Michael Kirby Even in the darkest days, my hotline to God was never disconnected. Religions must embrace truth and rationality if they are to coexist with science, says gay Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby. This is an extract from an address given to Sydney's Pitt Street Uniting Church last week. When did you first meet God? For me, it was in kindergarten: Mrs Church's school attached to the Anglican Church of St Andrew at Strathfield. In between the plasticine and interminable concerts, I was introduced to God. Generally speaking, we have been on friendly terms since. When I grew old enough, my parents gave me a Bible which I still have. Many a judicial oath of office I have taken on it, which I certainly did not foresee back in the 1940s. I took this Bible (the King James version, naturally) to Sunday school at St Andrew's, where I learned of Jesus and His love for us all. It was a wonderful discovery and I have never felt parted from that love. For me, it was a human manifestation of God that was more comprehensible to my understanding. God was not, after all, an angry grandfather with a beard. He was a very loving presence. At that time the British Empire still flourished. In the school map, a quarter of the world was coloured red and we were pretty sure that God looked on British subjects with special favour. We did not really want Asians or black people in White Australia; we wanted to remain pure white - just like the images of God's son shown in the stained glass windows. At about this time I also came to know that there were unfortunate people who lived outside this calm and beautiful English church where God dwelt. Some of them were Roman Catholics. It shocked me to learn that they had a bigger church. There was a lot of talk about Mary, described as the "Mother of God". All of this was alien to my beliefs. Even as a boy I knew that Protestant truth had given me a hotline direct to God. Ultimately, I did not need the intercession of bishops and priests. I could speak directly to God. He was always with me. There was no confession to a human being. The English were never obsessively religious and neither was I. In a sense, surrounded by love at home with parents and siblings and close relatives, God was an other-worldly phenomenon of the same type of love extended universally. But then a very strange thing happened to me. I reached puberty. When I realised that my sexual attraction was to people of the same gender, and did not change, I knew that this was not looked on as a good thing. My knowledge did not come from the Reverend Dillon at St Andrews. If ever he read the passage from Leviticus, I must have missed it and all the other strange injunctions appearing there. Nor did it come from my family. But at school, the occasional denunciation of "poofters" led me to know that I should treat my sexual orientation as something very, very bad. The newspapers would occasionally report on famous people entrapped by the police and tried for crimes. At first, I shed a few tears. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. But I got on with my studies, kept speaking to God and continued with life in a state of denial. This, presumably, is what was expected of me by religious people. So far as I knew, my own church said nothing about the subject. Perhaps that was because, in an English type of way, a former supreme governor, King George V, had declared: "I thought people like that shot themselves." But other churches were not so reticent. The Catholic Church, the evangelical Christians and the Jewish religion all spoke about the demons of homosexuality. For an adolescent, full of hope and spirit, these were very frightening times. Especially because you were frightened into silence about your deepest feelings even with those family members closest to you. Do not think that these times have passed in sunny Australia in a new millennium. Violence against people for reasons of their race, gender and sexuality are daily occurrences. Youth suicide is extremely high, especially among boys and young men. Last week I learned of the funeral of a highly talented young man, rejected by his Italian-Australian family because of his sexuality, driven to suicide. At his funeral, after all the prayers and the music, all that could be heard was muttering: "It doesn't matter. He was just a poofter." I was greatly blessed by having many loving friends and companions, homosexual and heterosexual. Especially in finding a loving partner, Johan. He has very little time for religion and churches. He has often said to me: "I don't understand how such an intelligent person can take seriously religions that all oppress women, people of colour and gays." He prefers to volunteer to clean and cook and scrub the toilet bowl for a patient living with HIV. That is his "religion". For 35 years, despite the impediments of the world, we have been together. Not everyone is blessed with such relationships. Not everyone wants them. But they are not evil or disordered - just loving, kind, loyal and mutually supportive. To deny humans such love is truly disordered, unnatural, some may even say evil. My life has coincided with the great advance of science in the study of human sexuality. We knew we were in the atomic era. We saw Sputnik in the sky. We witnessed the advent of jumbo jets, the computer, the human genome. We knew the churches had modified their beliefs about Creation after Darwin's revelations. My generation had complete confidence that science would reveal more truths. One of them concerned a minority of human beings with a sexual attraction to their own sex. We knew that if this reality existed everywhere in nature it could not be "evil". Eventually, if our species survives, rationality will embrace all religions everywhere. Rationality, truth and science must be the modern companions of spiritual belief. They cannot be the enemies for, if they are, science will trump religion every time. I have never been cut off from God. Never in the darkest days of secrets, fear and alienation have I felt removed from the loving presence of God. It might be a presumption, but I never felt myself "intrinsically evil". I never felt guilty of "grave depravity". I knew this was just the way that God and nature meant me to be. It had a purpose. Perhaps it can be seen tonight. We are not at the movies. Johan is out there cleaning a toilet bowl. I am here speaking to you. ENDS Biographical notes: Michael Donald Kirby, AC, CMG, was appointed to the High Court of Australia in February 1996. At the time of his appointment he was President of the New South Wales Court of Appeal, having been appointed to that office in September 1984. He was admitted to the New South Wales Bar in 1967. He was appointed a Deputy President of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in 1975. He served as first Chairperson of the Australian Law Reform Commission from 1975 to 1984. In 1983 he was awarded Companion to the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), and he became a judge of the Federal Court of Australia, serving on that Court until 1984. He has held numerous national and international positions including on the Board of CSIRO, as President of the Court of Appeal of Solomon Islands, as UN Special Representative in Cambodia and as President of the International Commission of Jurists. In 1991 he was awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and in the same year was appointed a Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AC). Justice Kirby was 1998 Laureate of the UNESCO Prize for Human Rights Education. Justice Michael Kirby - 2nd April 2004