Case studies in religious false victimhood

‘Most of these people’, Morpheus tells Neo in The Matrix, ‘are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.’

Occasionally the producers of 4thought, Channel 4’s atheist-inclusive answer to Thought for the Day, get in touch with me when they’re looking for heathens. I’m visiting London next week to be filmed myself, but I recently referred them to Sue Cox from Survivors Voice Europe. I can’t embed the video, but go watch it here before you read on. It’s excellent. Below on the 4thought website, a user called J. Shelley leaves the following comment.

The hate preaching started with an elderly woman (Sue Cox) walking onto the screen, sitting down in a chair and proclaiming that she was an atheist and ‘recovered’ catholic (implying that having a love for Jesus is nothing more than a disease). I felt butchered by this attack. At no point in my faith in God; have I ever attacked people, discriminated them or harassed them for believing contrary to my beliefs. What you have done is horrible. Not only rude but also immoral! Going against the very objective that you sort to present! If my love for God is a disease; then I am glad to be infected because loving our fellow man, caring for each other and loving Jesus who set this example, is a good thing! You made me feel like a victim, while I waited for the next program to begin (Inside Nature’s Giants). What you did was utterly distasteful and immoral!

Those pesky rape survivors. I mean, really. How dare they talk about what happened to them? Perhaps Sue doesn’t realise this makes her a horrible, immoral, hate preaching, victimising butcher. But here’s the thing: Sue is an addiction therapist. She doesn’t see religion as a disease, she sees it as a dependency. (So did Karl Marx, who compared it to opium. So did Nietzsche, who compared it to alcohol. So does Maryam Namaziee, who compares it to smoking. So do I.) The thing about addictions is they take over your life; once dependent enough, you can see your habit as part of you, not just something you engage in. So it’s unsurprising that we see this kind of indignation a lot when we criticise churches – even when speaking in the broadest worldwide terms, or about the most narrowly personal experience.

Last September, Joseph Ratzinger visited Berlin just as he’d visited Britain the year before. I’d only just moved here, and I joined the demonstration against him after finding its Facebook page. Across it were strewn comments from outraged believers – taken aback at how disrespectfully they’d been treated, determined to show their faith wasn’t like the Pope’s, anxious to assert they weren’t involved in the Vatican’s past. We face this from our parents too, when we’re told despite the most obvious contrary evidence that real Christians don’t believe in Hell. We face it when Muslims tell us real Islam never leads to violence. In each case, the people to whom we’re talking become defensive. They respond as if it’s them on trial, as if the only relevant form of their religion is the one they practice, failing to engage with the average realties of how faiths play out across the world.

Particularly in faiths which target the young, and ones which have strong ties to minority ethnic or national identity – Islam in the West is one example, as is Catholicism in many areas – belief is never simply something you hold, but something you are. I don’t want to sound too much like Darrel Ray, who examines these issues far more closely than I can, but it strikes me these belief-memes have a very strong defence mechanism in that sense. It makes it difficult, much of the time, for believers to understand they aren’t personally under attack when their religion (as practiced by them or others) is scrutinised. It makes it hard for us, even if we’re very clear about what we’re saying, to get past that emotional wall.

I don’t claim to know how we should deal with this issue - how we get believers ‘ready to be unplugged’. I’d certainly be interested to know what people think. I do think it’s something to consider often, though.

Alex Gabriel

Jim Everett’s official stance on bigotry (and his other one)

The Oxford Student, one of my university’s student papers, has now covered the events I blogged last weekend when Jim Everett got expelled from the LGBTQ society’s message boards.

In their write up, he’s quoted as follows.

‘LGBTQSoc has no place for sexism, transphobia and ableism. Unfortunately, certain reactionaries see such things where there are none, alienating members and causing substantial unnecessary divisions in the society. The argument was between an extreme fringe with LGBTQSoc who make things very difficult for the majority by attacking them on minor, terminological issues.’

I see. So he wasn’t being misogynistic or ableist? Hmm. Let’s take a moment to recall what got him banned:

This because Simone Webb politely suggested ‘girls’ wasn’t a good catch-all term. I tend to think that if you call people ‘fucking insane’ when they ask you to show sensitivity, you probably have a bad attitude to mental health – particularly in queer group, particularly in Oxford, a city not famed for an atmosphere conducive to holistic wellbeing. And personally, I think the misogyny speaks for itself.

No worries though, since I’ve been sent what he posted on his page at the time. Here’s what he says about his critics:

Still, if he’s called them stupid ‘crazy girls’ who aren’t ‘normal’ and ‘don’t matter’ because they said he shouldn’t tell feminists to shut up, and he still denies being misogynistic or ableist, at least he takes their concerns (however misplaced) seriously. That’s what his statement tells us, right?

Oh.

I’m given to think that if you’re not familiar with the concept of ableism, you’re probably at the rather less marginalised end of the disability scale. And yes, the ball. Much more important. Always good to know that if an LGBTQ group can’t provide a setting free of misogyny, transphobia, ableism and dismissal of the issues as ridiculous, it can still provide bigots with a social life:

 

Drinking and fucking. That’s definitely what it’s for. He’s now been added back into the Facebook group, too.

 

The poor thing. Really, I’m glad to’ve been taught about who was really being victimised here – let’s all try to be more tolerant to bigots from OUCA in future.

Alex Gabriel

The Pat Condell problem

This post appeared previously at The Heresy Club.

I just watched a great Atheist Experience with Russell Glasser and Jeff Dee. At the beginning, a caller raised the issue of ‘Islamophobia’ among atheists, and specifically Pat Condell. His 2010 ‘No mosque at Ground Zero’ video came up, in which someone suggested he was blaming all Muslims for 9/11, as did the idea he’s too hostile in general.

