The right to be a shit is under threat!
A ‘relationship counsellor’ was fired after (and for? the Telegraph is cagy) refusing to give sex advice to homosexual couples. Therefore, the former archbish of Canterbury George Carey says, laws banning discrimination have ‘taken precedence over religious freedoms.’ Well, yes, if you like to put it that way. By the same token, if you choose to believe that the bible both mandates and allows slavery, and that that translates to people of your particular race being allowed to enslave people not of your race, and you act, or attempt to act, accordingly, then yes, your ‘religious freedom’ will be curtailed to that extent. Laws against discrimination in the form of enslavement by race or other category do indeed take precedence over the freedom to enslave by race or other category. You know what? That is too god damn bad.
The complaint is fundamentally stupid, because no freedom is without limits. Freedoms and rights come with various implicit stipulations in the background – within reason; other things being equal; of course not to the point of harming other people; and so on. The former archbish might as well complain that laws banning murder have taken precedence over religious freedoms to execute blasphemers and infidels. He wouldn’t say that, because it is no longer the done thing in his part of the world to execute infidels, or even to enliven the Telegraph with wishful thinking about executing infidels. But it is still the done thing in his particular fetid corner of his part of the world to hinder and reject and refuse service to gays, and he is too blinkered and ungenerous to realize that that too is a parochial bit of small-minded nastiness that is just as temporary as the old practice of executing infidels. He is too lost and empty to realize that in a few decades at most his desire to defend the persecution of gay people will look just as tyrannical and demented as a desire to defend infidel-murder would look now.
Lord Carey, in his written statement, said that recent decisions by the courts were “but a short step from the dismissal of a sincere Christian from employment to a religious bar to any employment for Christians”…They claim that the ruling [in the Lilian Ladele case] meant that the right to express the Christian faith must take second place to the rights of homosexuals.
That’s right, and a good thing too. The ‘right’ to ‘express the Christian faith’ by refusing service to gay people must indeed take second place to the rights of homosexuals not to be treated as automatic inferiors and pariahs. I hope the asymmetry is obvious enough? On the one hand a putative ‘right’ to treat other people badly, on the other hand a right not to be treated badly. Are we clear about this? My right to treat you badly always takes second place to your right not to be treated badly. In other words, the ‘right’ to treat people badly is not a right at all. To claim that it is, is an abuse of the language of rights (in that it resembles the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which makes all rights subordinate to ‘what sharia allows’).
The fact that boffins from a supposedly ‘moderate’ church like the Anglican one are running around squalling about the end of their ‘right’ to persecute people is enough to show that Dawkins really isn’t all that wrong about ‘moderate’ religion.
I just about choked on my breakfast burrito when I read that. Um – really? Someone actually made that statement and didn’t immediately blanch at how obviously unreasonable and appalling it was?
It’s another example of the mindless “special rights” trope that bigots use as a (weak) rhetorical weapon against equality. They do not (or do they?) understand the concept of universal human or civic rights. My right to patronize a business without being thrown out for no reason, my right to the same tax considerations for my household as any heterosexual married couple – these things aren’t “homosexual rights.” They’re rights that all people, all citizens have, irrespective of being gay, straight, male, female, Christian, Muslim, atheist, etc.
The couple to whom that obnoxious civil (as in, working for the state, not for the church) registrar denied service were not asserting “homosexual rights.” They were asserting plain old, universally conferred-by-law rights that all citizens of the UK have.
Gah! What is so impossibly difficult to understand about this?
Well, no one would call Carey a moderate. But, that aside, Dawkins wasn’t wrong at all. As Grayling says, religions always degenerate into their fundamentalist forms. I’m not quite sure what the half life is, but moderate religion always reverts to type. It has to. The texts are always there as a measure of faithfulness, and while they may vary in relation to interpretive freedom, the homing device is always set on zero. That’s why Christianity is always a danger, and why Islam is always a greater one.
The right to “express” (which in this case means impose) the Christian faith DOES come second to the rights of homosexuals!
Which, haha, OB said in so many words. I should really read the whole post before angrily dashing off a comment, but in my defense, Lord Carey was being quite ridiculous.
