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This article is more than 1 year old

The Sydney Anglican church should apologise for its conduct in the marriage law postal survey, rather than lobby to “legalise bullying against LGBTIQ students”, the independent New South Wales MP and Equality Campaign co-chair Alex Greenwich has said.

Greenwich issued a stinging rebuke after a group of 34 Anglican principals demanded exemptions from discrimination law be preserved until a positive right to freedom of religion was created, saying the church should repair its relationship with the LGBTIQ community after “knowingly” harming it in the campaign.

Greenwich has written to Michael Stead, the bishop of South Sydney, seeking a formal apology from the Anglican church – which donated $1m to the Coalition for Marriage campaign against same-sex marriage – for “harmful and damaging conduct” in the postal survey.

Greenwich said the church chose not to “argue for your view of so-called ‘traditional’ marriage” but instead targeted the most vulnerable members of the LGBTIQ community with ads “attacking families with same-sex parents and trans and gender diverse young people”.

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The Coalition for Marriage – of which the Sydney Anglican church was a member – ran television ads warning if marriage equality were legalised schools would allow boys to wear dresses and compel students to roleplay same-sex relationships.

“It’s deeply troubling that instead of seeking to repair the church’s relationship with the LGBTIQ community, who you knowingly harmed during the postal survey, your church is now seeking the power to legalise bullying against LGBTI students and teachers in non-government schools,” Greenwich said.

Greenwich accused the church of seeking to “disrupt and undermine” the inclusiveness of Australian society.

Stead said he was happy to meet Greenwich to discuss the issue, adding it was “disappointing that he continues to mischaracterise our participation in the national plebiscite and now falsely accuses us of seeking to legalise bullying”.

“As the plebiscite revealed almost four in 10 Australians opposed to redefining marriage, it is clear there are deeply and sincerely held views on both sides of the issue,” he told Guardian Australia. “It would be more helpful to acknowledge this than to misrepresent disagreement as some type of misconduct which requires an apology.”

The federal government is seeking to remove exemptions in the Sex Discrimination Act that allow religious schools to discriminate on sexuality and gender identity.

Talks with Labor stalled when the opposition warned the government’s bill would allow religious schools to indirectly discriminate in order to avoid “injury” to the schools’ religious sensibilities.

The letter from 34 NSW Anglican schools, sent to all MPs and senators, argued that teachers must support “the values, ethos and mission of the school as much as he or she can”.

It said it was a “reasonable expectation” that teachers not “undermine or denigrate the beliefs and teachings of the employing school”.

The schools said existing exemptions from discrimination law were “clumsy” but were “the only significant legal protections available to schools to maintain their ethos and values with regard to core issues of faith”.

“A more general positive right would be far better but until such time as religious freedom is codified in legislation, the exemptions should remain.”

Entrenching the power to hire and fire gay teachers and eject gay students was one of the central demands of the Catholic church, the Anglican Diocese of Sydney and Christian Schools Australia in submissions to the still unreleased Ruddock religious freedom review.

Labor has provided in-principle support to a Greens bill removing exemptions that allow discrimination against staff and students but Labor senators have also warned that legal changes should allow religious schools to preserve their “ethos” and prevent contradiction of church doctrines.

The Greens’ LGBTIQ spokeswoman, Janet Rice, has questioned whether merely being out as an LGBT person is enough to “undermine or denigrate the beliefs and teachings of an employing school”. If so, “then that’s homophobia and transphobia, not religious freedom”, she said.

“The Greens support freedom of religion to be included in a charter of rights and I call upon the Anglican diocese of Sydney to support us in achieving that,” she said. “But freedom of religion is not a licence to discriminate against LGBTIQ+ people.”