I’ve said before that I have issues with ‘Islamophobia’ as a term. It’s a slippery, simplified glossing of sometimes complex issues, and I worry it lends credence to groups like the English Defence League who use discourse about ‘religion’ to mask racism. (Their leader, Stephen Lennon, makes comments in interviews which could be taken almost word for word from Maryam Namazie. It’s not inconceivable they actually are.) I have considerably more issues, however, with Pat Condell.

I’ve nothing against a combative, confrontational approach to religion – including Islam. Maryam, God only knows, can get pretty angry. So can Matt and Jeff. So, in case anyone still doesn’t know, can Greta Christina. Atheist anger is justified, useful and often persuasive. However: when I watch Condell’s videos, it feels like watching non-stop bile. There’s a whole lot of confrontation in Greta’s famed Skepticon talk, but there’s also a large amount of humour. There’s celebration, and optimism, and measured composure. With AXP, Maryam and in fact most atheist speakers, the composure is there too, and the outbursts, valid and – let’s face it – fun as they are, form the exception and not the rule.

To watch Condell’s vlogs is to feel constant, unadulterated rage. I can’t remember seeing him smile, laugh or empathise. I can’t remember him pausing for thought. It’s as if an endless barrage of concentrated venom is being spat at me; the same impression, incidentally, that TJ Kincaid/TheAmazingAtheist always made. That’s hard for me to watch.

Now of course, I’m only speaking for myself. If this isn’t how you feel about his tone, that’s up to you, and I’m not judging anyone else for enjoying it. It’s just not for me.

But TJ was objectionable more than just aesthetically. He was an MRA who spent his time harrassing rape victims and threatening violence. The main issue was his content, not just his style. (I use the past tense here because, as PZ points out, he’s now PR-bombed himself out of mainstream circles.)

The same is true, I think, of Pat Condell. So I’m now going to talk not just about why I don’t personally enjoy his work, but why I don’t think atheists, skeptics and secularists – or pretty much anyone else sensible – should admire him.

If in his ‘Ground zero mosque’ video, he was assigning collective blame to every Muslim for 9/11, he was clearly being stupid – but that’s not the question I want to address. (For the record, I think there’s a good case for that accusation, but it was covered on AXP around the time and is beside my main point here.) Supposing for the sake of argument that it was okay to blame Muslims in general for Al Qaeda’s actions – so what? Would he try to stop churches being built where witches had been burnt? Stop synagogues being built where the Old Testament’s genocides were carried out? Places untarred by religious violence are few and far between. Why only the furore when it’s a mosque?

Let’s be clear. I’ve no problem fighting ‘Islamisation’ if it means ending Sharia courts in the UK, animal cruelty in halal slaughter, mutilation of children’s bodies and state-funded Islamic schools. I’m a secularist. I’d fight all those things if other religions were doing them – they are, and I do.

I’ve no problem, either, saying that Islam is socially divisive, individually degrading and most importantly untrue. Most religions (perhaps all of them) are, most of the time.

And I’ve no problem suggesting to individual Muslims that they leave their religion, or making a case for that. Specifically, I’ve no problem attacking its empirical claims and its ethical standards. I’m happy to do so with every religion – and with every other belief system, too, if I think it’s flawed.

I’m clearly not soft on religion, and Islam is no exception. Yet for Pat Condell, it is.

For Condell, who enthuses at every chance about the freedoms of the West, Islam and its Muslim adherents deserve special restriction by the state. Ironically, he’d curtail their religious freedom just as theocrats have curtailed heretics’ throughout world history. In this case, that meant banning a mosque’s construction where the secularist U.S. constitution permitted it, but from the people he supports it’s clear Condell doesn’t stop at that.

A couple of years back, he praised the Dutch politician Geert Wilders as a hero. This is a man, in case you didn’t know, who campaigns to have the Qur’an banned from the Netherlands; who according to The Guardian wants ‘all immigration from Muslim countries halted, Muslim immigrants paid to leave and all Muslim “criminals” stripped of Dutch citizenship and deported “back where they came from”; who lobbied in parliament for Muslim women to be taxed who wear headscarves – not burqas or even niqabs, but ordinary headscarves – or else made to pay €1,000 a year for a license to wear one. He later stated of course that Christian headscarves wouldn’t be taxed, and also that he’d ban the hijab form altogether if he could.

Pat Condell, last year, was nominated for the NSS Secularist of the Year award. What kind of secularist, exactly, calls this man a hero? What kind of idiot sees Geert Wilders as a freedom-defender?

It doesn’t get better. In 2010, in the run-up to the UK’s most recent general election, he announced he’d be voting for the United Kingdom Independence Party, a right-wing group intent on withdrawal from the EU, specifically damning anyone who voted Labour. Unsurprisingly enough, his party also wants to freeze immigration. Now, I’m not necessarily saying everyone who supports that idea hates foreigners or Muslims – but given his track record, does it seem an unlikely motive?

With his traction among some parts of the atheist movement, one might think Condell would be all about skepticism, reason and critical thinking. But UKIP, whom he publicly endorses, have other policies which are batshit crazy, and which stand at direct odds with secular and freethinking goals. Some examples:

• They support withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, and the scrapping of the Human Rights Act – the major legislative shield against Sharia courts and a large part of the National Secular Society’s successful court case against council prayers.
• They support the scrapping of Ofsted, the government body responsible for teaching standards in our tax-funded school system. It currently monitors, among other things, sex education and science lessons and is one of few safeguards against dogma and distortion of facts in our classrooms.
• They support home schooling as an alternative to school attendance with other children, frequently chosen by religious fundamentalists to avoid the exposure of their children to Darwin and diaphragms.
• They oppose the legalisation of same sex marriage on the grounds that they deem it ‘an aggressive attack on people of faith, and an act of intolerance in itself’.
• They oppose the idea of anthropogenic climate change, describing themselves as ‘the first party to take a sceptical stance on man-made global warming claims’.