The Netherlands is having a similar discussion. A conservative Christian political party refused to let women run for office. A ruling from the Dutch Supreme Court has now put an end to that, and ruled that they can no longer categorically deny a woman a place on the ballot. While it’s probably more of a symbolic ruling, that won’t change much in practice, at least not in the short run (“Our don’t even want to be in positions of leadership”), there is a lot of wailing coming from conservative Christians right now. Supposedly this ruling will be the end of freedom of religion as we know it, or something like that. Some even see it as the establishment of a “religion of equality”.
We’ll have to see if this ruling has any effect on some of the other controversies in the Netherlands. For example, in the Netherlands, religious schools get supported by the state as well. This creates conflicts, for instance in the form of religious schools who won’t hire gay people, which is against anti-discrimination laws. The defense of the religious is pretty similar to what you’ve described here: they will hide behind their freedom of religion. They’ll say that they should be allowed to act according to what their religion teaches.
This ruling pretty much said that there is no right to act the way your religion teaches without impunity. You’re allowed to believe what you want, but you still have to stay within the law.
Conservatives fear that, because of this ruling, there may now be precedent that the right to equal treatment is always more important than the freedom of religion. As far as I’ve understood the verdict (IANAL), I doubt that the legal implications of this single case will be that far-reaching, as it specifically referred to a UN treaty on promoting the equality of women.
But I wouldn’t mind it if they were. After all, the right of equal treatment does seem like a more fundamental right to me. After all, what is the freedom of religion other than the right of equal treatment, regardless of what religion you follow?
Well, no one is being persecuted for homophobia. I don’t see them surrounded by men with swords and escorted to the stake. Sure, I’d defend them if that were the case. People are entitled to have their views, even horrible ones. Let them burn their effigies of Oscar Wilde in their religious ceremonies, or even in their political demonstrations. No problem. If the state tries to ban these practices, I’ll go the barricades for them.
But of course if you have such views it might affect what sort of career you should choose.
Off-topic, but LOVE the new web-site arrangement, and congratulations to the designers.
EXCEPT the anti-s[am \type the two words\ is V very difficult to read – you may need to change it a little?
I’m working on a way to have the CAPTCHA (the anti-spam two-words thing) go away once you’ve had a few comments posted and proved that you’re a human. I’m hoping to have that done in the next day or two. In the meantime, I apologize for the inconvenience. But, man, you should have seen the amount of spam Ophelia had to deal with in the old system.
Yay, for the new site!
I just want to christen your new site, OB. Best of luck!
Terrific new site!
Hell, yes! Great improvment. It’s got style. Does this mean we can call people liars now?
Wow . . . now B&W is aesthetically as well as intellectually pleasing! Sounds like the perfect husband, doesn’t it? Congrats, Ophelia! :)
Thanks for changing the type, Josh, but I still think I need spectacles!
If using Firefox:
Use CNTL+ to enlarge the text (CNTL- to make smaller, CNTL0 to restore original).
Thanks for your advice, NEB.
Nice new site – and RSS feeds too!
I like the new design as well, nice to no longer have to read comments on a separate page :)
Wo, ain’t it great?!
“But, man, you should have seen the amount of spam Ophelia had to deal with in the old system.”
That’s for sure!
To be fair to the aesthetics of the old site…it was designed in 2002.
Huge thanks to Josh Larios for all this.
I just noticed the ‘Related Posts’ feature; what fun. It makes me feel important to have Related Posts.
Mind you, there are those who think my posts are not so much Related as The Same Damn Thing Over and Over and Over again. Hahahahahahahahaha.
Lovely new look.
As a sincere christian I believe that the sons of Caanan are destined by god to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and so will not employ them in other fields. So it is an attack on my christian beliefs if I have to consider black people for other than the most menial of tasks.
And obviously the idea that a woman could have a teaching role vis-a-vis men is totally oppressive of my right to express my beliefs. In fact, Josh is oppressing me by facilitating OB’s dominant role in this forum. Silence, woman.
Yikes! Josh has added toys for commenters already. Josh S asked for toys just barely a few minutes ago; seek and ye shall find.
