Australia’s greatest tennis player turned Christian minister is vilified every January for daring to hold a traditional view of marriage and biology.

Like clockwork, at this time every year the high-priests of diversity condemn the 78-year-old grandmother for the unforgivable sin of holding views divergent to their own.

These preachers of tolerance and love summon every derogatory term they can conjure to demonise the sporting great for daring to believe — as Christians always have — that two men don’t make a marriage and that imagining you are a woman doesn’t make it so.

Normally the baying mob demand that her name be erased from the tennis arena named in her honour.

This hunting season they are demanding that she does not receive the nation’s highest award for her services to sport.

But the venom directed at the winner of 24 singles grand slam titles is especially toxic this year, even by the Left’s own pernicious standards.

Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews spoke at length about her but, pointedly, refused to use her name.

“I’m quite sick of talking about that person every summer,” he told journalists yesterday, emphasising the word “that”.

The irony of refusing to use the name of a person you disagree with because you are against dehumanising fellow citizens was lost on the media pack and no doubt never even occurred to the righteously indignant Premier.

Andrews said “that person” who ought not be named held views that were “disgraceful, hurtful and cost lives”.

How it was that Dan Andrews could remember the views of a senior citizen on the other side of the country, while having no recollection of how the most important decisions of his government’s hotel quarantine program were made, is a mystery.

And how many lives would be lost because of that person’s views he did not say.

Might it be more or less than the 800 lives lost, not because of “views” but because of actions his own inept government took in response to the pandemic?

“I think it’s worth saying again: Grand Slam wins don’t give you some right to spew hatred and create division,” Andrews said.

Someone needs to tell the Premier that having different views is not creating division, but demanding that someone not be honored for sporting achievements because they do not hold state-approved views most certainly does create division — and is nothing if not a manifestation of hatred for those with whom you disagree.

Oh, and “that person” has a name. It’s Margaret Court.

She’s far more a lady than Daniel Andrews will ever be a gentleman.