What idiots Bolt and Kenny are. Literally, arguing that Catholic and Anglican Archbishops should be able to be heads of churches and Ministers of the State, executing both roles, at the same time in our  Constitutional Secular Democracy? Forget religion the head of the Army could be PM as could Kenny and Bolt and still continue in dual roles as talking heads for Murdoch and running portfolios. Anything less for heaven’s sake is an imposition on individual freedom. Thorburn should have been allowed to execute both roles despite his conflict of interests.

Mind you the two often struggle with women having two roles, particularly if there’s a man around. We heard the incompetent Miranda Devine tongue-lash Andrew Bolt on 2GB when Bolt claimed she was his guest on Steve Price’s Show and he wasn’t hers. Shortly after Bolt was dropped or sank to doing a very failed self-managed 5 episode podcast with his son Dom which sank even deeper.

Andrew Bolt was raised in country towns showing little or no scholastic merit unlike his brother and sister all he was given was a less-than-Australian cultural sense of himself by his mother. He was the son of the headmaster. He was certain he was White Christian Dutch and of European heritage with all the superior cultural traits required to stand above the ordinary Aussie folk he met. He even let us all know he once had a black aboriginal friend.

Bolt’s Racial background was his cultural capital, his claim to fame and his only skill. From the get-go he failed academically but for years had on his CV that he was educated at Adelaide Uni when he wasn’t. He was taught one lesson by his mother and applied it. Who you knew was the far easier path to the top rather than what you knew and he’s never really changed. Without the help of influential friends Andrew Bolt either stagnated or sank. Once when he tried to portray his ex-fiancee, a woman that helped carry him, as somewhat lesser than he was threatened with being sued and publicly red-faced forced to apologise. Even his wife and family were fed tales of his larger-than-life Walter Mitty past. He claimed it was for their protection.

One wonders whether they knew of his family’s origins from Aalsmeer. That it was famous for more than flowers but rather more infamous for its Dutch-Nazi past during WW2 a past Bolt never speaks of. One does wonder why a man obsessed with White Australian and Western History isn’t as obsessed with his own.

Thorburn mourned that “my personal Christian faith is not tolerated or permitted in the public square.” This is incorrect. As he repeatedly pointed out, he manages to keep the less tolerant beliefs that his faith might dictate utterly private if he holds those views at all. It was the leadership role at a crusading church that provoked the temporary uproar and the choice he was given. Barney Zwartz inadvertently underscored this point. By asking why Dan Andrews can continue to lead Victoria as a Catholic if Thorburn could not lead Essendon, he illustrates what is clear to the rational: it is not the faith but the role that was in conflict.

The News Corp Dog Line howled over and over about how the hypocritical “priests of tolerance” were driving us into an almost Stalinist dystopia. Janet Albrechtson ludicrously thundered they would demand a “clean sweep of practising Catholics” from every institution. Kevin Donnelly sited the authoritarian left’s viciousness in their descent from the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror. Andrew Bolt declaimed that the “‘tolerance’ gestapo” and “‘diversity’ thugs” were damning Christians to Hell. Shannon Deery’s column repeats Victorian Opposition Leader, Matthew Guy, querying whether everyone would be banned from attending the services of their chosen faith. Operatic registers of imagined victimhood spilled over thousands of lines of print.

The ABC’s Ita Buttrose bemoaned that what had been a private matter – one’s faith – was now inescapably public. This is not, in general, the case. Leaders in Australian politics, business and social institutions are still mostly men, still mostly white, still mostly culturally Christian. Nobody comments on their church attendance or mere celebration of Christian festivals. The discussion about their faith arises when they are closely associated with a religious institution that would actively impinge on secular society and the rights of others.

Source: That white man’s dystopia – » The Australian Independent Media Network