I know that atheists are united, strictly speaking, only by a common lack of belief in gods, and I know that we vary greatly throughout the world. But I also know the contemporary atheist community values skepticism, critical thinking and secularism on grounds of freedom of belief. And when I look at Pat Condell, I don’t see a good atheist, skeptic or secularist. I frankly think he’s everything we shouldn’t be about, and I’m disappointed by the kind of platform he’s found.

Then again, I voted Labour once.

Alex Gabriel

About those ex-gay bus ads…

This post appeared previously at The Heresy Club.

There are three key points no one seems to have made about those homophobic ads that just got banned from London buses.

1. Remember Reverend Lynda Rose, who smeared Evan Harris with pro-life leaflets just before he lost his seat in Oxford West? Here are some of the leaflets, if you don’t. The Guardian quotes her on behalf of Anglican Mainstream, the Christian group behind the adverts.

2. Transport for London is a local government body. As a secularist, I don’t think it should be promoting any belief group, however nasty or nice their message. (This includes, in hindsight, the Atheist Bus Campaign which the BHA took over.)

3. The ads that just got banned? They didn’t get banned.

It looks certain we’ll see the usual cry of persecution from Christian groups who don’t get their way in the next few days, and the same misplaced appeal to free speech HOTS Bath made when told they needed evidence prayer could cure cancer. [Update: we will. They’re about to sue for human rights violation.] But Boris Johnson is chair of TfL, and it’s not censorship if that organisation doesn’t want to run an ad campaign. (I would note though that with London’s mayoral election coming up and the gay community one of Johnson’s electoral weak points – he previously supported Section 28 and compared gay coupling to bestiality – it seems possible his motives were less than pure.)

A friend who runs an atheist group at Cambridge said on an NSS Facebook threat that ‘there’s a major difference between “You are allowed to say what you like” and “You are allowed to say what you like on the side of my bus”.’ Quite: if Anglican mainstream want to put their ads on someone else’s buses who’s willing to promote them, I can’t see why they should be stopped.

As far as truthfulness, can we really ask Advertising Standards to rule on whether ‘ex-gay’ is a real status? Sexual identities are subjective, slippery things not meant for empirical scrutiny, and I have no trouble believing a good psychologist could induce in a vulnerable person a sense of revulsion at queer sexuality, or stop them identifying as gay – with enough suggestion and pressure for long enough, anyway.

We might answer that by saying ‘They’re not really straight, though, are they? They’ve just been convinced they are.’ But how do you distinguish between someone’s ‘real’ sexuality and their perception of it? A great many people who identify as straight have queer sexual potential they don’t acknowledge, having grown up with anything outside heterosexual norms being stigmatised. We know you can teach someone to feel disgusted by queer desire, because parents, politicians and priests have been doing this for centuries; the only difference is that where they called this prevention, ‘conversion therapists’ call it a cure.

It’s completely unethical, of course, and the people who do it should be stripped of all psychiatric or therapeutic qualifications. (The coverage in The Guardian is in part from Patrick Strudwick, whose amazing exposé on ex-gay ‘therapy’ placed it atop the media agenda.) But how do you police social suggestion, and specifically the homophobia meme? If believers who do this aren’t claiming authority on mental health, as vicars and teachers in faith schools don’t, then what grounds do we have for forcibly stopping them? You can’t ban an attitude, after all, and an attitude - albeit a highly concentrated and coercive one - is all conversion treatments are instilling.

It’s an example, in the end, of why secularism isn’t enough. Even once we’ve banished religious bias from the public sector, ended legal and financial exeptions for faith groups and done everything else we need to do to separate church and state, we still won’t have stopped the vulnerable being preyed on in church and at home, and filled with destructive ideas about sex, themselves and others. The only way to fight groups like Anglican Mainstream, in the long term, is to discredit their beliefs. Vive l’hérésie.

Alex Gabriel

Did OUCA’s ex-President just threaten to sue me?

Yesterday I uploaded a post involving comments Jim Everett had made, who in autumn 2011 was Secretary of Oxford University Conservative Association. He’s pictured above with other society members, including then-President of the society James Lawson (far left).

Not long after the post went live, I received the following e-mail from him.

Dear Alex,

I have been informed that I feature in a blog you have written about the LGBT movement/ a story involving Jim Everett.

Please may you remove me from the photo, either by cropping, blurring, or preferably deletion altogether. I am not involved in LGBT soc in any way, and have no involvement in the story either.

Having me in a photo on a blog, to which I have no link, I feel is libellous as it may misrepresent me by implication.

I have not yet taken any legal council, as I don’t think it is necessary, but I do request that you please make the requisite changes. I know that the other two individuals featured in the photo would also like to be removed.

Best of luck with your blogging.

Many thanks in advance.

Kind regards,

James

Below is my reply.

Dear James,

Many thanks for your e-mail. I have of course removed the image in question for the reasons you provide, and am pleased to hear you haven’t sought legal advice. Consultation fees can after all be steep nowadays, so it might have been a colossal waste of money.

As you say, you had no personal involvement in what I reported, and I’d hate to suggest you were associated with a large group of privileged misogynists. So as not to use the image of you and Jim out of context, I’ll now be directing readers to its original place in this Telegraph article, and have replaced it in yesterday’s blog post with a photo of a large, unusually well-crafted rubber duck. (A peerless specimen, I think you’ll agree.)

