Louise Greentree, 18th June 2008
In 1995 noted Australian feminist and author Helen Garner published her book ‘The First Stone’. In this she examined the case of two charges of indecent assault that were brought by the Victorian Police against the then Master of Ormond College, Melbourne University. The Police were acting on the complaints of two female students. While recounting her journey to try to interview as many people involved in the case as possible (including the two complainants and a number of their supporters all of whom refused to be interviewed), she tried to understand why the complaints were brought and why events unfolded the way they did. In that process she also mused upon feminism and feminist ideology as it had developed from the days of early feminism when she was an activist.
Now in 2008, Louise Greentree writes about the way in which two student complaints (one anonymous) against a man who was once an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, complaints which were never communicated to him at any relevant time, have found their way into material that is being used against him by the Anglican Church in Australia Professional Standards Unit Sydney Diocese which is purporting to exercise a disciplinary role over him and the whole of his family in the Anglican Parish of Figtree. No doubt the Anglican Church in Australia Sydney Diocese would be particularly surprised to find that it was being used to further any form of feminist ideology, particularly in view of the Diocese’s notorious opposition to the ordination of women. However, the author has found fascinating, and frightening parallels between the two cases which would indicate that women and men have been ill-served by the ideologues, both Christian and feminist.
In addition, of particular interest is the fact there are parallels between these two cases and the original case of the woman taken in adultery who was brought by the Jewish religious leaders one morning into the presence of Jesus as he taught in the Temple in Jerusalem. The important issue here is the false nature of this action by the religious leaders. This was not a case of honest indignation but an attempt to trap Jesus into recommending one of two courses of action, mutually damaging to his continuing ministry. The first would have been to endorse the law of Moses which provided for stoning to death of adulterers, both the man and the woman, notwithstanding the fact that this penalty had not been carried out for hundreds of years, divorce plus financial compensation being the more usual remedy. But to make such a recommendation offended the law of the occupying nation, Rome, which did not provide for the death penalty in such cases. The second recommendation would be to say ‘do not stone her’. But this offended the law of God as revealed to Moses . How adroitly Jesus turned the ‘trap’ around by setting a limit on how the killing could be carried out, by defining who might throw that first stone as ‘he who has done no wrong’ or in earlier translations ‘he who is without sin’. In this passage the word ‘sin’ might be construed narrowly or broadly (as ‘any sin’). The whole incident constituted a flagrant breach of the strict laws and procedures that were required by Jewish law before such a penalty could be carried out. Thus, even the narrow interpretation precluded the religious leaders and their witnesses from taking up that first stone.
In this case and in the two cases under discussion in this paper the woman or women at the centre were and are pawns in a much more vicious power-play, and to assist this objective the observance of proper procedures were similarly abandoned and justice compromised.
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‘The First Stone’ Revisited