The NYPD's criminal stop-and-frisk record

Darius Charney | The Guardian |  15 May 2012 

A march earlier this month against the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy, led by community leaders and Princeton University professor and activist Cornel West. Photograph: Scott Houston/Corbis

The police department's policy amounts to racial profiling and the illegal harassment of thousands of New Yorkers a day.

Last week, the New York Police Department released quarterly data on its stop-and-frisk program. The numbers are worse than ever, and they confirm everything that is wrong with this practice.

From January through March 2012, 203,500 New Yorkers were stopped and frisked. That's an average of 2,200 people per day. Twenty-two hundred people a day, many of whom are stopped for no reason – or the wrong reason, like the color of their skin, or their age, or their gender expression – patted down, sometimes roughed-up, intimidated, asked for ID in their own neighborhood, sometimes in their own buildings, asked to empty their pockets. Twenty-two hundred people a day stopped by police as they walk down the street on their way home, to school, the corner deli, or to see friends. Twenty-two hundred people a day asked to justify their presence in the city in which they live.

This is already an outrage; but if you look further at the numbers, it's even more outrageous. Despite years of public outcry and lawsuits, theNYPD is stopping even more people than in previous years. In 2011, the department stopped a record 685,724 New Yorkers, a 600% increase since Raymond Kelly took over as police commissioner in 2002. But the 2012 numbers are on track to be still worse. At the rate it's going, the NYPD will stop nearly three-quarters of a million New Yorkers in 2012.

Eight-seven per cent of the people stopped by the NYPD in the first quarter of 2012 were black or Latino, while only 54% of the city's population is black or Latino. Despite claims to the contrary, the data show that even when you take other factors into consideration – including crime rates –stops are disproportionately concentrated in black and Latino neighborhoods. And in all neighborhoods, blacks and Latinos are significantly more likely to be stopped than whites. The data also show that NYPD officers use physical force more often when stopping blacks and Latinos.

Stop-and-frisk, as practiced by the NYPD, amounts to racial profiling, which is illegal. It violates the 14th amendment of the US constitution, which prohibits racial discrimination, and the fourth amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Stop-and-frisk also fails to make New Yorkers safer. There is an implied trade-off that New Yorkers are told to accept: OK, so the practice is intrusive and humiliating and it violates your rights, but it's necessary to fight crime. That is a lie. The vast majority of stop-and-frisks – 90%, in the first quarter of 2012 – do not uncover evidence of a crime. Less than 1% lead to recovery of guns, the supposed goal of the stop-and-frisk program.

The NYPD is not catching criminals; they are stopping and humiliating thousands of New Yorkers a day who have done nothing wrong.

There is no evidence that stop-and-frisk is responsible for the city's drop in crime rate in recent years. On the contrary, New Yorkers feel less safe and often have their lives upended by unlawful stops. Many communities, especially communities of color, feel that they are under siege. To them, the presence of police on the streets signals not protection against crime, but a danger of becoming the victims of a crime: being illegally stopped, harassed, possibly beat up.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is suing New York City to end these gross violations of hundreds, or thousands, of people's rights. Occupying entire neighborhoods and treating vast portions of the city's citizenry as suspects violates the US constitution and fundamental human rights.

Teacher fired over pregnancy can sue religious school

Terry Baynes | Reuters | May 16 2012

An appeals court on Wednesday revived a Florida teacher's lawsuit against a Christian school that fired her after she admitted to conceiving a child before her marriage.

Overturning a lower court ruling in the school's favor, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found that Jarretta Hamilton was entitled to a trial on her claims of pregnancy discrimination by the Southland Christian School in St. Cloud, Florida.

The fourth-grade teacher informed administrators in April 2009 that she was pregnant and needed to take maternity leave. During the conversation, she admitted that she had conceived the child three weeks before her February wedding.

The school fired her a week later. Administrator John Ennis explained that "there are consequences for disobeying the word of God," according to the court opinion.

