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You Are A Heretic!’
YOU ARE A HERETIC!’
Dr. Peter Cameron, Australia’s only official heretic, branded so by the Presbyterian Church of Australia, has flown back home to Scotland, bewildered by his adopted country.
The bearded 50-year-old former minister was tried and convicted for heresy after he said in a sermon that he thought women might make better ministers than men. He appealed to the General Assembly of the Church in New South Wales but his appeal was thrown out. For the past five years he has been principal of the 126-year-old St. Andrew’s College at Sydney University, one of the few all-male university residential colleges remaining in the world. (He received a second rebuff when he moved to have the college made co-ed., saying it perpetuated an unhealthy approach to women.)
His heresy trial took place in 1993, in a Sydney presbytery with a Q.C. prosecuting. ‘I was a solicitor in a "previous life",’ said Dr. Cameron, ‘so I defended myself. Although my comments about women being better ministers than men sparked off the trouble, what they were accusing me of really was my underlying attitude to the Bible. I disagreed with their literal, fundamentalist view. They were saying Paul was against the ordination of women and I was saying: "If Paul says it, so what?" That is what made them really angry. It was a very solemn thing. Ministers had been before such a court before for misdemeanours like theft or adultery; I was the first in the history of Australia to be tried for heresy.
‘I had heard a woman preach, but that wasn’t what influenced me. There are only three Presbyterian women ministers left in Australia now, so far as I know. There were five. There are no new ones coming on.
‘My view was based on what I know about women, rather than their calibre as preachers. Like doctors, there are times when female doctors - with their compassion - are more appropriate than men; and so there are times when female ministers are too.’ The pipe-puffing Dr. Cameron says he has not been influenced by his wife, Elizabeth, ("who tends to regard me as a male chauvinist pig") or his 15-year-old daughter who was "just bemused by seeing her father’s face on the front page."
He says he departs after his years at the helm of the all-male college, with serious worries about Australian men. ‘They have a poor attitude toward women. Most Australian males I’ve come across, either regard women as second-class citizens, or they put them on a pedestal. They either bully their wives or are bullied by them.’ Men playing sport together and drinking together in pubs do not, he says, have deep, meaningful friendships where they can confide in each other; they seemed to be worried that such friendships might be construed as having homosexual overtones. ‘A lot of my male students have come from all-male boarding schools and it doesn’t produce the healthiest approach to women. I wanted my college to be co-ed. and it proved to be my second downfall.’
He felt upset by his male students standing by at roll-call shouting abuse at passing women. Such incidents were indicators of a broader problem of sexism. The college has 200 undergraduates and 15 postgraduates and fellows. Its fees are $6,500 a year and is renowned for its academic and sporting achievements.
Dr. Cameron has no job to go to in Perthshire, and will take a sabbatical and do some writing - a book about his time in Australia. He says he doubts if he would ever return there to live.
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Tim
PomsInOz.com
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