Morrison’s religious freedom bill lays the first step to a bill of rights — even if he doesn’t know it

While Scott Morrison’s religious discrimination bill is designed to propagate a US-derived narrative of victimhood for some of the most powerful institutions and people in the country, in doing so it imports another virus that Morrison and his government may be altogether less keen on.

The hitchhiker is a bill of rights, which Scott Morrison provided the basis for in his otherwise drab speech introducing his religious discrimination bill yesterday (even if he did it unintentionally).

Because Australian right-wingers — mainstream and fringe — import so many of their political tactics, culture wars and conspiracy theories from the US, they tend to forget key differences between our two nations. One of them is the US Bill of Rights.

While the right here regards a bill of rights as some sort of communist plot that would allow unelected, activist judges to prevent Coalition governments from governing as they see fit, in the US the Bill of Rights is cherished on both sides, and venerated by the extreme right, who source their obsession with free speech and gun ownership from it. That they see these rights as only really applying to white Christian right-wingers is just the usual hypocrisy.

But why does Morrison’s bill lead to a bill of rights? He laid out the case when introducing the bill yesterday.

The Commonwealth has a Sex Discrimination Act, a Racial Discrimination Act, a Disability Discrimination Act and an Age Discrimination Act. However, there is no standalone legislation to protect people of religion, or faith, against discrimination … In this age of identity politics where we hear much about how we are identified by our gender, our age, our sexuality, our race, our ethnicity or our level of physical or intellectual ability. These are known as protected attributes, and they should be. We are rightly protected against discrimination in relation to any of these attributes. But Mr Speaker, human beings are more than our physical selves. As human beings, we are also soul and spirit. We are also, importantly, what we believe. For many, this can inform who they are more than anything else. The protection of what we choose to believe in a free society is essential to our freedom.

Those “protected attributes” of course are — except for those who wish to engage in academic debates about social construction of gender, race etc — inherent characteristics people either cannot alter or do not wish to alter, usually derived from genetics, or from life circumstances that cannot be changed.

Religion is fundamentally different. It is not biologically determined or dictated; it is a matter of individual choice. But Morrison and his bill elevate religion to the ranks of those protected attributes which a civilised society must fundamentally protect — or at least pretend to — because people cannot alter them. A socially constructed attribute must be protected in the same way as an attribute created by genetics, or by irreversible accident.

The logic that follows is straightforward. For many people — especially on the right — freedom of speech, freedom from surveillance, freedom from arbitrary power, and a host of other negative rights, inform who they are more than anything else. These fundamental values are closely akin to religious belief — indeed, often confused with them. You heard the man: “human beings are more than our physical selves.” Indeed we are — we are social and political creatures.

And Morrison’s bill sets out not merely to protect the freedom to believe in one socially constructed attribute, but to protect the exercise of that freedom from state or corporate power. While corporations would retain the power to sack someone in relation to their expression of religious belief, professional associations would be prevented from enabling that, and state government laws prohibiting discrimination by religious bodies would be overridden.

Asserting the fundamental importance of a socially constructed attribute, and protecting its expression and its exercise from interference by others, is the basis of a bill of rights that would protect other commonly accepted socially constructed attributes — free speech, free press, privacy, right to due process, right to bodily agency and so on — from government and corporate interference. There is nothing to distinguish freedom of religion from freedom of speech in this argument — and many on the right insist they be held in the same regard.

Without knowing it, Scott Morrison has laid the first stepping stone to a bill of rights, at least in legislated form, rather than in the constitutional form that would properly protect us. Future governments can invoke his precedent and set about protecting other fundamental beliefs.