However they dress up their worries in the rhetoric of freedom, the great complaint of the naysayers is having to campaign at all. A faith that once faced lions is indignant about being challenged.

“We’re under assault,” cries Cory Bernardi but offers no proof of rough treatment. Sure, the contest has been a bit too willing at times but where’s the biff? Where are the martyrs? Who has actually been silenced?

Free speech has won every round that matters in this contest.

Yet the Catholic archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, lists at number two on his scare sheet of “5 reasons I will be voting no”: “People’s right to speak freely is endangered if they can be dragged before anti-discrimination tribunals, fined or fired for speaking in favour of real marriage.”

Put to one side Fisher’s legal right to fire anyone he employs who speaks in favour of equal marriage, what’s he talking about here?

One Christian at IBM and another at Macquarie University have both been targeted by a zealous yes warrior who reckons they should be dismissed because their advocacy for traditional marriage is at odds with the ethos of their employers. So have they lost their jobs? No and nor should they.

The result? A good win for free speech.

Julian Porteous, archbishop of Hobart, faced an anti-discrimination tribunal last year when another yes zealot Martine Delaney complained a church booklet on marriage was insulting and offensive to gay men and women and the children they raise.

Was Porteous dragged? Hardly. Handcuffed? No. He had a couple of conciliation sessions with Delaney who then withdrew her complaint in May last year. The church won.

Yet every campaigner for no cites the Hobart case as an outrage against liberty. Porteous speaks darkly of issues left unanswered by the Tasmanian anti-discrimination commissioner, “In particular the ability of the church to freely express its view on marriage.”

But Your Grace, you won. Hands down. The church’s freedom to distribute your pamphlet Don’t Mess with Marriage is now beyond question across Australia.

Even the Institute of Public Affairs, while deploring the laws in Tasmania, acknowledged the result as a victory for free speech and freedom of religion.

Those unhappy mothers in those television ads afraid their boys will be put into frocks and endure lessons on gender fluidity don’t remind viewers that the church campaign – backed heavily by News Corp – killed the federal Safe Schools program.

The last federal money runs out in October. It won’t be renewed this side of a Labor victory at the polls.

I don’t call that a victory for free speech, but who can deny it was a smashing victory for the hardliners of the faith. It’s their biggest win in the perpetual syllabus wars since they lost on evolution.

Depicting such victories as defeats is strategy 101: always claim to be the underdog. But there is something else going on here: a sense that the real offence to religious liberty is having to go into battle to defend it. Win or lose, the hardliners resent the contest. It shouldn’t be necessary. And it shouldn’t be so hard.

Church leaders have been complaining for years about finding themselves driven from the public square. They love that phrase. It’s so first century. Well they are in the square now and finding it uncomfortable.

They feel the rules are skewed against them. In a way they’re right. What works in the pulpit doesn’t work in the square.

The message of every sermon I heard when I was growing up – and I sat through hundreds – was fear of the future. Over and over again I was told that only Christ could save us from the terrors that lie ahead.

It kept me in line for years.

Tony Abbott preaches the terrifying consequences of equal marriage. John Howard in his grizzled suburban way has the same message of fear. So do those unhappy mums on TV.

At the launch of the no campaign last Saturday night Cory Bernardi preached pure terror: should equal marriage become law, anti-discrimination laws will be “weaponised” and “legal warfare” will be waged against supporters of traditional marriage.

Bernardi’s congregation gave him an ovation. But out in the square citizens are doing what worshippers never dare from the pews: asking questions, disputing facts and even, from time to time, having a laugh at the expense of the religious.

Hardliners find this difficult to handle. They are used to respect and obedience. It’s the air they breathe. Anything less can seem a portent of the dystopian future in which religious liberties will disappear one by one once we allow equal marriage.

They should take heart.

Don’t doubt the sincerity of the fight to limit the rights of LGBTI. That’s deep in the DNA of the faiths

The laws of God may be going out the window, but the laws of politics will remain hard and fast. All the dark outcomes predicted by Bernardi and Abbott and Howard and the commentariat of News Corp must first pass parliament.

Politicians aren’t going to suddenly commit political suicide just because blokes can marry each other. Democracy will continue to work. Nothing will change without public backing. Parliaments will be the best protection the churches have for religious liberty.

But not for religious privilege. That’s where the warriors of no have every reason to worry about the future.

Over the last 60 years, the people of Australia have walked away from traditional Christian teaching on sex and marriage. This profound shift has been fought every step of the way by the churches. But where the community has led, parliaments have eventually followed.

Secular law is permeated with church doctrine that’s not about mercy or turning the other cheek. Euthanasia. Surrogacy. Abortion. Contempt for LGBTI. These laws are inevitably under scrutiny by a community less and less persuaded by old church teaching.

In the face of this slide, church leaders are demanding in the name of religious liberty that there be no more change. Things must stay as they are. That’s not a demand for freedom, but protection.

The postal ballot is a great risk for the churches. Their power has always rested on the shadowy notion that they can rally great forces in a crisis. Well the crisis has come but this time their remaining power will be precisely calibrated. The result will be known down to the last number.

Very secular.

But if they do lose, and lose badly, other changes will follow. That’s inevitable. But we won’t fall off a cliff. Change will be democratic, slow and cautious. It always is in this country. Attacks on true religious liberty are unimaginable.

Don’t doubt the sincerity of the fight to limit the rights of LGBTI. That’s deep in the DNA of the faiths. But they are fighting this campaign knowing that anything but a convincing win will transform their political standing in this country for the worse.

A bad loss in the ballot will confirm there is indeed a slippery slope here, and they are on it.

But if they win, Australia will have fallen victim to martyrs that never were and fears that could never be realised mustered by faiths that hold to a distaste for homosexuality that this country no longer shares.

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