Hamilton sued the school in 2010 under a federal law that bars discrimination based on pregnancy, seeking compensation for lost wages and emotional distress.

A federal district court ruled in the school's favor before a trial, finding that Hamilton failed to establish that she was fired for her pregnancy rather than moral concerns over her premarital sex.

The three-judge appeals panel disagreed.

The Atlanta-based court pointed to evidence that the school may have been more concerned about Hamilton's request for leave than about her admission to having premarital sex.

Ennis expressed concern over finding a replacement teacher, Hamilton testified.

"Hamilton has established a genuine issue of material fact about the reason that Southland fired her. The ultimate issue is one for a jury to decide," Judge Edward Carnes wrote for the unanimous panel, sending the case back to the lower court for a trial.

David Gibbs, a lawyer for Southland Christian School, said in a statement that he would vigorously defend the school's religious rights before the district court. Edward Gay, who represented Hamilton, was not immediately available for comment.

New guidelines to prevent discrimination against those with criminal records

Australian Human Rights Commission | 10 April 2012

Doing time for the crime doesn’t always mean the end of employment possibilities.

Having a criminal record can be a major obstacle for people when job seeking which is why the Commission has just updated On the Record - Guidelines for the prevention of discrimination in employment on the basis of criminal record.

Commission President Catherine Branson QC said that failing to give someone a job, a promotion or even dismissing them because of a criminal record could leave an employer open to a claim of discrimination.

“Every employer has the right to employ someone of their own choosing, based on a person’s suitability for a job,” she said.

“Employers best understand the main requirements of that job and what qualities an employee needs to meet those requirements.

“But it’s also in employers’ interests to treat job applicants and employees fairly and in accordance with legal obligations.”

Ms Branson said some employers are unaware that discrimination in employment on the ground of criminal record may lead to a complaint of discrimination under the Australian Human Rights Commission Act. It could also be unlawful under state and territory anti-discrimination laws.
She said the Commission had recently found that Railcorp had discriminated against an individual when it rejected his application for a position as a market analyst on the basis of low and mid-range drinking convictions from eight years earlier. This was despite the fact that the man met all the selection criteria for the job and was the selection panel’s preferred candidate.
“The Commission received 68 complaints in the last reporting year that alleged discrimination in employment on the ground of criminal record,” she said.

“What this shows is that while some employers are aware of their responsibilities under the law, they don’t always know how to put them into practice.

“These updated guidelines will assist employers and others to prevent discrimination against people with criminal records and help ensure employers meet their obligations under anti-discrimination law.”

David Marr & Jim Wallace: Gays and Lesbians Do Not Belong in the Classroom

Festival of Dangerous Ideas | October 2011

Exempt from anti-discrimination laws, religious organisations of all faiths have the right to decide who they employ in their schools, and who they sack, on questions of faith and morals. For many Australians the idea that gay men and lesbians don't belong in the classroom is an unjust anachronism, but parents are opting in large numbers to send their children to schools that offer a 'values-driven' education. If there is a place for faith in the classroom, does equality of opportunity have to take second place, or can religious values and equality be reconciled?

David Marr is an Australian journalist, author, and political commentator. He writes for the Sydney Morning Herald. Jim Wallace is the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby.
Chaired by Ann Mossop

Watch David Marr and Jim Wallace debate here

Kenneth Clarke to 'wipe slate clean' for hundreds of thousands of ex-offenders

Alan Travis and Owen Bowcot | guardian.co.uk | 2 February 2012

Justice secretary wants to dramatically reduce the length of time ex-offenders must declare their convictions


The reform of the 1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act will see the period of time under which the convictions of medium-term prisoners will be 'spent' reduced from 10 years to four. Photograph: Mark Harvey/Alamy

The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, is to "wipe the slate clean" for hundreds of thousands of offenders by dramatically shortening the period during which they are obliged to tell potential employers about their criminal past.

The radical reform of the 1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act will see the time after which the convictions of medium-term prisoners are "spent" reduced from 10 years to four.

The convictions of short-term prisoners, serving sentences up to six months, will be spent after two years instead of the current seven.

