A funny idea of “wrongdoers”
Barry Duke at The Freethinker tells us:
Iain Lee has lost his job as a presenter for BBC Three Counties radio after calling an anti-gay Christian group representative ‘a bigot’ during a debate on homophobia.
Lee made the comments to Libby Powell, a lawyer for the Christian Legal Centre, who was appearing on breakfast show to defend homophobic Pentecostal preacher Barry Trayhorn who had read out verses from the Bible condemning homosexuality during a service at a prison.
The presenter described the passages, and Libby’s belief in them, as “homophobic” and “bigoted” during a heated debate.
He asked her “Do you support bigotry?” and, when Libby defended her stance, said:
You’ve chosen not to question it, because you’re a bigot.
So the BBC doesn’t want him presenting things for them any more.
I suppose I can understand why the BBC doesn’t want its presenters calling people names, even names like “bigot”…but even so, I find it a tad sickening.
The on-air row arose from Reverend Barry Trayhorn’s reading of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 6, Verses 9-11 at HMP Littlehey in Cambridgeshire in May 2014. He was working as a gardener at the prison.
Trayhorn subsequently said he felt “compelled” to resign from his job and brought a case of constructive dismissal.
Ok, so let’s have 1 Corinthians 6:
Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
It’s that weirdly impoverished morality again, the same one that’s so striking in the “ten commandments” – nothing about cruelty or torture or rape or abuse or exploitation or violence – it’s all either “vices” or property crimes. It sweats the small stuff while ignoring the large. It is indeed a morality for bigots.
But it doesn’t do to say so.
I suppose there was a more politically correct way to say it: “Can you explain why that passage in the Bible doesn’t support bigotry?” That’s how I do my debates. If I attack the theist they will become defensive. If I attack the Bible, it creates a little distance, enabling the theist not to feel so personally attacked, and hopefully to distance themselves from the awful book.
Is it appropriate for the Rev. to toil in a walled garden?
OTOH, he seems to have produced Little Hay? ;-)
And Libby seems less than Liberal?
The Beeb – what can I say?
August – well yes, that would have been much better all around, you’re right.
I suppose he lost his temper, and the Beeb probably doesn’t want presenters who do that.
I sympathise strongly with Iain. I guess you can’t have that kind of behaviour though.
Hardly surprising. The message in most religious rules and guidelines are all about supporting the status quo for the group that comes up with the rules.
On a related note, the US Constitution was carefully crafted as a progressive and forward looking document. No document or set of ideas stays perfectly relevant forever, at some point you have to accept that it’s time to act in the spirit of the original crafter and move on. Sadly, the US Constitution seems to be ossifying into a quasi-religious tract.
Noticeably, the quoted passage explicitly only proscribes male homosexuality.
Is bigot actually a “name”, though? Is it name calling to say Hitler was a fascist, or Stalin was a dictator, or Jim Bakker a hypocrite? Is it off limits to label someone *accurately*, according to what those labels mean and their words and behavior indicate? How many useful words must we lose?
Fair point. It’s not really an epithet, but it’s close.
Anyway, I just said I can see why the BBC doesn’t want its presenters “calling people names” – meaning, I can see why the BBC would have much stricter standards about that than the rest of us have to. I definitely wasn’t suggesting that should be a standard for everyone!
The thing is, it seems to me that while, okay, the BBC has probably always tried to appear neutral on issues, before there were so many media monopolies, we had newspapers and radio stations owned by people who cared passionately about being correct as they saw correctness, rather than constantly calling mushy-mouthedness professionalism.
Krugman is almost always right, for instance, and his columns don’t tiptoe about his ideas. Austerity kills people and economies, for example. Not a popular thing to say, but he says it.
What about when a journalist finally said to Senator McCarthy, “Have you no decency?” These days, he’d be fired, I guess, but *someone needed to say it* and he made history by doing so.
I’m not saying that the next moderator of the Republican debates needs to call them, “a bunch of misogynistic xenophobes who couldn’t write a coherent, truth-based paragraph if their lives depended on it.” But the fact is, they walked away from one debate because they decided to play victim over even soft questions. Conservatives have become incredibly expert at manipulating people’s unwillingness to seem impolite to lie as much as they want and spin everything into their orbit. Organizations trying hard to appear neutral are used by them, to give credence to their frame and even their make-believe “facts”. Losing a job over calling someone a bigot is just *one* of the incidents in which reporters have their hands tied and realize their jobs depend more on their image than the substance of their work.
Must not insult their sensitivities. You can’t question anything any more if it’s somehow connected to religion.
It’s the clerical/fascist victim Olympics