So if I get too dominant around here it’s quick and easy to say silence, woman.
“A ‘relationship counsellor’ was fired after (and for? the Telegraph is cagy) refusing to give sex advice to homosexual couples”
If they were fired for refusing to give sex advice to homosexual couples, then it seems unfair. Someone may be very able to give useful advice to some people and not to others. Indeed, someone who thinks they are qualified and able to give advice to all couples may well be less suited as a ‘relationship counsellor’ than someone who does not. The second person is at least more modest in their aspirations.
Yay for the new site!
Sadly, I can easily imagine well-meaning liberals saying something along the lines of, “well, forcing religious people to do or accept X is an unfair imposition on them, and secularists must be careful not to impose their views on the religious by insisting they change their views or expecting them to go along with X.” I was reading a sociology of religion book about the difference between the US and Europe in terms of religion (Religious America, Secular Europe? by Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Folkas), and one complaint noted was the way that secular liberals were unwilling to be reciprocal when it comes to tolerating the religious other.
“Conservative religious people are expected to be tolerant of forms of behavior that many of them (including Muslims) find difficult: explicit forms of sexuality, same-sex unions, and blasphemy offer the most obvious examples. The reverse, however, is not the case. Secular liberals simply refuse, it seems, to tolerate religious beliefs and cultural customs that run counter to their cherished ideals…Tolerance was clearly a social construct, to be applied in some cases but not in others.” (pp. 103-104). This seems to be a not-uncommon trope in the field of sociology of religion.
Roger,
Hmm, that’s a point, I suppose. But then would firing have been the result. In fact it seems odd that anyone who set up to give sex advice at all would also be priggish enough to say No Gays Please. It all sounds rather odd.
Lisa – urghh. How I hate that kind of thing.
Lisa
Don’t you raise the old old issue of the extent to which the tolerant must tolerate the intolerant? I do not know how to answer this question but here in New Zealand, in an otherwise tolerant country, we do not tolerate hate speech i.e. it is illegal, nor all sorts of discrimination, which are also illegal. In other words, we, the tolerant, have said that we will not tolerate X and Y.
Perhaps the answer to my question lies in a hierarchy of rules/laws/ethical principles in which each over-rules all those below it but I do not know of such a hierarchy that is non-arbitrary. Is there a non-arbitrary answer?
@Peter Clemerson:
Probably not. You could come up with a right not to have your rights violated, but from there it’s turtles all the way down.
Peter,
Yes, of course, that’s a perennial problem — how far does tolerance go? Is using “illiberal” means to protect “liberal” societies ever justified, and if so, how much? How far do concepts of religious freedom go, anyway?
The problem with “hate speech,” of course, is “who decides” what is offensive enough to be banned. It can also be a bit self-defeating, if people feel unable to criticize a group’s beliefs that are emphatically hateful because they will be seen as themselves engaging in hate speech (e.g., criticizing Muslim homophobia or misogynist minority culture practices). Also, since so many religions have such hate-filled scriptures, how do they get off?!
I don’t know if there’s a purely non-arbitrary manner of creating a hierarchy of values, but if your society values some things more than others — e.g., freedom of choice and action — over the right to compel others to live according to the rules of your religion (which is what “the right and freedom to live in a society run according to my religious views” ends up meaning), I don’t think that’s “arbitrary” at all. It would be arbitrary if a society put a lot of value on non-discrimination and freedom of speech and the rights of the individual, and so on, and then conspicuously failed to protect those rights for members of a certain group, simply because the leaders of the group demanded that their religious freedom requires subjecting other members of their group to their rules, not the state’s egalitarian rules. You might also get into a conflict of rights — freedom of religion vs. freedom of access, and the society is going to have to thrash that one out — and, I hope, be consistent about it! Letting members of religion X discriminate against, say, gays or women, while punishing members of religion Y for doing the same is grossly unfair and violates the society’s own professed commitment to equality that they’re trying to uphold by punishing members of Group Y in the first place!
Wow. I have computer problems for a few days, and I come back to a whole new internet! Well, a whole new B&W, at least. Same old trenchant criticism of hidebound reactionary idiocy, though. Good on ya’s for both!