The proposed reform will also cover hundreds of thousands of people who have recently been fined or ordered to serve community sentences. They will no longer have to declare their criminal record after one year instead of the current five.

The changes will raise the threshold for prison sentences that are never spent from two and half years to four, on the basis that sentence lengths are much longer now than when the period was fixed in 1974.

One factor that will limit the impact of the changes is that the period after which a conviction is spent will be counted from the day an offender completes their sentence rather than, as currently, from the date of their conviction. In the case of someone serving a prison term of two and a half years, this means it will become spent after six and a half years, rather than 10.

Rare but Grudging Judicial About-Face in Bias Case

Adam Liptak | The New York Times | December 26, 2011

Mr. Clemon, who stepped down from the bench in 2009 after three decades of service, was talking about an extraordinary about-face this month from the federal appeals court in Atlanta. He was home with a cold, but he sounded delighted to have played a part in persuading the court that some words still carry the sting of oppression, even in the modern South.

“The court now understands,” Mr. Clemon said, “the unwillingness of black men to go back to being called ‘boy.’ ”

Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that there were no racial overtones when a white manager at a Tyson chicken plant in Gadsden, Ala., called adult black men working there “boy.”

“The usages were conversational” and “nonracial in context,” the majority wrote in a 2-to-1 decision that overturned a jury verdict of about $1.4 million in an employment discrimination case brought by a black Tyson employee, John Hithon.

The decision prompted Mr. Clemon and 10 other civil rights leaders to file a brief. Among the signatories were giants of the civil rights movement like the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama and who died in October, and Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United Nations.

The brief urged the court to reconsider, making the case that “boy” retains its venom. For evidence, the brief drew on personal experiences, history, literary classics like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Native Son,” and the writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Boy,” the brief said, is either a proxy for or “at the very least a close cousin” of the most charged racial epithet.

On Dec. 16, more than a year after the initial decision, the appeals court reversed course. The new ruling was opaque and grudging, but Mr. Clemon said he welcomed it, particularly since it is very unusual for a federal appeals court panel simply to change its mind. “I don’t recall it ever happening,” said Mr. Clemon, who graduated from law school in 1968.

Judge Edward E. Carnes wrote the new decision, now for a unanimous panel. He said the court had reconsidered the evidence in the case and “we now reach a different conclusion.”

A Human Rights Agenda for the new Attorney-General, continued

Human Rights Law Centre | December 2011

Australia’s new Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, was sworn in on 14 December 2011.

We asked some of Australia’s leading human rights advocates, activists and academics to tell us, in less than 100 words, what the Attorney’s top human rights priority or initiative for 2012 should be. We’ll be sharing more of them with you in the coming days and weeks.



John Tobin is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School and a member of the HRLC Advisory Committee

The prioritisation of efforts to address human rights considerations is always fraught with danger. But the reality of limited resources means that prioritisation is a fact of political life. Given this reality, the top priority for the new Attorney General in 2012 must be ensuring the successful implementation of the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Act 2011. The requirement to scrutinize all new legislation in light of international human rights standards must not be reduced to a shallow process of compliance. Instead, the Attorney General must lead from the front and demonstrate that substantive engagement with international human rights standards leads to more effective and equitable legislative outcomes.

Lucy McKernan is Manager of Strategic Projects with the Public Interest Law Clearing House (Vic)

That a five year old girl can be lawfully refused admission to a government funded kindergarten on the basis of her parents’ same-sex relationship, is a disgrace. Even the Acting Bishop for the relevant Catholic diocese was ‘appalled’ by the discriminatory decision, yet Australian laws allow this form of discrimination by religious organisations.

Attorney-General Roxon should remove the blanket exceptions for religious organisations permitting them to discriminate on the grounds of sex and age. At the very least, the Attorney should prohibit discrimination by religious organisations in respect of their government funded functions and require greater transparency from organisations seeking to rely on the exceptions. Importantly, the Attorney should also show leadership by encouraging her State counterparts to follow suit.