Writers like me are often contacted with libel-related concerns, and the ongoing involvement of Conservative Association members in this course of events seems noteworthy, so for transparency’s sake I’ve included our correspondence in a new blog post. In your message, you kindly mentioned the three other individuals from the Telegraph image, meaning this new post involves them all, so I’m sure you won’t mind it reappearing there in a more fitting context.

I’d be wrong, you quite rightly suggest, to use a photo of you once more in a blog to which you had no link – so here’s a link. http://dft.ba/-ouca

Best wishes,

Alex

Update: this came today.

Dear Alex

Thank you very much for removing the photo. I was keen to make it clear that the blog didn’t have anything to do with me.

Just to clarify, as I noted explicitly in my last message, it was not intended as a threat, simply a polite request.

Many thanks for your prompt response.

Kind regards,

James

Sent from my HTC phone.

Nice to know that’s that, then. (And how silly - he clearly wasn’t trying to intimidate me. Clearly.)

Alex Gabriel

Guys of LGBTQsoc, let’s not be dicks.

If you haven’t read Simone Webb’s blog, you should. Her Twitter describes her as a ‘waistcoat wearing socialist feminist type’, and she’s kicked up a fuss lately over Diva magazine’s hiring policy for (unpaid) internships. She’s also at Hertford College, over the road from me in Oxford, and part of the LGBTQ group. Yesterday on its Facebook page, someone posted a message saying ‘Why do I always complain about the lack of girls in our LGBTQ events? … Girls: can you please show up more in our future events?’ This is what Simone said underneath:

The original poster was female-identifying and a discussion followed about whether ‘girl’ or ‘woman’ is preferable and attendance of the group’s events in general. (NB: for the purposes of this post, I’ll be using ‘woman’/‘women.’ I apologise if this is a contentious term for anyone, but to my reasonable knowledge it’s what most feminists prefer.) It turned into a flame war when Jim Everett – previously secretary of OUCA, that great bastion of respect for women, and pictured second from the left in this Telegraph article – posted this comment, and Simone said she was ‘legitimately peeved’ by his reference to ‘gay men’ and ‘girls’.

This was his response to her rebuke:

Dismissiveness? Check. Diversion tactics? Check. Shutuppery in general? Check. On being asked not to derail the discussion, he went on…

A group admin told him to avoid ‘dismissing a woman’s valid concerns about sexism in her queer community’ and that ‘sexist comments about “little feminist wars” and “hysteria” will not be tolerated’. Then he said:

and

That last comment got him banned from the group, but not before he posted the following on another thread which had sprung up.

That’s right – ‘bait’. Those wicked feminists made him say it, who set traps for poor innocent men then come to attack them.

Clearly I support kicking someone from a page who makes comments like those, but there were comments throughout the thread from a lot of other guys that I find pretty worrying. Some of them I know, and some of them I love and respect, so I’ve cut out everyone else’s names, but I think this needs to be addressed even if it’s uncomfortble. When one woman expresses moderate concern to another about being described with a word she doesn’t like, there are things I feel we should avoid doing if we don’t want to make men in LGBTQsocs look like douches.

First of all, let’s not defend misogyny on ‘inclusiveness’ grounds. Here are comments guys made once Jim Everett got kicked:

Question: who was sidelined, or worse, by the person who was banned?

Answer: women (deliberately referred to as ‘girls’ because one of them found this demeaning). Feminists (‘your own little feminist war’). Other people who saw the discussion as valid (‘this argument is absolutely absurd’). People with mental health issues (‘you are fucking insane’) and people upset by aggressive language, both of which are disproportionately common in queer groups.

Are we really saying it’s less important to include all these groups than to include gay men who marginalise them? Dudes. Come on.

Secondly: let’s maybe not tell people to shut up who care about addressing these issues when they come up.

Yes, these arguments are uncomfortable. But if a women’s discussion on gendered language has naturally, organically arisen at the centre of the LGBTQ group, doesn’t that suggest it’s a discussion worth having? Even if tense? And are we really saying that as men in a typically male-dominated group – mainly sexually straightforward white cismen from relatively privileged backgrounds – our comfort is more important than the issues being aired? Also, why are we assuming the ‘stop arguing’ instruction is ours to give? Who made us the moderators in the dispute? It’s clearly an important, valid discussion for the people who want to have it, so maybe ours is not to say ‘be quiet’ – even if we phrase that as ‘Shut up, you’re making the society look bad’.

On a related note: let’s not say ‘later’ or ‘somewhere else’.

Say you’re at work, and your colleague makes a remark about the kind of relationship you’re in which you find homophobic. A heated discussion ensues which turns into an argument, and your boss comes over. She says ‘Now is not the time or place to be concerned about homophobia. Let’s talk about it somewhere else, or some other time. Now back to work, everyone.’ Is that fair?

The discussion arose here and now. This clearly suggests it’s relevant here and now. Saying ‘take it somewhere else’ is sidelining it. It’s saying, ‘Oh, you can talk about whether that word’s infantilising to women. Just don’t do it where we have to hear.’

And by the way, we’re not the boss in this situation. The men in LGBTQ groups don’t get to tell everyone else where to go and hold conversations, as if the others were on their property. Let’s lose the presumption we’re entitled to do that. Furthermore:

Let’s not just flatly insist ‘girls’ is okay.

Simone asked the original poster to ‘call us “women”’ because that’s what she prefers. I’m pretty sure that’s up to her. And moreover, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t inviting men in the group to pronounce judgement on it.

We’re guys and we don’t experience misogyny. We can do our best, and we should, to understand the issues. But given that it’s the women in the discussion who actually face prejudiced behaviour and language, is it possible they’re better judges than we are of what constitutes that?

