"Keep your Rosaries off my Refugees"?

Very much worth reading is Dennis Shanahan’s peace in the August 18 edition of The Australian: 'Heads I win, tails you lose'.

He writes about the way that a number of Conservative MPs declared that they would vote against the refugee and immigration bill for religious reasons and thus ensured that it never saw the light of day.

And he notes that there has not even been a squeak about this invasion of religious principles into politics from the Greens or the Democrats. He writes:

There's something missing, something that is illogical and contrary to the prevailing political mood and a golden thread that joins this act of conscience with others on a range of moral issues: Where are the attacks on all these people for acting on religious beliefs? Where is Australian Greens senator Kerry Nettle's sectarian T-shirt mocking Joyce's Catholicism and urging him to keep his "rosaries off our refugees"? Why isn't Australian Democrats leader Lyn Allison deploring Fielding's links with "Hillsongy types"? Was this not a conspiracy between the churches and proselytisers of the US Bible Belt and our home-grown bible bashers?

By now we have all seen (and possibly filled in) the Democrat’s silly questionnaire of the separation of church and state.

Shanahan comments:

The Democrats' confused campaign to rightly maintain a separation of church and state is being misdirected against the equal right of individuals to hold religious beliefs and use them in exercising their parliamentary duty.