Les Malezer is Co-Chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples

The priority for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples is to gain recognition and respect as first peoples, and acknowledgement and protection of Indigenous rights.

In 2012, the Attorney General must make the Human Rights Framework effective, leading cultural change across government. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples this includes giving the recommendations and reports of the Australian Human Rights Commission, including the ATSI Social Justice Commissioner, real authority, not just political lip service. The Government must implement and be accountable to reports on human rights by national and international authorities. There should also be a focus on judicial and legal education, to ensure legal professionals understand Indigenous rights and can properly and impartially resolve cases regarding those rights.

Lucy Adams is a Senior Lawyer with the PILCH Homeless Persons’ Legal Clinic

On census night in 2006, approximately 105,000 Australians were homeless, including approximately 7,480 families. Australia needs a human rights-based framework for addressing homelessness.
InVictoria, we have seen how legislative protection of human rights can work in practice through the Victorian Charter of Human Rights. The HPLC has relied on the Charter’s binding obligations on public bodies – to give proper consideration to human rights in decision-making and to act compatibly with human rights – to avoid the eviction of 42 people, including 21 children, from social housing into homelessness.

Enforceable human rights obligations, including national homelessness legislation that enshrines the right to adequate housing, are critical to Australia’s ability to effectively prevent and address homelessness.

Constitutional reform crucial to indigenous wellbeing

Noel Pearson | The Australian | December 24, 2011

There is an existential angst about the place of indigenous cultures in the Australian nation.

I HAVE been close to the epicentre of indigenous policy for 20 years now. During this time I have dealt with premiers and prime ministers, ministers and public servants, both great and small, smart and dumb, committed and careless.

I think I have seen every permutation of policy and program, and the swings of the policy pendulum from left to right and back again. Real progress has been made in some areas, but the larger picture is one of waste and failure.

Like other Australians who take this policy scene to heart, my moods swing from ebullient optimism to deep depression. The small gains lift me but the entrenched failures stricken me.

My experience is less than half that of Lowitja O'Donoghue, Marcia Langton and Galarrwuy Yunupingu. I recall sitting on the beach at Yunupingu's Arnhem Land outstation with former minister Mal Brough and hearing Yunupingu list the names of the prime ministers and ministers he had dealings with since the days of the Gorton government. His story could have been titled Groundhog Day.

It is not for nothing that the one conviction I share with these leaders is that constitutional reform which properly defines the place of indigenous Australians in the nation is a matter of first importance.

Gay marriage debate has a long way to go

Frank Brennan | Eureka St | 6 December 2011

On the weekend the ALP party conference voted to amend the party platform on same sex marriage. The platform now states: 'Labor will amend the Marriage Act to ensure equal access to marriage under statute for all adult couples irrespective of sex who have a mutual commitment to a shared life.'

Churches and religious organisations will retain the freedom to perform marriage ceremonies only for a man and a woman eligible for marriage under the rules of the church or organisation.

The conference voted by 208 to 184 to allow Labor MPs a conscience vote on the issue. Tony Abbott continues to insist that Liberal MPs will not be granted a conscience vote. This will change. If it doesn't, several Liberals, including Malcolm Turnbull, will cross the floor. It could even become a leadership issue in the party.

Within the life of the present parliament, our elected leaders will probably be voting on the issue, and in all likelihood the members of all major parties will have a conscience vote.

How should the conscientious Catholic member of parliament vote? If I were a member of parliament, I would support a law for the recognition of civil unions similar to the present United Kingdom law, and I would vote against any bill extending the definition of marriage to include the union of two men or two women.


I would do so because I think the State should not discriminate against couples who have a mutual commitment to a shared life (whatever their sexual orientation), while affirming that the bearing and nurturing of the children of the union is a constitutive good of marriage (even though not all marriages produce children).

