Do you not remember the off season we just had? Take your pick.
This off season showed exactly why religious freedom should have nothing to do with the Folau case (except in his mind and the thousands of donators, politicians and supporters who are desperate to be martyrs and persecuted Christians and think somehow that their precious beliefs are so unique and valuable they should be awarded greater consideration than other people's...).
Ben Barba ran afoul of modern attitudes about treatment of women. In many places at many times, organisations would never dare judge a man for the way he chooses to "discipline" his wife. Thankfully that is no longer the case.
If he was claiming that the bible gave him dominion over his wife and therefore his religious freedom was being hurt by the NRL (which is not that far fetched, many men mistreat their wives under the protection of the bible/their religion), at this point in time we would all laugh at him, including the Australian Christian Lobby and the most sycophantic conservative politicians.
Hopefully "religious freedom" will continue to be weakened and derided as a useful concept in coming years, so we get to the point where no one could contemplate using hateful and dangerous language against people for their sexual orientation and then claim they are expressing some perversion of religious freedom.
When the prevailing attitude to mistreating people because of their sexual orientation is the same as the prevailing attitude to men mistreating their wives, Christians will no longer be as brazen as Folau in their bigotry (of course, at this point most Christians will be like everyone else and share the dominant ideology that sexual orientation is irrelevant to how a person should be treated).
