know modern democratic societies are built precisely on the idea that we should respect the freedom of all people to think, speak and organise as they see fit, whether or not we agree with their ideas.
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