The Greens’ Threat to Religious Freedom

Greg Smith | Quadrant | October 2011

The most recent report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom paints a troubling picture. It describes the critical situation for millions of people who are suffering persecution, in many cases violent persecution, often sponsored by the state or governmental bodies in countries such as Burma, North Korea, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Vietnam, among many others.

The situations in those countries remind me that I am blessed to live in Australia, which enjoys a high degree of religious freedom. That gratitude leads me to cherish the freedoms that we enjoy by ensuring that in an ever-changing society those freedoms are not diminished or lost. To borrow a phrase: “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”.

Although adopting elements of other constitutions, the Australian Constitution retained the monarchy and Westminster parliamentary government from Britain. According to Justice McHugh in the High Court case of Australian Capital Television v Commonwealthin 1992: “the purpose of the Constitution was to further the institutions of representative government”.

In that sense, the Australian Constitution was overlaid onto an already existing tradition of legal jurisprudence which accepted the basic tenets of Westminster democracy. In the words of Justice Isaacs in 1926 in the case of Commonwealth v Kreglinger, the principle of responsible government: “is part of the fabric on which the written words of the Constitution are superimposed”. With that system came a series of principles and conventions which were unwritten but nevertheless fundamental to the operation of government and free society in Australia.

Viscount Bolingbroke, an eighteenth-century proponent of the principles of Westminster democracy, once said that the constitution is: “that assembly of laws, institutions and customs, derived from certain fixed principles of reason … that compose the general system, according to which the community has agreed to be governed”. That statement is particularly true of Australian constitutional law. The principles of representative and responsible government embodied in the Westminster system of government go well beyond the written words of the Constitution and embrace the laws, institutions, customs and principles which underpin it.

Fundamental to the principles of that system of government are the freedoms of speech, association, assembly, religion and movement, which can be traced back through the common law to the Magna Carta.

Therefore, with one main exception, the drafters of the Australian Constitution did not see it necessary to include a US-style bill of rights or other statement of principles guaranteeing the fundamental freedoms of those bound under it. Justice McHugh expressed this well in Australian Capital Television v Commonwealth:

Although the makers of the Constitution were much influenced by the terms and structure of the Constitution of the United States and “felt the full fascination of its plan”, they rejected the United States example of a Bill of Rights to protect the people of the Commonwealth against the abuse of governmental power. They did so because they believed in the efficacy of the two institutions which formed the basis of the Constitutions of Great Britain and the Australian colonies—representative government and responsible government.

The absence in the written document of the Australian Constitution of express rights such as those granted by the Bill of Rights under the US Constitution did not prevent the High Court in that case from finding a constitutional protection for freedom of communication. To the contrary, the system of representative government was the precise reason why such a right existed. In the words of Chief Justice Mason in that case: “Freedom of communication … is so indispensable to the efficacy of the system of representative government for which the Constitution makes provision that it is necessarily implied in the making of that provision.”

The essential point is that fundamental freedoms of speech, association, assembly, religion and movement are indispensable to and inseparable from a system of responsible and representative government and are thus intrinsically embodied in Australian constitutional law.

To this general principle of avoiding “bill of rights”-style guarantees, there is one main exception found in section 116 of the Constitution which provides:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Marr’s Attack

Garrett Bithell | Sx Magazine | 30 September 2011

Revered social commentator and journalist David Marr is a persistent questioner of the status quo. This weekend, at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, he is turning his razor-sharp powers of reasoning to the issue of religious exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation and the Australian Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace. Marr speaks to Garrett Bithell ahead of the highly-anticipated clash.

"Did you know there is a provision of the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Act that allows a private school to expel any child simply for being gay? Isn't that good?"

The posh, nuanced voice of seminal commentator and Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Marr is tempered by a lethal combination of restrained anger and bitter sarcasm. "That's in our legislation," he reiterates. "You can be expelled from a private school simply for being gay. It's there!"

Marr, of course, is correct. Section 49ZO of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (NSW), which basically states that it is unlawful for an educational authority to discriminate against a person on the ground of homosexuality, contains a nasty little subsection at the end. Allow me to quote section 49ZO(3): "Nothing in this section applies to or in respect of a private educational authority." It follows that if Sydney Grammar School, for example, was to expel a student for being gay, there is nothing the law could do about it.