:-)
G
” it seems odd that anyone who set up to give sex advice at all would also be priggish enough to say No Gays Please.”
Priggish or able to assess their own skills and limitations, Ophelia? After all, “relationship advisers” deal with a great many matters, not all of them sexual.
““Conservative religious people are expected to be tolerant of forms of behavior that many of them (including Muslims) find difficult: explicit forms of sexuality, same-sex unions, and blasphemy offer the most obvious examples. The reverse, however, is not the case. Secular liberals simply refuse, it seems, to tolerate religious beliefs and cultural customs that run counter to their cherished ideals…Tolerance was clearly a social construct, to be applied in some cases but not in others.” (pp. 103-104). This seems to be a not-uncommon trope in the field of sociology of religion.”
Trope or tripe, Lisa?
Where do Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Folkas think religious believers are prevented from saying- for example- that practising homosexuals ought to be tortured to death for their wickedness?
Roger –
It’s not that they think that religious believers are not allowed to speak against the “liberal consensus” — it’s that (from the extended discussion) that they think that there is a lack of reciprocality between religious believers and secular liberals. From the conservative religious point of view, the very fact of their having to “tolerate” open homosexuality and state recognition of same-sex relationships, etc. in their society is a burden on them. To them, it’s not a matter of letting others do as they please so long as it doesn’t affect them – they think that the entire society suffers from this, and I suppose the implication is that secular liberals should be “sensitive” to this imposition on religious sensibilities.
Actually, this really sounds like Taner Edis’s recent remarks on this point that we were arguing over a few weeks ago…and if you read his last post, tellingly entitled “Defeat,” from just last week, none of what we said seems to have changed his mind AT ALL! http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2010/04/defeat.html
From my own experience, sociologists of religion tend to be very…noncommittal, I guess is the word, when it comes to making judgments about particular religious traditions or beliefs. This can get a bit irritating when, for example, they dispassionately describe the place of shari’ah or religious authorities in Catholicism, or the social pressures a faith community imposes on its members. Still, it must be understood that this is just part of the discourse and not get too annoyed that it doesn’t comport with my own view of the situation! I might get really annoyed with the sociological study I was reading today (British Muslim Converts: Choosing Alternative Lives by Kate Zebiri) describing the views of British Muslim converts on, among other things, homosexuality (mostly negative because “Islam forbids it” or an insistence that it be private and not “shoved in people’s faces”), but it would be churlish to expect condemnation of these views by the author!
This is, of course, not to say that they’re objective — sociologists of religion tend to be far more positively inclined to see religion as beneficial or at least not necessarily harmful than the so-called “new atheists,” so they tend to take a dim view of Dawkins et al. They may not be religious at all, but think that religion is complex, etc., and mustn’t be dismissed so cavalierly.
Actually, re-reading what I’ve just written, it’s pretty clear why a lot of critics of religion would find social science on religion to be irritating and boring and unworthy of further study…but I think it’s quite interesting (and you can learn a lot about the subject, which may actually help solidify your opinion about the deleterious effects of religion!).
Sir Boyle Roche-who famously said he would “judge a case fairly, without being partial on the one hand or impartial on the other”- was eminently qualified to be a sociologist of religion, it seems. The problem is that the Conservative religious people cited in the first quotation think they are being persecuted because they aren’t allowed to persecute others and the sociologists concerned seem to accept their claim, which goes beyond being noncommittal. Many of them may not believe in god, but they seem to believe in religion.
Priggish or able to assess their own skills and limitations, Ophelia? After all, “relationship advisers” deal with a great many matters, not all of them sexual.
The former, Roger, because if you set up as a relationship adviser, you are already announcing that you have the requisite skills. If you don’t have the requisite skills, then you shouldn’t set up as a relationship adviser in the first place. It’s rather like setting up as a plumber and then saying oh well you don’t have the skills to fix toilets.
