Why is Israel Folau obsessed with people’s sexuality? When did what other people do and whom they love become the business of a bloke who kicks a ball for a living? Stick to footy codes. Moral codes are above your pay grade. Even at $3 million.
The whole ‘Israel Folau Gays Can Burn in Hell and so can my Footy Career’ thing is nuts. For someone who professes to find gay people some sort of ‘abomination’, Israel Folau sure spends a lot of time focusing on them. I’d reckon it occupies most of his thinking space.
Doth he protest just a little too much? Has something stirred inside him that he can’t silence? I don’t follow football but I’ve seen enough games to observe that of all men’s sports it’s possibly the most homoerotic. Handsome buff men in tight shorts packed in a scrum face to butt. I mean, that’s serious man-on-man business. Lots of sweaty rough and tumble. Lots of macho male bonding. Crikey, they’re just a leather mask short of a Mardi Gras float.
Israel had the world at his feet but his belief in his right to be a Christian bigot saw it all disappear. Now he’s throwing a crowdfunded tantie. And guess what, even though he’s raised over $700k, he’s breached the rules of the platform, who issued a statement that says, ‘As a company we are absolutely committed to the fight for equality for LGBTIQ people and fostering an environment of inclusivity… we do not tolerate the promotion of discrimination or exclusion’. And so all the bigots get their money back.
On the upside, GoFundMe now has a list of homophobes and bigots they can supply as ‘persons of interest’. Folau and his followers have confused religious freedom with hate speech. So now poor ‘where’s my religious freedom to marginalise the gay community and inflict pain and abuse on a group that already has one of the highest suicide rates’ Folau is wanting to take his former employers to court for unfair dismissal. It’s the Folau Show (say it quickly three times).
He had a crack at crowdfunding his ‘right to hate’, which, as a value in itself, is surely the antithesis of christianity. Who exactly is Israel’s Christian God? He sounds like an arsehole. Definitely a man. I certainly don’t remember that God from my years of bible bashing. I was brought up Christian too and I don’t ever remember reading ‘gays will go to hell’ in the Bible. I do remember ‘Love thy neighbour’ and ‘Do unto others as they do to you’ and other fairly clear instructions when it comes to tolerance and social integration.
I really don’t think God is going to judge sexual orientation. Jesus was his own father. He was doing non-binary gender before it was even a thing. I don’t reckon he’d be judgey.
But there is a positive in this story. It belongs to Rugby. Years ago, Folau would probably have got a pat on the back from the other blokes for hating poofs. But not now. Rugby Australian and Folau’s teammates have made it known that they don’t support that kind of attitude; they have also made it known they are disgusted that he attempted to crowdfund cash that could have gone to sick kids.
There’s a GoFundMe campaign launched against Israel Folau by a disgruntled fan from the UK, who is raising money for Rainbow Laces to encourage tolerance and inclusivity across all sports.
On my Twitter feed I found another GoFundMe initiative by someone that was named ‘send gay photos to Israel Folau’. Ironically, the one journalist in Australia who’s become an ally in Folau’s very public fall from grace with Australian Rugby is Alan Jones, the man ABC journalist and author Chris Masters described as ‘… the hidden homosexual, forever hunting for love among the twentysomethings’. What strange ideological bedfellows those two are. In the words of Lewis Carroll, it just gets curiouser and curiouser.
Anyway, Israel, instead of stealing money from dying children to fight for your multi-million-dollar contract, maybe you should just accept your sacking as part of the divine plan. Let’s face it: God Loves Gays, and your sacking, well maybe that’s just ‘God’s will’.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
