Parliamentary inquiry into religious freedom told that laws should help people with differing views on marriage ‘live and let live’

Senior Australian Catholics have warned that marriage equality should not be a matter of “winner takes all” five months after unsuccessfully advocating a no vote in the postal survey which led to its legalisation.

Fourteen years after the Howard government defined marriage in the civil law as exclusively between a man and woman – a move supported by the Catholic church – Michael Casey from the Australian Catholic University (ACU) told a parliamentary inquiry into religious freedom that laws should help people with differing views on marriage “live and let live”.

At a hearing on Wednesday numerous witnesses from organised religions told the joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade inquiry that marriage equality has changed Australian culture and laid bare the fragility of protections for religious freedom.

Casey, who is the director of the PM Glynn Institute, a public policy institute within the ACU, said there are different views in society about “what a marriage is” and how far it extends.

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Casey said that rather than requiring one view of marriage be validated by “forcing people who don’t agree ... to endorse or cooperate with it, we should as much as possible be creating a space to live and let live” and allow religious people to organise their affairs “consistent with their own beliefs”.

He warned that forcing people to accept others’ views of marriage would lead to “more conflict and acrimony in public debate”.

The Catholic bishop of Broken Bay, Peter Comensoli, told the inquiry that religious people need to be able to lawfully express their views in “all dimensions of their life”.

He said there could be no freedom of religion without the freedom to exercise their beliefs “individually, or in community; privately or publicly”.

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The parliamentary inquiry is separate to the Ruddock review of religious freedoms which has opted for secret hearings and has heard complaints that religion is being forced from the public square as a consequence of the changed definition of marriage in the civil law.

In submissions to the Ruddock review, the Equality Campaign – which won the postal survey campaign – called for exemptions in discrimination law that allow religious institutions such as schools, hospitals and aged-care facilities to discriminate against staff and clients based on beliefs to be abolished.

Religious exemptions were a focus in the campaign because of a threat from the Catholic church to sack staff who engaged in same-sex marriage and because of the sacking of a gay teacher in Western Australia.

Submissions to the Ruddock review from Christian schools have sought to protect their right to hire and fire teachers based on adherence to religious practice while the Catholic church and Sydney Anglican church have called for a religious freedom act to positively protect religious exemptions to discrimination law.

Casey, who was not asked about the Catholic threat to sack their staff, said Australian society needed to discourage the default view that people with strong opposing beliefs are one’s enemies, adding “we need to de-escalate these things”.

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Lee-Anne Perry, the executive director of the Queensland Catholic Education Commission, told the parliamentary inquiry that Catholic schools’ right to hire and fire staff is not a matter of “discriminating against” certain people but rather “positively selecting for those who are supportive” of their values.

The Australian Marriage Equality co-chair Alex Greenwich told Guardian Australia the public had “a very long national discussion about marriage equality, and ultimately the parliament legislated to achieve the balance between the protecting of the religious celebration of marriage with allowing all LGBTI to be treated equally and to marry the person they love”.

“Obviously there are various views across the country on religious freedom, however the overwhelming experience of the marriage equality movement was that Australians do believe in a live-and-let-live approach, and therefore feel the disproportionate discrimination that still exists in many laws against LGBTI people is completely inappropriate,” he said.