Most – all, I think – of the guys who left comments are white, as are most society members and most Oxford students. When black communities have arguments over whether to reclaim the ‘n’-word, do we rush in and supply our own thoughts on the issue? Hopefully not. Hopefully, we recognise it’s not our issue and we’re not qualified to comment, and let the people the word affects decide for themselves if it’s offensive.

And let’s not go ‘Hey, it wasn’t meant in an offensive way!’ We’re queer. We should know better.

For the record, I’m not saying ‘girl’ is necessarily offensive. That’s not up to me. (You read the last point, right?) However: there are many degrading things said which aren’t meant that way.

My tutor for prelims mentioned a sign in Cambridge reading ‘Tutors and wives, this way’. Meant offensively? Clearly not, but it very much was. My grandma doesn’t mean to be offensive when she calls me ‘peculiar’. And while I wouldn’t necessarily say ‘gay’ offends me, that’s not (as with Simone and ‘girl’) how I prefer to be described.

Lots of language can be offensive, to a group or an individual, without being deliberately so. In fact, subconscious prejudice is often the worst. I might be wrong, but I really doubt it was a personal attack on the original poster when Simone objected to ‘girl’.

This matters, because the implication is we can use any word we like – no matter how anyone else feels about it – as long as we’re not consciously being bigots. Speaking of which…

Let’s not flip out like we’re being censored.

Rightly or wrongly, someone asks someone else to consider the implications of a word they’re using. Not a huge deal. And it wasn’t a request the word ‘girl’ be banned or censored; I’m fairly sure Simone’s fine with people calling themselves that if it’s their preference. It’s just not hers.

It’s easy to get defensive in these discussions. I’ve done that before and I was being a dick.  (I’m sorry, if you’re reading this.) But if we’re going to talk about privilege, maybe we could acknowledge that the language we use reflects our society, and if particular members of marginalised groups want to suggest it’s biased in places, they’re entitled to that.

There are good reasons and bad reasons to ask that a word be avoided, obviously. Bad ones include ‘It’s vulgar’ and ‘My holy book says so’. But it’s not an authoritarian imposition for an 18-year-old to express discomfort when addressed as ‘girl’. Get over it, guys.

Finally, most importantly: let’s ditch the gaslighting, shall we?

When someone leaves a short, to-the-point comment politely suggesting she and other woman not be referred to as ‘girls’ since it can be infantilising, could we at least entertain the idea her concern is valid, and not tell her she’s out of her mind?

Dismissing it is not okay. And when you tell her she’s acting like an eight-year-old, or to ‘chill’, ‘stop whinging’ and ‘get a grip’, you’re dismissing it.

When you minimise the subject by calling it ‘petty’, ‘trivial’ and a ‘small issue’, you are dismissing it. Clearly her feelings trivial to her, or she wouldn’t have brought them up, and it’s not up to us to say what women in the group are and aren’t allowed to find unpleasant.

When you make the discussion sound theoretical, by referring to it as ‘political correctness’ or ‘politics’, you’re dismissing it. The point of the ‘men and girls’ phrase being brought up is that as guys, we don’t usually have words used for us non-maliciously which make us feel like we’re treated as children. This may be ‘political’ to us, because we don’t live it. If someone else who does wants to says it bothers her, we don’t get to write it off as academic.

In short, let’s not be dicks.

This has not been an enjoyable post to write. I don’t put myself on any kind of pedestal, and I definitely don’t presume to speak for the women involved. I don’t particularly want to say any more about this - these are my thoughts, right here - and I left LGBTQsoc a good while back, largely because of things like this. But this kind of thing makes me feel crap about being a guy. Next time you hear feminists talking about how ‘dudes don’t get it’ and you’re tempted to think they just hate on men, comments like some of these are probably one reason why.

Alex Gabriel

Straight euphemisms for ‘a particular lifestyle’

Hayley Stevens, who now shares a blogging platform with me, just posted about Keith O’Brien’s Easter sermon. It’s a good post, so I’d only be retreading her path if I gave my own opinion of the silly claims he makes, but I’ll use one phrase of his as a starting point. She quotes him:

‘Recently, various Christians in our Society were marginalised and prevented from acting in accordance with their beliefs because they were not willing to publicly endorse a particular lifestyle.  You have only to ask a couple with regard to their bed and breakfast business; certain relationship councillors; and people who had valiantly fostered children for many years of their particular experiences – and I am sure they are not exaggerating them!’

O’Brien’s examples make clear that he’s talking about gay relationships, so it’s obvious he calls this ‘a particular lifestyle’ to euphemise rather than obscure. It’s an instinct I’ve seen often in straight people of a certain age, and not just religious ones, which bothers me far more than direct abuse; to hedge around queerness verbally is, I think, a much more alarming kind of slur.

I’ve had more or less every straight term of abuse, but ‘faggot’ and ‘cocksucker’ have never hurt my feelings. They’re words a bigot would never use in their ideal world, acknowledging what is for them an uncomfortable reality. To call me that is to state not only that I have the kind(s) of sex you wish I couldn’t, but that you’re completely, utterly unable to stop me. It’s a mark of my ability to fuck with you – which as far I’m concerned is the whole point.

That’s why I like ‘queer’, not just as an inclusive umbrella term but as a positive descriptor. I love its confrontational tone, its celebration of bad behaviour; as if to say Yes, we know we freak you out. Just try and stop us.

There’s power in our status as anomalies of sex and gender, a glitch in straight society’s programming, a spanner in the works which can’t be ignored. We’re the grit which the priesthood just can’t wiggle out of its shoe. When people call us deviants and perverts and freaks, they’re implicitly illustrating the threat we pose – as if, should we not be kept far away from their social order, we might jam its workings and cause it to collapse. To a problem child like me, that’s practically viagra.