In an age when the fight for equal marriage rights dominates GLBT activism, the startling, sweeping exemptions religious organisations, of all faiths, have from anti-discrimination legislation is sometimes forgotten. But the issue is set to be brought to the fore when Marr locks horns with Jim Wallace, Managing Director of the uncompromising Australian Christian Lobby, on the subject 'Gays and Lesbians Do Not Belong in the Classroom', as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Opera House this weekend.

As Marr asserts, because marriage equality will largely be a symbolic victory in this country, religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws represent the biggest threat to substantive equality we face. "I feel a lot more strongly about this than gay marriage," he tells SX. "Gay marriage is inevitable and it's right, but in Australia gay marriage is symbolic. It's very, very important symbolism, but meanwhile there are laws that actually impact on gays and lesbians."

To wit, religious organisations have the point-blank right to decide who they employ in their schools – and who they sack – based on questions of faith and morals. While for many Australians, the idea that gay men and women don't belong in the classroom is an unjust anachronism, parents are opting, in larger numbers, to send their children to these schools that offer a 'values-driven' education.

"What I find impossible to believe is that a grown-up, modern, kind, secular society offers churches the capacity to continue to punish people through employment for not living up to the churches' rules of sex," Marr says. "We're not talking about little boutique operations here. Church schools and hospitals are the biggest private employers in this country, and they are exempt from anti-discrimination laws. So there's a highway through anti-discrimination legislation."

For Marr, who's openly gay, the debate on Sunday is personal. "I certainly want Jim to tell me exactly why I – or my partner and half my friends – can't be employed by one of his organisations. What is it that we bring? What about the other sins and broken commandments? No, they don't matter! You can hire people who are greedy, or who don't love their mother and father, but you can't hire a person who goes to bed with somebody who has the same genitals as them."

The great folly is that amidst a tide of cultural change that has seen "the religious highway through anti-discrimination turned into a back lane" in places like Great Britain and the United States, Australia still sees the issue of exemptions as one of religious freedom. "We just don't get it in Australia," Marr states. "Politicians are scared stiff – they are so scared stiff they won't even take on the Scientologists, let alone the Anglicans! And when you've got a state that won't take on the Scientologists, you've got a completely gutless state.

"There are all sorts of religious practices that are forbidden by the state, like polygamy and genital mutilation, but we continue to honour religious bigotry about sex in employment law."

The exceptional power religious organisations continue to wield over our supposedly secular democracy is also the reason we still don't have a Bill of Rights, Marr continues. "I don't think people understand," he says. "It's not just the opposition of News Limited, which is perverse and interesting in its own way, but it's the absolutely immovable opposition of the Catholic Church – because they believe they have a much better chance of preserving their hold [on politics] through direct political influence rather than judicial decision-making."

As Stephen Fry once said, the Catholic Church is obsessed with sex. The only people who are obsessed with food, he continued, are anorexics and the morbidly obese – and that, in erotic terms, is the Catholic Church in a nutshell. "It's about power," Marr concludes. "If you can stand between somebody and their most basic instinct, then you have immense power over them. If the church is the gateway to sex, family and pleasure, it's hugely bloody powerful."

Moreover, one of the Church's most bizarre notions – and one that Wallace as a highly enthusiastic hard-line Christian wholly embraces – is that there is a place in the church for gay people, so long as we don't act on what even he acknowledges is a primal impulse. "It's mind-blowing, but one thing about Christianity – and also Islam – is that the capacity to give something up that is natural has always been seen as a measure of holiness," Marr tells. "So someone of Jim's tradition can go, 'so you're a poof? Just don't have sex and you'll be alright'. For them, that is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds to a secular human being. That might make you happy Jim, but your happiness is not really my first concern here."

The pitiful irony inherent in this ridiculously contentious issue is that "even the believers don't believe it anymore".

