Reminding us why ALP inactivity is preferable to Liberal Party destructiveness

And the week of appallingly backwards and destructive policy by the Victorian Liberals continues:

Fury as Baillieu rams through pro-discrimination law

The Victorian Government has cast the rules of Parliament aside to reintroduce a bill that will allow faith-based groups to discriminate on grounds such as religion, marital status or gender.

Seriously, whenever there’s a terrible Labor government and you’re thinking “the Liberals can’t be any worse than this”, please remember – YES, THEY CAN.

UPDATE: You know what’s even more galling about this? That when Labor went to remove those exemptions for discrimination from the Act, they compromised and permitted religious organisations to discriminate on employees’ private lives so long as they could show a connection between the role and the ground. Religious schools could still sack the gay teacher, they just couldn’t sack the gay gardener.

But even that wasn’t good enough for the bigots. They needed to sack the gay gardener. Sanitarium needs to be able to sack the single mother. St Vincent’s Hospital needs to be able to sack the divorcee. How could they provide services if they can’t?

So what was the point of the ALP giving them the concessions they did? The ALP might as well have said, no, we’re not going to permit you to discriminate against employees on the grounds of what they do in their private life at all. Clearly you can’t compromise with these people.

Let’s hope that when this issue is revisited, next time Labor is in – and it had bloody well better be revisited – that Labor doesn’t even try compromising with the bigots. It’s not like they could be any more hostile to it, anyway.

I hope that these people live long enough to see gay marriage legalised and all forms of discrimination against gay people ended, I really do. Because unlike their victories, which are temporary and on the wrong side of history, once that psychological barrier is crossed, that’s it. Short of a collapse of civilization and the rise of a theocratic heart, they’ll never be able to undo it, any more than racists can revive apartheid or misogynists can take away women’s vote. I hope they live long enough to see it – and I hope we don’t have to wait all that long for the discrimination to end, either.