When Your Doctor Diagnoses You as Racist

The news today that some two thousand doctors have signed a petition backed by the Australian Medical Association that those who oppose same sex marriage are acting like racists is a portent of the future.

You can read the full article here.

In fact the future has arrived a lot quicker than we might have imagined – it’s here now.

Less than ten years ago the President of the USA, himself a man who had to tackle racism, was avowedly in the “marriage is between a man and a woman camp.”  And we know that to be the case for many of our politicians in Australia, including one who could have herself been racially abused, Penny Wong.

The petition letter states:

“To speak out against one sector of the community for wanting access to what everyone else can claim freely is discrimination in line with that historically practiced (sic) against non-white ­people throughout the Western world,”

Leaving aside the fact that racism exists among non-white people towards other non-white people through the entire world, the petition is pulling no punches.  Many have suggested, to the scorn of those who disagree, that a time will come when to hold the traditional view on marriage will mean exclusion from a variety of vital civic and social positions within our culture.

Political leaders on the Left are equally concerned about “conservative doctors treating same sex patients.”  That’s the shrivelled opinion of the Greens leader Dr Richard di Natale.

Frankly it’s an insult to any doctor who, in the average week, sees many a patient whose lifestyle they disagree with, yet who is completely capable of hiding their distaste and acting in a professional manner.  The same is true for psychiatrists and psychologists.  Just because the good er, doctor, now operates in a theatre in which verbal abuse towards one opponent is cheered with glee, does not mean everyone else is so gauche.

Di Natale’s comment also reveals how little our secular political leaders know about how religion works.  They fail to understand that religious people can hold in tension a position they disagree with from someone who holds that position.  Something di Natale and his secular ilk, hermetically sealed off from religious experience, are clearly incapable of doing.  We truly get the politicians we deserve.

What next?  Is the medical examination board going to test your buy-in to a whole raft of sexual causes before it determines whether you can practice?  Yes, yes of course it is. Just as all other associations in the medical and social sciences field are going to do.  Anyone who says otherwise is flying in the face of the evidence.

Now the fact is that the petition has been produced by a third year medical student.  So perhaps we should not be too concerned, And some have sought to pour cold water on what this petition means because of that.  After all what is a third year medical student compared with the great and gravity-inducing weight of mature doctors who have served for many decades, and who see through such long-bow arguments?

She’s the future – that’s what she is.  The third year medical students of today are the GPs, surgeons, psychiatrists, specialists of the next three decades.  By the time they are running their own practices and overseeing complex procedures in major hospitals, opposition to same sex marriage being viewed as the equivalent of racism will be the new norm.

I don’t agree with everything Rod Dreher says in The Benedict Option, but he makes a prescient observation that in the coming decades in the West, jobs and roles that were once open to those who hold orthodox Christian beliefs on sexuality will no longer be. It’s not scaremongering all the signs are there.

And given many orthodox Christians have traditionally gone into the health industries at a percentage well above their general population numbers, it will be interesting to see where they choose to direct their energies.  I suppose they may find there are plenty of countries struggling with huge medical issues who would be grateful for well educated and trained doctors who are barred from practising in their home countries.  It could well open up a new medical mission field.

That is, of course, assuming that universities let young, aspirational orthodox Christians train in their medical faculties in the first place.  For if the sexular zeitgeist began on the campuses of our major cities across the West, you can be sure there be all sorts of pro formas to weed out dissent.  At some stage there won’t be any water upstream, so the flow into the medical profession will dry up.

Former UK Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron made the point, after being hounded from his role due to his orthodox views on marriage, despite being at the forefront of public policy that advocated marriage equality, that it will soon be no longer possible to be an orthodox Christian and hold public political office in the UK.  And what is true of politics will soon be true of other professions.  If you want to argue my point, don’t, argue Farron’s instead, he lost his job over it.

I don’t feel sorry for the Christian doctors of today.  They’ll probably have enough time left to ride out the storm, and dodge and weave their way to retirement.  I feel sorry for the bright young Christians who, while they hold an orthodox view of marriage, interact with and have gay friends and who wouldn’t have a racist bone in their bodies, yet who nevertheless will come under enormous pressure to put a pinch of incense on the altar to Caesar just to keep things quiet.

Those who will be required to publicly pay homage to the great god of sexual identity if they wish to take part in the social and public activities that the fifty year olds such as myself have taken for granted.  I hope our churches are going to support such young people, because they are going to be increasingly lonely.

There may be no pill to cure racism, but you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be a therapy in the social sciences to combat its perceived sexual equivalent – opposition to same sex marriage.