"Many church-people admit that if they actually enforced their own rules, and weeded out all of the lesbians from church-run old people's homes for example, or all of the poofs from Catholic hospitals, parishes would rise up in revolt! Therefore the rules are used in crueller ways – to pick people off, to bully people, to refuse to hire people."

Ultimately, the way we balance religious values and equality is staggeringly off-kilter. As Marr stipulates, religious freedom cannot be used as a trump card at the expense of a greater human rights framework. "We cannot give the religious a veto argument," he says. "It's pretty easy to reconcile [this issue] and many states do: When it comes to who runs church organisations – who their priests are – that's for them. But when it comes to employment to do work for church organisations, they don't, in my view, have a right to be exempted from anti-discrimination law.

"This religious vetoing has to stop, and I can't wait to come to grips with Jim on Sunday."

Booze Territory: The Crisis of Alcoholism

 Anna Krien | The Monthly | September 2011 

On a Tuesday morning, I make my way to the Gap View Hotel for a drinking session starting at 10 am. I’m told this is one of Alice Springs’ three notorious ‘animal bars’ but, when I get there, the hotel is all shut up. The car park is empty except for a car with an Aboriginal couple sitting inside. I tap on their window and wave my hand at the closed pub. “Not open?”

“2 pm,” comes the answer.

“Oh,” I nod. I’m about to get back into my car when I realise the woman is talking about the bottle shop.

“You mean the bottle shop isn’t open till two?” I ask. She nods. “You waiting around for that?” She nods again. “Isn’t there a bar here?” That’s when I discover a section of the pub is open. The woman directs me out of the car park, back along the main road and down the side of the hotel. A small concrete corridor with no roof doglegs until it is hidden from street view, where a toothless security guard greets me. He raises an eyebrow, then runs a metal detector across my clothes and confiscates my pens.

“Someone’s been stabbed with a pen before,” he says. “You can grab ’em when you leave, luv.”

Behind me an Aboriginal boy, just turned 18, offers a scrap of paper to prove he’s of age. Kindly, the security guard explains how to get a proper ID and turns him away. I walk up a cement ramp to a bar, billiard tables and pokies. There are lots of people milling around but the guy at the entrance tells me it doesn’t “get pumping till 11.30 am”, when the bar “switches to full-strength beer”. Techno music blares out of speakers. As I wander around, a Sudanese security guard approaches me, his face concerned. “Am I lost?” he wants to know.

In a way, I am. I don’t want a beer. It’s 10 am, for Chrissake.

*

At the Todd Tavern down the road it’s just after midday and the place is jumping. Billy Joel is on the jukebox and women jiggle in time, waiting to be served. On one side of the tavern is the Riverside Bar, the original ‘animal bar’, complete with blackened windows creating a kind of false night for its drinkers, who chuck their empties into wheelie bins dotted around the room. A lone white man runs the bar.

“They’re comfortable in there,” numerous people say to me when I ask about the low-slung ceiling that makes you hunch and the permanent night. “No oneforces them to drink there.”

In 2009 CCTV footage revealed 236 people inside the small bar at 11.48 am when it is licensed for 100 – the Todd was suspended from trading for 5 days. Today, around the other side of the tavern, the cleaner and more sophisticated bar with clear windows is also full of Indigenous people. What used to be a voluntarily segregated pub – blacks in the animal bar, whites in the classier section – is now black and black.

Outside, Indigenous people are hanging around the closed roller doors of the Thirsty Camel drive-through bottle shop attached to the Todd Tavern. Some form small groups, others wait in banged-up cars across the road, and a lone man, his purple shirt tucked into black pants, his belt buckle and boots shining, with a cowboy hat tilted over his eyes, leans against the brick wall, waiting.

At 2 pm the shutters will open, the tavern will close and the drinking will shift to the dry riverbed of the Todd River.