Frustrating, then, when all this is reduced to ‘a particular lifestyle’. I do get a partial, gratifying sense that O’Brien is afraid of saying what he really means, but the overriding impression is that gay relationships don’t deserve mention. It’s a marginalising tactic, like a teacher who refers to ‘certain pupils’ drawing rude pictures so as not to confer street cred on the guilty parties. The same is true when my grandmother calls me ‘peculiar’, glossing all the troubling potential of queer sexuality as simply an eccentric quirk, and when my mum asks me every year or two, ‘So… are you gay?’

I’m not, but I do. Referring to my queerness as something I simply am and not a pattern of behaviour with politics, intent and motive running through it. The sex I have – with men, women, genderqueer folk or whomever – is threatening and ideological, embodying a general instinct to fuck with things. It’s not just an inoccuous quality, like height or hair colour. To imply that I only like sex with men because I was born this way insults its status as a rebellious act, and to gloss me as ‘being gay’ skirts around the blunt reality of my liking cock as determinedly as Keith O’Brien’s vagueness.

This is entrenched. It’s not just references to ‘being’ and ‘lifestyle’, it’s the media’s fixation with ‘love’ in its discourse on LGBT issues (gay marriage, especially); it’s the gay community’s increasing self-sanitisation, replacing sex ads in its magazines with vouchers for designer clothing and swapping pills for cocktails, all to court mum and dad’s acceptance. More and more, the upstart nature of what we do is being straightened out of our communities, and it terrifies me.

‘Gay’? I’m a faeces-eating, semen-drinking fag soldier for Satan. If like Keith O’Brien you don’t like that, you should be scared.

Alex Gabriel

Charles Moore’s on-off relationship with facts

This post appeared previously at The Heresy Club.

‘One of the main reasons that slavery was abolished in the Christian world’, Charles Moore wrote in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, ‘is that St Paul taught that no slavery could be approved by the faith’.

St. Paul for his part has the following to say:

‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.’ (Ephesians 6:5)

‘Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them’. (Titus 2:9)

‘All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered.’ (1 Timothy 6:1)

Later in his article, Moore suggests ‘secularists and atheists do not read the Bible as much as Christians’. We read it more than he does, apparently.

It’s hard to make a biblical case for abolition without resorting to generalised abstractions like ‘love thy neighbour’ – the book contains not one direct instruction against keeping slaves, which I’d modestly expect from a tome of ultimate, divine goodness – but I don’t know a single Christian (and I know some very brilliant ones) who’d try to claim Paul as a forebear of the anti-slavery movement. It’s worth noting that, in the bottommost passage above, he suggests keeping slaves only tars the name of early Christians if they’re badly behaved, and the status of believers as ‘slaves to God’ is a running motif in his writing and the other apostles’.

This post isn’t dedicated to slavery in the Bible, so I’ll resist saying more. Moore’s article is just so full of wrong that its assertions have to be addressed.

‘A view has now grown up in the West’, he says for example, ‘that religion in the public sphere is either irrelevant or positively harmful.’ Whose views does he mean? David Cameron’s, who – as he acknowledges – just declared ‘the values of Christianity are the values that we need’? Sayeeda Warsi’s, who likes to warn about ‘militant secularism’? Are we sidelining the church by only letting it run one in three schools? Oh no, of course: we’re persecuting Christians when we insist they follow the same rules as everyone else.

To remove religious bias from the public sector is not to ban religion in the public sphere. Preach and pray all you like in the market place, but don’t expect taxpayers’ money and state endorsement. (Why secularists don’t have the rightist Moore’s support, I’m completely unsure, since our main aim is to privatise God.)

‘The Nazis repudiated Christianity’, he tells us. Excuse me? No. Adolf Hitler madeextensive declarations of Christianity. His party used creationism to justify its racial policies, banning books on Darwinian evolution and ‘writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion’. His chancellorship was immediately bestowed on him by Germany’s catholic hierarchs, his party’s ascendence all but endorsed by the Holy See and his pogroms in eastern Europe carried out largely by Catholic civilian populations. (The church remained formally anti-semitic until 1964). His regime created its own evangelical body, the Protestant Reich Church, within three years of coming to power and targetedmuch of its propaganda at the Christian population.

Even if the Nazis were pro-secular, of course, that wouldn’t make it a bad thing. The Nazis created one of the world’s best motorway networks and invented the Volkswagen, as its name makes clear. I somewhat doubt Charles Moore finds either reprehensible.

He goes on to suggest that the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause – ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or preventing the free exercise thereof’ – doesn’t rule out government spending on religion, though it’s hard to know how tax money going to any one faith group (or the tax-exempt status of U.S. churches) fails to bias government against other groups, thus impeding their free exercise. He refers specifically to the printing of ‘In God we trust’ on American currency, though neglects to mention it was only added in 1956 at the height of the McCarthyist period and all its associated fear of godless reds.

‘Secularists in this country’, Moore concludes, ‘should recognise how lucky they are. They live in a nation which, until recently at least, has treated the institutions of Christianity kindly – on the condition, which the Church of England has faithfully fulfilled, that they do not throw their weight around.’ Hmm, really? With Rowan Williams, John Sentamu’s and George Carey’s entitled comments on every passing issue, with the Church’s completely unjustified presence in parliament, with its aforementioned running of tax-funded schools; with its chaplains in our hospitals earning several times the salaries of nurses while other religions’ volunteer, and its fought-for exemptions from equality and employment law, I’m disinclined to view the C of E as such a humble creature.

Charles Moore needs to straighten out his facts. It isn’t secularists in Britain but Christians who should ‘recognise how lucky they are’. As James Donnelly of the University of Sheffield Atheist Society puts it:

Christians in Syria are being executed for their religion by members of the Sunni jihadist insurgency and used as pawns by the Shia-dominated government. Yet Charles Moore, instead of worrying about this and the very real persecution of Christians in many countries, chooses to whine about Jesus Christ not being praised sufficiently enough in a country where Christianity is the established religion.

