c/sydney · by Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone · 12d

It took months for an LGBTQ+ arts pop-up to resurrect an old church – but just three days to shut it down

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/25/it-took-months-for-an-lgbtq-arts-pop-up-to-resurrect-an-old-church-but-just-three-days-to-shut-it-down-ntwnfb

In a statement to the Guardian, Catholic group Fit for the Kingdom said nobody had stopped Divine Playhouse’s organisers from publishing, fundraising, speaking or performing, but that they welcomed the landlord’s decision to “refuse to allow their premises to host hateful content”.

Ummm... contradicting themselves in a misguided effort to sound reasonable? Be offended, express the fact that your offended by it, and have the mutual respect to have a dialogue.

Whether the landlords acted on their own, or were asked by these groups to. Unfortunately it seems this rescinding action is really going to blow up in the landlord's faces.

27 points · 2 comments · view on lemmy.world

2 Comments

blind3rdeye@aussie.zone · 10 pts · 12d (1 reply)

“[This law has] never been applied to moral offensiveness in the way the landlord is seeking to do,” Bradley said. “We don’t doubt that the landlord is offended by what Heaps Gay was doing, but that’s a subjective personal question.”

It would be a very bad precedent to allow the landlord to evict people solely based on the landlord finding them morally offensive. The tenant's behaviour was not illegal, or damaging, or slanderous or anything like that - but the landlord found it 'offensive', and used that as a reason for eviction. If that is allowed to stand, then basically no renter is safe.

Before they were evicted, Divine Playhouse had already made hundreds of bookings and was set to support more than 1500 artists, producers, performers, technicians, small creative businesses and staff during its year-long lease, organisers said.

That's a lot of people who are hurt by this decision, and a lot of lost economic activity amongst people who need it most - apparently crushed without effort or thought by representatives of billionaires.

Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone · 6 pts · 12d

Yeah, I mean maybe theres more to the landlords case than is understood or included in this article, but it seems prettu cut and dru the way a court would jave to land on this unless we're gonna have a minor legislative emergency in NSW.