The change in the hour brings about a different kind of busyness as pubs are cleaned for the late afternoon trade. It is rush hour for Alice Springs taxi drivers. “No car, no drive-through” is the new rule for these bottlos (unless you’re white, in which case you can walk up and buy whatever you want), and taxis are hailed for the 10 metre trip and paid much, much more than the distance demands.

‘Bush’ minibuses that drive back and forth from remote Indigenous communities are cheered and hailed into the Gap View Hotel car park, the accordion doors opening for six or so blackfellas, some so zonked they can barely muster any sign of life. And then off they go! Through the drive-through!

I watch as the guy in the purple shirt and cowboy hat approaches the bottle shop and is shooed away like a feral dog. “No car, no drive-through,” an attendant yells at the man’s back as he slinks away.

The law of England is not Christian

By Andrew Brown, The Guardian, 28 February 2011: 

The judgment in the case of a Pentecostal couple who wanted to foster children, but refused to accept homosexuality, is an important statement of secular principles

The Christian Insitute and similar bodies have mounted a series of court cases over the alleged persecution of Christians in the last five years. Almost all have been based around the claim that Christians are entitled to discriminate against gay people. Each one has ended in defeat. From the cross worn by Nadia Eweida to the attempts to allow religious exemption to the registrants of civil marriage, or the owners of B&Bs, the cases have been pitched as matters of high principle, and the judges have responded with increasing asperity. None, I think, has been so brutal as Lord Justice Munby in his judgment on the case of Owen and Eunice Johns, a couple of Sheffield pentecostalists who were turned down as foster carers because they would not accept homosexuality.

"I cannot lie and I cannot hate, but I cannot tell a child that it is ok to be homosexual", as Mrs Johns explained her position.

Now it is arguable that this is a case that could, and should, have been settled much more quietly. I believe that if you really "can't lie and can't hate", or even if you have ordinary human difficulties with a policy of full-on lying and hating, then you must come to the view that for some people it is perfectly OK to be homosexual. But either way it isn't really an urgent problem. The Johnses were applying to foster children between the ages of five and ten, not teens troubled about their sexuality. It's absurd to make their views on homosexuality a shibboleth.

But the Johnses themselves, no doubt egged on by rich backers, decided to turn the case into a matter of principle. they wrote to the council "We take these statements and others to mean that it is either your policy, or your understanding of the law, that Christians and other faith groups who hold the view that any sexual union outside a marriage between a man and a woman is morally reprehensible are persons who are unfit to foster. In short you seem to be suggesting that Christians (such as us) can only adopt if we compromise our beliefs regarding sexual ethics"

This is the view that Lord Justice Munby has described as a "travesty of reality". He goes on to say that:

Greens call for end to religious discrimination

Sydney Star Observer, 16 February 2011:

The NSW Greens have called for the closing of loopholes in the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act that allow businesses owned by religious groups to discriminate against students, employees and clients if they hold that something about them conflicts with their beliefs.

Currently religious groups may refuse to hire GLBTs or terminate their employment, while GLBTI children can be forced out of a school with no redress.

The law was passed before homosexuality was decriminalised in NSW but has remained on the books ever since.

Greens lead candidate for the Legislative Assembly, David Shoebridge, said the party supported removing the exemptions and replacing them with a bill of rights that enshrined protection from such discrimination, while the NSW Government and the Coalition parties did not.

“Once a religious organisation receives taxpayer money to fund its operations, whether it’s a school, welfare services or accommodation, then it is absolutely unacceptable that they be allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual identity, their religion or being a single mother,” Shoebridge said.

The Greens state election candidate for Marrickville, Fiona Byrne, echoed the call, singling out the NSW Attorney General for criticism.

“The NSW Attorney Genenal John Hatzistergos should be protecting the vulnerable in society rather than defending an antiquated law allowing students to be expelled due to their sexuality,” said Byrne.

A spokesman for the Attorney General told media the law was necessary “to maintain a sometimes delicate balance between protecting individuals from unlawful discrimination while allowing people to practise their own beliefs”.

The Shadow Attorney General, Greg Smith indicated he believed the law needed changing, but that was not the view of his party.