Alex Gabriel

Exclusive: Cameron’s letter to Christian leaders

This post appeared previously at The Heresy Club.

One perk of blogging is that when you’ve done it for so long, it’s common to have developed useful contacts in high places. Last night I was contacted by a concerned supporter of secularism in the Conservative Party, who’s managed to gain access to a letter David Cameron will now be sending church leaders in Britain – specifically, the attendees of his Easter function at Downing Street this week, where he announced his support for a ‘Christian fightback’ in a speech. (A transcript is here.)

This hasn’t, as far as I can tell, been leaked elsewhere, so we’re thrilled to bring it you as a THC exclusive. The letter reads as follows:

Dear all,

Happy Easter, once again. I’m writing personally to thank all of you for visiting Downing St. this week, and to reaffirm this government’s support for celebrating faith as a key part of our society in Britain.

There will always be differences in what we, as Christians, think and say. I know that some of you were very keen afterwards, for example, to discuss my idea of the resurrection as a ‘detail’ in Christianity. But the media’s reception of what I said about the role of faith in all our lives should come as an encouraging signal that the fightback against a bullying, intolerant kind of secularism is really happening.

Because of this, I’m excited to let you know that as part of our plan to build the values of the Bible – values that today, we need so badly – back into our society, the Government will soon be announcing a raft of new measures. These are policies which draw on our nation’s great Christian heritage, and are intended to reflect the morals that we find when, as believers, we read the Bible.

I put two challenges to you at Number 10, and the first was about foreign aid. That area – the way Britain interacts with the wider world, and how we engage other cultures – is the starting point for our new, biblical society. I spent some time with the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, thinking how we should bring our foreign policy more into line with the Bible’s values, and we believe there do need to be changes.

Our troops, who risk life and limb to protect our safety, have been deployed all over the world in the past few years. They’ve done brave, important work to keep us safe in Afghanistan and in Iraq, in Libya. But having read the Bible more closely, it’s clear to us now that invading these countries isn’t enough. Its values give us a different and a very real sense of how to treat enemy forces: ‘utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’ From now on, we’re prepared to be much more robust about military action, and ask our soldiers to annhiliate the general population where we send them. This will be a tough fight, with the bullying, intolerant secularists of the anti-genocide movement in our way, but we’re determined to put the Bible back at the centre of our action in the world.

There are points where the message is different, of course, so in case this seems draconian we’ll be making some exceptions. It’s Moses who stands right at the core of our faith traditions, and in some countries we do want to take our cues from what he said, so we’ll make sure to take virginal girls as sex slaves instead of killing them. This might seem like a difficult goal, with slavery of all kinds having been illegal so long – but since we’ve planned for several years now to scrap the Human Rights Act, reinstating it as an important Christian tradition won’t take too much extra work, and we’re confident we can achieve it. There are two great Christian traditions in this country which have followed Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and we know you haven’t always been on good terms – but both of them get behind slavery in an important way, so this is an incredible opportunity for different denominations to work together. And since we said when we first entered government that we’d slash through red tape and health and safety bureaucracy, we’re committed to saying if you want to drive nails through your slave’s ear, you should be allowed to do that.

We know in politics there’s often a price to pay, so it’s true this new, more biblical foreign policy won’t come free. Times are hard for everyone already, and we’ll all have to make sacrifices – literally. The story of Jephthah is still one of the most inspiring the Bible offers us, so each time we embark on a new genocide invasion humanitarian intervention, we’ll be making sure our Ofsted inspectors have at least one schoolgirl burnt alive. (Don’t worry, we’ll make sure she’s from a state school.) In case the feminists on the opposition front bench try to fight us on this, we’ll also be honouring the more liberal story of Abraham and Isaac, by ordering randomly selected fathers to burn their sons to death – though this may mean announcing U-turns at the last moment.

Our education system is broken as it stands, and we need to mend it, so our schools reforms are going to be even more radical. The Pope’s visit eighteen months ago had such an amazing reception here that we’re really rethinking sex education. Saint Paul is very clear about gay relationships not being acceptable, so we want to be clear about that on the syllabus now, as well as clamping down on LGBT History Month and all those other initiatives. We do still see bullying as a urgent issue, of course, so we’ve put together an entire new procedure for students who say they’re being ‘bashed’ at school: under proposals we’re putting forward, teachers will now be advised to tell them, as Jesus says, ‘Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ The Bible is clear from the beginning that we shouldn’t have our own ideas about good and evil, so we’re rolling back PSHE as well – and since Theresa May and I are already taking a tough line on protest, it shouldn’t be too difficult to enforce ‘resist not evil’.

In schools, we’ll also introduce some new exemptions to equality law so that women can’t teach or hold authority. This will of course lead to huge numbers of jobs lost in the public sector, so our MPs will get right behind it. On the subject of reforming our broken politics, it’s obvious now that we need to reappraise some current ideas in the light of the Bible’s values, so we’ll also be rethinking women’s right to vote - it seems unavoidable that the book prefers them to submit to their husbands in such matters. This is, of course, a tough decision, but since following the Bible is so clearly in the national interest, we believe it’s the right one for Britain. Since we’re not as keen to promote the less traditional faith groups, we’ll also be executing witches. It says so in Exodus, after all, and I sometimes think witch burnings are a part of our national tradition we’re too hard on.

