Joe Hildebrand: Andrew Thorburn is the latest victim of the fundamentally unjust notion of ‘guilt by association’

What do you give the story that has everything? As it turns out, you give it Andrew Thorburn.

Or perhaps more accurately, given the way he came to become the Essendon Football Club CEO in the first place, he gives himself.

The former NAB boss has managed to achieve a remarkable trifecta in recent days – or a holy trinity as those of the one true Christian faith might put it.

Not just being appointed to the position he was leading the search to fill, nor being forced to resign from that position just 24 hours later, but by making Sydney media genuinely engaged in an AFL story.

No wonder the bloke believes in miracles.

And as both a lapsed Catholic and a lapsed Essendon supporter it is a story this Sydney media type is heavily engaged in too.

As is now known to everyone who isn’t living under a rock – including the one in Jerusalem with a dome on it – Thorburn was punted from the Bombers’ top job because he is chair of a small evangelical Christian church that, depending on how you might frame it, either refuses to condone or actively condemns homosexuality and abortion.

This puts it pretty much in line with conservative, orthodox or fundamentalist – take your pick – adherents of all three Abrahamic religions, being Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

But the problem with evangelical churches is that they are, well, evangelical.

And so they often have firebrand preachers openly espousing views that the followers of more mainstream faiths merely quietly believe.

Thus a sermon from a preacher at Thorburn’s church in 2013 actively condemning homosexuality and abortion was posted on the church’s website and has now brought him undone, despite him claiming to be unaware of its presence or contents.

As is appropriate for metaphysical matters, this raises an almost infinite number of questions – but let’s just start with two big ones.

The first, poetically enough, is again a trinity of sorts:

Should Thorburn be culpable for words uttered when he was a mere layperson at the church?

Should he be culpable because he later joined the board of said church?

Or should he be culpable because he is now the chair of said church?

The second is a more binary choice: Do these culpabilities rest on the provocative language of this near decade-old sermon?

Or do they rest on the general beliefs of the church and its congregation that homosexuality and abortion are not in keeping with the church’s values?

It should now be clear to any rational reader that a “yes” to any of the above is – to use a popular progressive term – problematic.

If Thorburn is to be held accountable for the words of another person – that he did not even know were said – then we have entered a wildly new and dangerous phase of the fundamentally illiberal, irrational and unjust notion of “guilt by association”, by which an innocent person may be punished not by what they do but merely who they know.

If, however, he is to be held accountable for views he privately holds himself but has never acted upon then we have entered the equally wild and dangerous territory of “thought crime”, by which an innocent person may be punished not by what they do but because of what they think.

The charge of guilt by association has already been prosecuted in absurd circumstances, from the groundbreakingly gay Ellen DeGeneres being condemned for fraternising with the conservative George W Bush to Scott Morrison being condemned for shaking hands with Donald Trump.

But the notion of thoughtcrime – which is arguably the only credible case for Thorburn’s fall from grace – is if anything even more sinister.

Coined by the great anti-authoritarian crusader George Orwell, its origins go back almost half a millennia.

It was no less a person than Elizabeth I herself who, upon finding herself Queen amid a potential civil war between Catholics and Protestants, declared: “I have no desire to make a window into men’s souls.”

In other words it was only what people did that mattered in public life – not what they thought.

And so there may be many things that Andrew Thorburn has done or not done that he may rightly be condemned for.

Maybe even sacked for.

But if his downfall is purely because of his personal beliefs then we have truly gone back to the dark ages.