An article written by Emma Kemp for The Guardian, published on 4 Oct 2022.
A link to the article itself: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/oct/04/andrew-thorburn-resigns-as-essendon-ceo-after-one-day-over-links-to-controversial-church
A Few Comments
- This was quite a controversial development in Australia
- Some context for international readers:
- AFL is the Australian Football League, which administers a national level competition of Australian Rules Football (a popular sport in Australia, which is almost exclusively played here)
- Essendon (nicknamed the Bombers) is one of the clubs participating in the AFL, based in Melbourne (the capital of the Australian state of Victoria)
- Daniel Andrews is the Premier of Victoria
- City on the Hill is a Pentecostal church in Australia, similar to an Evangelical church in the US. They’re headquartered in Melbourne
- It was interesting (but not surprising) to see how quickly conservative Christians played the persecution card. For perspective, here is a link to a CSF Article on the real persecution perpetrated by Christianity for 1500 years: https://thecsf.xyz/christianity-starts-its-1500-years-of-persecution/
- It seems to me:
- People claiming this is persecution have no idea what persecution is, and are quite inconsistent how and when they apply this term
- It is not even religious discrimination, but a clash of values between two organisations, which meant the same chairman was just not tenable
- This was a high-profile recruitment failure
- If Andrew Thorburn chaired another club/organisation advocating racism it would have posed the same problem, with the same outcome
- Although Australia is a relatively secular country, it is clear that many conservative Christians still push for discrimination based on their Biblical views and that homosexuality is, for some unknown reason, a real hot-button issue for them. There are after all, many other outdated and barbaric Biblical passages which they happily ignore, but they continue to selectively focus on Old Testament examples of homophobia
- It looks like this conservative Christian element with homophobic views may be over-represented in sports
- In May 2019 Rugby Australia terminated the contract of Israel Folau, a member of the Wallabies (the Australian national team) for making strong anti-gay statements
- This was another high-profile controversy about the same issues, and all the same predictable responses
- We’ll publish a Special Feature on the Israel Folau case in the next couple of days to do more of a deep-dive on this.