This government’s always said we should celebrate marital commitment, so as Jesus tells us it leads to adultery we’ll be scrapping divorce. He also tells us we’re committing if we look at women lustfully, of course, so we’ll be funding new scientific research into policing thoughtcrime and using our new powers to monitor internet use to investigate the issue. (Sam tells me I’ll have to sell my Thatcher memorabilia too. We’re all in this together.)

But the real jewel in the crown for our reforms is the justice system. It’s no secret that in my party, there are those who take a tougher stance on crime and punishment than I do, but respect for the Bible’s values really brings us together. So in the next few years, our prisons service will be scrapped – as will all fines, court orders and other legal punishments. I’ve often found myself talking about personal responsibility, and so have many in my party, but having studied Jesus it’s clear that this is really just a fashionable, secular idea. From now on, instead of punishing guilty individuals for their actions, we’ll now be holding a public selection process every few years to (perhaps via a light entertainment show with Graham Norton) to find an entirely faultless person devoid of moral failings. After this, that person will be gradually and sadistically tortured to death as a punishment for everyone else’s crimes – including ones we don’t realise we’ve committed. All that will be required for the acquittal of rapists’, murderers’ and child molesters’ crimes is belief in this event, though it will be staged in private to avoid any evidence it took place.

In case it’s not obvious how this maps to the teachings of the Bible, we’ll also be developing a failsafe system based on Jesus’s teachings. The London Underground network will be gutted and refitted as a gigantic underground torture chamber, replete with the best innovations of British industry: fire, gnashing teeth and high-quality audio productions of agonised crying. Any latent unbelievers who fail to accept the execution of the innocent person for them will be sent her, and never let out. Once this system, the pinnacle of reform for the Big Society on Bible-based values, is in place, I think we can all feel we’ve won the argument over faith’s place in modern Britain.

Happy Easter.

David

The Church of England’s tolerant new message: shut the fuck up

This post appeared previously at The Heresy Club.

Suddenly, and despite having just announced he’ll resign this year, Rowan Williams has in recent weeks become a reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury. His predecessor George Carey is now leading the church’s charge for traditional marriage, so perhaps stepping down as ABC is politicising – though he’s joined by John Sentamu, the heir presumptive to Williams, so on second thoughts maybe not.

In Newcastle a fortnight back, Sentamu warned in the Telegraph’s words about ‘a new, intolerant brand of “aggressive atheism” intent on driving religion out of public life’. Here’s how he’s quoted:

‘What we are facing isn’t so much secularism, it is what I call ‘aggressive atheism’ disguising itself as secularism. I’ve never been against secularisation because it allows the possibility for good debate and disagreement. But there is a strand within it which has become so intolerant, they think it is tolerant but it isn’t. It is the assumption that religion should have no space anywhere.’

Quite what he thinks secularism is, I don’t claim to know – as someone who supports tax-financed church schools and special treatment for Christians by employers, it doesn’t seem to me that he wants church and state to be separate. It’s true that most Brits who campaign for that are suspicious of religion, but one can’t help feeling that’s because our much-namechecked Christian heritage makes expectations of privilege a central part of that particular faith for many adherents.

Certainly, there’s nothing very aggressive about giving talks and writing articles (however inflammatory), or forming local groups to criticise religious claims and support non-believers. ‘Aggressive’, as Sentamu uses it, is a smear and a form of shutuppery, a defanging tactic which aims to guilt us into compromise; it’s the equivalent of saying queer people can have rights ‘as long as they don’t flaunt it’.

But Williams too, a fallen alumnus of my left wing Oxford college, has joined in on the move to shut the church’s bêtes noires up. He commented a few days ago that, again in the Telegraph’s words, ‘fixation with gay rights, feminism and separate racial identities is threatening to “fragment” British society’. Here’s what he says:

‘Identity politics, whether it is the politics of feminism, whether it is the politics of ethnic minorities or the politics of sexual minorities, has been a very important part of the last 10 or 20 years because before that I think there was a sense that diversity was not really welcome. And so minorities of various kinds and … women began to say “actually we need to say who we are in our terms not yours” and that led to identity politics of a very strong kind and legislation that followed it.

We are now, I think, beginning to see the pendulum swinging back and saying identity politics is all very well but we have to have some way of putting it all back together again and discovering what is good for all of us and share something of who we are with each other so as to discover more about who we are. Identity isn’t just something sealed off and finished with … it’s always work in progress. Once we start saying this is my identity and that’s it then I think we are in danger of really fragmenting the society we belong to.’

The Guardian has already run a series of responses from Reni Eddo-Lodge, Sunny Hundal and Peter Tatchell, who all make good points and whose comments deserve attention. Eddo-Lodge in particular says his commards ‘veer towards the dismissal of marginalised voices’, and she’s right. Couched in Williams’ characteristically guarded language, the message which comes is a clear delegitimisation of activists for women, queers and ethnic minorities; a ‘stop going on about it’; at worst, a ‘shut the fuck up’.

For one thing, the aspects of those groups’ politics he calls fragmentary – ingroup language, safe zones, interlinking organised groups – are there because our society was uninclusive in the first place. We have gaybourhoods and women’s caucuses because metropolitan and areas and political assemblies were non-representative; we have black history month because ethnic minorities are underrepresented in public discourse and school syllabuses. These things are not the causes of fragmentation but the symptoms: asking marginal groups to give them up and re-enter the ‘mainstream’ means asking them what security they have.

Which is fine, of course, if that security is no longer needed and the existence of segregation no longer occurs. But that’s a long way off, and in any case it’s not for Rowan Williams to say. At the risk of sounding clichéd, the Archbishop is a white, straight man. If the time comes for BAME, queer and women’s groups to abandon political narratives based on their own perspectives, we can be pretty sure they’ll make that decision themselves – and it’s typically presumptious of Williams to think he gets to make it for them.

Alex Gabriel