David Jennings can't be serious! Forgiveness is not inactivity! It sets the basis for a renewed relationship; it keeps the door open to reconciliation; it offers mercy instead of hard justice; it responds with love instead of hate. And best of all, God's reality is glimpsed.

I am serious. No matter how sweetly expressed the sentiments are you need to look at what concrete result will be for the person who suffers the wrong. Forgiveness is not a choice that we can make on the behalf of others. It is up to the person who has been hurt to decide whether to forgive or not.

Talking sweetly and saying all the 'right' things whilst taking away other people's basic rights is not liberation. It is oppression (with sanctimony chucked in).

We all deserve the right to freedom of speech.

However, such freedom comes with responsibility, legal and moral.

I have the freedom to drive my car anywhere around Australia, however that doesn't mean I can drive it in a manner outside the law, or ram into groups of people because I dislike the look of them.

The same is with speech. Say what you like, but expect repercussions. If you're telling porkies about someone, especially from a platform such as Bolt's, or if you're vilifying or discriminating against a group without reasonable grounds... You are breeching your responsibility. Your right to free speech does not overarch the rights of others to live peacefully among society.

And should we all act like Mother Teresa? Sure, we'd like to. But we shouldn't be letting people get away for doing the wrong thing by others. Jesus may have turned the other cheek, but he also stepped in to stop the injustice of a woman being stoned to death.

TrashcanMan

'But we shouldn't be letting people get away for doing the wrong thing by others. Jesus may have turned the other cheek, but he also stepped in to stop the injustice of a woman being stoned to death.'

Actually TrashcanMan Jesus was showing that His mercy triumps over judgement. The woman deserved like every sinner to die along with the man she had a fling with. God's mercy allowed her to live not because it was the wrong thing according to the law for her to die. He also illustrated how we are lawbreakers by challenging her accusers to throw the first stone if they were without sin. All sinners deserve to die like you and me however God's mercy offers forgiveness through Christ.

Interesting "was it possible for them to ask: What can we, Aboriginal Australians, learn from Bolt?"

Their response was based on ego and the expectation that "we are entitled!"

To this or that or something else .. but fundamentally, this is the age of the entitled ones, and everyone lines up for this once they have been coached that there is something in it for them, or that they might lose something if they don't.

It's interesting too that that the people who feel so entitled and so aggrieved by others, all too often exhibit the same behavior.

Didn't someone recently compare fornicating with a horse to be less offensive than another person .. for disagreeing with them>

Didn't someone else who "thought" his tweet was private (uh huh sure he did wink wink) make the allusion that the opposition leader is a pedophile? This person's reputation is destroyed now as on objective player.

If the distressed ones did not make such a big deal of this, it would have vanished of into historical vagueness, with all the other prattlings of like minded irritants of the left and right .. thankfully Bolt doesn't twitter, the left's instant reaction to the world around them.

So the aggrieved have brought this to the fore, brought it and themselves into the light, we will forever now be exposed to their faults, not their virtues .. gee, thanks, I think.

So could they learn from Bolt, sure, they could have, however the kneejerk "over-entitled" reaction of the left to any conservative prod .. they believe they MUST behave in the exact opposite manner, usually to their own detriment. (amusingly)

Of course, learning from experience appears to be something they are not good at, they demand wisdom in the same way they demand attention .. because they are "entitled" to it. PhDs for everyone!

Thank you for this contemplative piece and welcome to Australia. The Bolt case has indeed conflated something that would have simply disappeared had not the nine people claiming racial identity as Australian aboriginals, identified in Bolt's articles, sought to use a law not used for 16 years to cover the hurt, offence and humiliation the Bolt articles engendered.

If I were one of the nine I think I might have felt ashamed before I felt offended. The intention of the articles was not to offend and in polite circles it is bad manners to take offence when no offence was intended. The articles were to highlight that in this country there are those who claim a particular racial identity because in choosing that racial identity there are benefits, baubles and beads to be had. And as it turns out none of the nine denied receiving those benefits, baubles and beads even though it meant more disadvantaged others of the same racial identity were thereby denied them.

Perhaps therein lay the humiliation and the shame of Bolt's message-so the messanger had to be shot down by a mean-spirited law which does nothing to promote unity or understanding and certainly not forgiveness.