Still, it must be understood that this is just part of the discourse and not get too annoyed that it doesn’t comport with my own view of the situation! I might get really annoyed with the sociological study I was reading today (British Muslim Converts: Choosing Alternative Lives by Kate Zebiri)
Hmm. Part of the discourse in the sense of the professional or academic or disciplinary discourse? Because if so, I’m not so sure! “Choosing Alternative Lives” is pretty damn tendentious, if you ask me – and also misleading, because that kind of “choice” almost always entails imposing a lot of rules and limitations on other people – female other people, mostly. If the convert is female and has no children, then her choice probably can be limited mostly to her own life, but if the convert is male or has children or both, then that “choice” has large implications for other people.
It’s a pervasive and less than honest trick, to talk about these things as if they affected people only as individuals. Sociologists of religion and everyone else should be much more alert to the fact that large demanding totalizing religious rules do not work that way. That’s one reason liberalism is better.
It seems that these issues are becoming a trend, because here is another case: can universities deny official status to student organizations that aren’t open to all students because of religious principles? We’ll probably see even more of these cases in the near future.
” It’s rather like setting up as a plumber and then saying oh well you don’t have the skills to fix toilets.”
Well, no Ophelia, in fact it is perfectly possible to be a qualified plumber and not to have the skills for particular aspects of the job, especially for heating systems. A plumber I know has to do annual refresher courses for different boilers.
In the case of a “relationship counsellor”, as I said, I would be much more dubious about the skills of someone who thought they could give beneficial advice for every kind of relationship. Some relationships- sado-masochisitic or coprophiliac, say- might obviously require advisers with particular abilities,but I think this would be a general problem.
The anarchist group Class War decided that everyone was born bisexual and polymorphous. They then spent a long time debating the topic before they decided that this did not mean that every member of the group was obliged to behave in a bisexual and polymorphous way whether they wanted to or not.
Well Roger, I didn’t say boilers, I said toilets.
Now, on the substance…I don’t know the facts of this case, I don’t think I’ve heard of it before. But I think you’re making up unlikely possibilities by way of changing the subject. If it were true that this adviser said, “I’m sorry but your difficulties are outside my expertise, I think my colleague down the hall would be more helpful for you,” then…….we would probably never have heard a word about it. Do you have any reason to think that’s what happened? The word was refused, remember. Maybe that’s the wrong word – newspapers aren’t always careful about what words they choose, to put it mildly – but we don’t actually know that. (Unless you do, of course. Do you?)
So as far as I know, the story was more or less as described (if the Telegraph were going to distort it, it would distort it in the other direction), and I think your objections are tangential to the real issues.
Ophelia –
Well, the book in question is certainly not a disinterested work — the author wants to make the case that converts to Islam aren’t completely crazy or forced into it (especially in the case of women), but that they’re intelligent, self-assured individuals who are making a rational, considered choice and who haven’t totally become alienated from the rest of the culture. Still, that means this sort of thing kind of falls into the “apologetic” category…
I suspect that the insouciance with which so many well-meaning (and perhaps some who aren’t quite so well-meaning) people treat the kind of “large demanding totalizing religious rules” you mention is precisely because it’s purely an academic matter to them. They can win “tolerance,” “sensitivity,” and “standing up for the rights of minorities and/or religious people” points at no cost to themselves (think of the Archbishop of Canterbury on the subject of shari’ah or even, to flog a dead and decomposing horse, Taner Edis’s remarks about how religious groups should have large amounts of autonomy). If the shoe is on the other foot, as in the case of Christian fundies trying to impose their views on the rest of society and actually potentially affecting their own lives, well, that’s very different! You hardly saw anybody feeling guilty about insulting Mormon views on homosexuality during the Proposition 8 battle in California or engaging in ritual self-flagellation about how “our values aren’t any better/more valid than theirs” — no, this was a live issue that they felt actually affected them and thus needed to be fought tooth and nail.
End of rant — sorry, this kind of thing annoys the $*^& out of me, the way people will dismiss the rights of women or some other group as “unimportant” or at least not as important as “real” issues like anti-imperialism, wealth redistribution, securing natural resources, or whatever.
OB: I know this is a little late — but thought you might want to put the record straight for future occurrence – despite your busy schedule. Twitter / Vegan Atheist: From Ophelia Benson at But …From Ophelia Benson at Butterflies & Wheels ‘The right to be a shit is under … twitter.com/VeganMind/status/12390834156