Between two oughts
Joan Smith in amusing vein.
[O]ne of the jobs I most fancy is poster-girl for a strictly rational approach to human affairs.
Hey I want that job! Me, me, me. I dibs it. It’s mine.
[R]ecent events show that it isn’t just sceptics who are worried by the inroads which other people’s imaginary friends have been making in secular states…[I]n a blow to the Islamophobia industry which has tried to silence critics of Islam through strident accusations of racism, the Education Secretary Alan Johnson issued guidelines which will allow schools to ban paranoid forms of religious dress.
The Islamophobia industry hasn’t just tried to silence critics of Islam via accusations of racism, to a considerable extent it’s succeeded. Lots of people do indeed refuse to criticise Islam precisely on the grounds that doing so amounts to persecuting minorities. That’s certainly not a universal view, but it’s not a vanishingly small one, either.
“What do we want? Discrimination! When do we want it? Now!” has never seemed to me a persuasive platform for any religion to fight on…[T]he Archbishop of York and two Anglican bishops found themselves criticised by peers who wanted to know what had happened to the notion of Christian love…The Anglican hierarchy needs to do some soul-searching about why they joined this doomed cause, placing themselves on the same side as monstrously prejudiced bishops from Latin America and Africa.
Well, it’s partly precisely because those bishops are from Latin America and Africa. See item about what amounts to persecuting minorities, above. The Anglican hierarchy apparently feels uncomfortable and unhappy about simply contradicting or ignoring bishops from Latin America and Africa; it feels too much like white skin privilege or colonialism or both. They’ve pretty much said as much, I think – in slightly more roundabout terms, but that is the gist. They feel caught between two oughts, is what it boils down to. Unfortunately, they’ve chosen the wrong ought. It’s a powerful ought, and a lot of people choose it, with rather dreadful consequences.
Perhaps it’s just karmic revenge for slavery……
Which would work better if all slavers and slaveowners had been either gay or bishops, and all gays and bishops had been slavers or slaveowners. But then who said karma has to be fair…
Maybe we can divvy up the continents among the poster-girls. You can have North America — it’s a nice challenging one.
Can I be a poster boy? I could pose in a fetching swimsuit, but in the case of my expansive pale hide it would more likely be retching than fetching…
Oh, well, I think poster people for a strictly rational approach ought to pose in Rational Dress. That’s certainly the only kind I ever wear.
Bloomers?
Given the numbers of slave-owners, both past and present, it is a certitude that some of them were eihrt homosexual or bisexual ….
Which means that they gratified themsleves, in jsut the same way as the “normal” heterosexual ones did ….
I wonder if there are any accounts of this?
And, in all this fuss about slavery, and the disgusting crawling made by the C of E about “apologising” – whilst forgetting that we ( The English & Scots) were the first to get rid of the horridness of chattel-slavery, we are conveniently ignoring something …
“Arab” slavery which was not stamped on until the mid-19th Century by the horrid, cruel, colonialist British.
Re-reading accounts of the bombardment of Algiers in 1816, and why it was necessary might wake a few people up.
No matter how you slice it, the French revolution got there first.
Of course, I’d put in a plea for the pirates of the early C18th, who made a fine fist of abolishing slavery wherever and whenever they could.
And was 1816 motivated by abhorrence at the issue of slavery in Algeria? I don’t think so.
But apart from that, not bad.
G Tingey, you think you’ve got it bad, I found myself agreeing with over 80% of Peter Hitchens’ Radio 4 piece this monring. I feel dirty.
If our Govt spent less time apologising for something that took place 200 years ago and more time calling attention to those countries where it’s still happening and telling them to stop I’d be more impressed.
Chris W, the extent to which the misjudgement over, and mishandling of Iraq has damaged our ability to speak with authority on human rights anywhere overseas is distressing. The anguish this major foreign policy hamstring causes is worsened for this particular ‘human rights universalist’ by the advocates of the ideology of relatavism, who have a Chomsky-ite blind spot to acts of barbarity carried out by govts who aren’t very fond of Washington. (Since Harold Pinter came out as a fan of Milosevic, the world got smaller and nastier.)
“Can I be a poster boy”?
Yeah, why not, go on, be daringly devilish and utterly irrational and pose in a very fetching “G” string. Ouch, that hurts!