An absurd distraction?
Over at The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting has opined that the US-style culture wars seeping into Britain are an absurd distraction
. One only has to glance at her diatribe to realise how short sighted and just plain wrong this woman is.
Of course, it’s daft. … [G]ay adoption and Catholicism is an issue that will materially affect only a handful of people (no gay couple in their right minds wanting to adopt would approach a Catholic agency) but the set piece battle it provoked attracted huge attention.
My emphasis.
What Bunting has obviously missed in her ramblings is the bigger picture. Let’s, for argument’s sake, assume that the catholics get their way: they’re specifically exempted to refuse to consider homosexual couples for the purposes of adoption. Remember that this is codified into the statute.
Now, let’s say that, oh, I don’t know, perhaps muslims decide that, because of their faith, they don’t want to have to hire “infidels” (non-muslims, basically) in their privately owned businesses (let’s say a convenience store) because the Koran says that they shouldn’t have friends who are non-muslim (Sura 4:89). Go ahead, look it up, I’ll wait.
[4:89] They wish that you disbelieve as they have disbelieved, then you become equal. Do not consider them friends, unless they mobilize along with you in the cause of GOD. If they turn against you, you shall fight them, and you may kill them when you encounter them in war. You shall not accept them as friends, or allies. The Koran, Sura 4:89
Back? Right, this is where the problem lies: a precendent has now been set - one particular religious group has demanded (yes, demanded) that it be exempt from one law as this is one of their fundamental beliefs and teachings, what’s to stop other special interest groups from demanding exemptions from other laws for the same reasons?
We could, then, go one step further, or go the whole hog and say that, for example, murder laws shouldn’t apply to fundamentalist christians who, as their bible states, are obligated to stone unruly sons (Deuteronomy 21:18-21 (KJV)) in accordance with their belief. Precedent’s been set, a new exemption for christians.
Of course, one could go ad absurdium with this, but I want to make a point: an exemption from the law, for whatever reason, for one special group makes the law pointless.
Bunting goes on:
An important principle was at stake, of course. What’s the point of an anti-discrimination law that allows exemptions to carry on discriminating? But the incident also illustrates how it’s not just Blair who is thinking about his legacy. Many of his colleagues are also reflecting on a near-decade of dutiful loyalty and asking what it has achieved. In the tally, the Equality Act - along with other measures such as civil partnerships, the Human Rights Act and age discrimination - is a powerful balm for consciences bruised from years of marching obediently into the government lobby.
I think it’s completely disingenuous of Bunting to pre-suppose that the principle motivations for politicians to refuse to kowtow to the inordinate demands of religious bigots is to ease their conscience over Iraq. I would more likely suspect that it’s because they don’t want to live in a theocracy where the Vatican is calling the shots, just as I do not. As much as I don’t like the current government, at least I have a voice in this country to change the things I don’t like: I have no such voice in the ear of the man in the dress on the throne in Rome.
Last week’s rumpus was about much more than just an uppity cardinal, it was also one of those moments in public life snatched as an opportunity beyond Westminster for a bigger purpose. The hapless villain of the piece - the Catholic church - offered the perfect foil for a demonstration of liberal progressive moral superiority. The blogs hummed with an outpouring of anti-Catholic bile. Catholicism was lambasted as antediluvian, anachronistic and bigoted. In contrast, liberal progressives came out shining with moral fervour. Faith - of all varieties - has become one of the phenomena against which a demoralised post-socialist centre-left chooses to define itself.
Bunting here presumes to know the reason for people like myself to argue against the exemption: she’s wrong. Contrary to her stance that we are after a a demonstration of liberal progressive moral superiority
, we’re actually trying to prevent a society where a special interest group, that make claims for truth with nothing more than tradition to support it, can decide to force it’s own dogmatic beliefs on the rest of us.
When she says Catholicism was lambasted as antediluvian, anachronistic and bigoted
, what she fails to mention is that these appellations are deserved. The catholic church is bigoted and anachronistic.
Quoting (and clearly not understanding) A C Grayling, Bunting goes on:
Advances in learning and freedoms since are in jeopardy “now that toleration and secularity has allowed the cancers of organised superstition to regrow … and in battling to stop progress, to return us to the dark of prejudice and irrationality”.
Grayling’s comic-book history is so extreme that it’s funny. It wilfully omits how Christianity (and, incidentally, Islam) has fostered learning and science (even arches and domes) in Europe for hundreds of years - as well as providing the foundations for human rights and secularism itself.
From this, I can only presume that Bunting supports the teaching of creationism in schools, faith-based medicine and supports any number of supernatural solutions for the various ills in society.
She also states the completely bloody obvious with how Christianity (and, incidentally, Islam) … [provided] … the foundations for … secularism itself
.
Of course it did, you imbecile! Without churches insinuating themselves into the governance of the state, there wouldn’t be any need for the idea of secularism (separating the church from the state)! For someone with lots of big words in her vocabulary, she seems to have a poor grasp of one of the defining nouns in her argument.
Bunting then goes on to compare enlightenment values to rampant consumerism, citing rationality and freedom as root causes, and uses and imbecilic reality tv show contentant and people stealing flotsam washed up on a Cornish beach as examples of this in action. I won’t bother pointing out the post hoc logical fallacy here. Oopsie!
Having abdicated so much ground in political life - particularly over the economy - liberal progressives have to scrabble together another way to define their notion of progress, and they have recycled old anti-clericalism to attack religion. Faith has become a curiously faddish target in a new, ersatz politics. Judging by the outcry over the past few days, Catholics, or Christians in general, are lurking on every street corner to deprive the English of their most cherished liberties, as they have done all through history. The National Secular Society even raised the cry of English kings down the centuries last week: “Who runs Britain - the government or the Vatican?”
And I will whole heartedly support the NSS in this: just because they are using an old saying doesn’t make it less pertinent. One could easily make the comparative comment about christians’ incessantly banging on about their god and their beliefs for the past seventeen centuries, but I doubt that Bunting would think they were being anachronistic.
An absurd distraction, it is not.