“Trans” Rights v Religious Liberty?

Here’s What’s Happening in Australia

Mainstream Australia is at last hearing of the travails of one Sall Grover.

A young Sydney mum and entrepreneur, Sall created a women’s-only social networking app called Giggle for Girls, and was subsequently sued by a bloke in a frock for discrimination.

Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act — and the courts that interpreted it — decided that no, women don’t deserve their own spaces, and yes, men can be women too.

Sall is down at least a million dollars for her trouble, has shed many tears, and still has a High Court challenge ahead of her.

As heroic as Sall Grover is — and I commend her — she happens to be collateral in a much larger war raging. I’m not talking about a culture war but a theological one.

Since the 1960s, Australia, like the rest of the West, has set about unshackling itself from the transcendent norms upon which our civilisation was built: in a word, Christianity.

This began as a game of subtraction: a stripping away of taboos, sexual boundaries and cultural confines. But nature abhors a vacuum, and one set of values will inevitably give way to another. Set aside one theology and a novel one will always take its place.

The subset of theology known as anthropology — what it means to be human — marks the frontline of this theological war.

Under Christianity, there were two sexes: male and female. Marriage and family formed naturally, and only, from this pairing. Sex was sacred and reserved for matrimony. Life was sacred too, from the womb to the tomb.

Australia didn’t just subtract those Christian beliefs. We substituted them. Under the new woo-woo anthropology, our desires are our identity, sex is a spectrum, a child can be born in the wrong body, and life begins only when it’s wanted.