Obscure Thirty-Year Old Law Allows Christian Schools In Australia To Expel Homosexual Students Simply Because Of Their Sexual Orientation

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a 30-year old New South Wales law that allows private schools to expel gay students simply because they are gay. Attorney General John Hatzistergos supports the law, through a spokesperson it called it necessary “to maintain a sometimes delicate balance between protecting individuals from unlawful discrimination while people to practice their own beliefs.” The archaic law is actually a leftover from a time when homosexuality was illegal, offering private schools an exemption from any obligation to enrol or deal fairly with students who are homosexual. An expulsion requires no other reason than the sexual orientation itself. When it was introduced in the 1980s the then attorney general said in Parliament “The facts of political life require acceptance of the claim of churches to conduct autonomous educational institutions with a special character and faith commitment.” Now, however, churches have taken a different stance, the Anglican bishop of South Sydney, Robert Forsyth, saying of the law “I don’t think our schools would want to use it.” Nicholas Parkhill, the chief executive of ACON, NSW’s and Australia’s largest community-based gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender health and HIV/AIDS organization condemned the law as “deeply offensive, patently unethical and damaging to our society on multiple levels. Recent research shows that young same-sex-attracted people are up to 14 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers and that 80 per cent of the verbal or physical abuse they experience occurs in schools. Allowing religious schools to reinforce this negative experience by giving them the right to expel the victims of homophobic attitudes is incomprehensible."