I Thought The Greens Were A Secular Party

For a nominally secular party, the Greens are certainly talking up the fact they have just installed “the first Muslim woman appointed to any parliament in Australia”, into Cate Faehrmann’s soon to be vacant NSW Legislative Council seat.

New MP, Mehreen Faruqi even claims to be the “first Greens MP in NSW from a migrant background”. Her predecessor is of course not from a migrant background, because she is white, despite Faehrmann / Fährmann clearly being at least partly of German extraction.

What she really means in that she’s the first choccy frog the Greens have seen fit to place sufficiently high on their Senate ticket to actually get elected. That the NSW Greens are trumpeting this is telling. A look at their MPs reveals what a bunch of white, university educated, middle class lefties they really are.

Why make an issue of Mehreen Faruqi’s Islamic background / faith at all? Is she going to be pushing Islamic issues from within a putatively strongly secular party?

Oh, but it’s about promoting diversity. Promoting the identity politics and associated tokenism which are core to this preachy, politically pious lot’s ideology, more like it.

People are categorized according to the source of their oppression: race, gender, cultural background, economic resources, sexuality, disability. Then the predominantly white, university educated, middle class lefties set about fervently fighting for social justice and railing against the exclusion of anyone who ticks at least one (and preferably more) of their boxes. Of course, if you’re fighting for the right causes, it’s OK to maintain a privileged position, like David Shoebitch’s home in Woollahra, perfectly legally in his wife's name and his money presumably safely in a trust. Were we all so privileged with the legal education and means to secure our assets from confiscation, David!

How progressive of these enlightened white people to have welcomed a brown person into their club … and a Muslim too. But Muslims being in general more antagonistic toward women and homosexuals than all but the most fundamentalist Christians is something they’ll conveniently overlook, because Muslims tend to be brown people and therefore by definition oppressed … and Christians tend to make softer targets.

If the Greens honestly pursued the secularism and egalitarianism they pretend are part of their “core values”, their press release would not have even mentioned Mehreen Faruqi’s religion, because in a secular polity, that is a private matter and should have no bearing on the policies she will promote when she enters parliament.

Judging by Mehreen Faruqi’s stated aims of supporting feminism and same sex marriage, if she still adheres to the faith in which she was raised, she must be one of the minority striving to drag it out of the mediaeval era. It will be interesting to see how she reacts to statements by more conservative Islamic “leaders” when they can’t help themselves and open their mouths again.