A deeply unedifying collision
Carey turns purple in the face and insists that yes religious believers do too so have a right to treat people badly just because their religion says to.
The former archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey today accused judges of moving towards a new “secular state” that would downgrade the rights of religious believers. Attacking a “deeply worrying” court ruling, Carey claimed the judiciary was now tipping the legal balance against believers in “a deeply unedifying collision of human rights”.
The new secular state would downgrade the rights of religious believers to say no ew ick I won’t serve/marry/advise/cut the hair of gay people because I don’t want to because I think they’re gross and god thinks so too. Those rights. Those time-honored rights to hate certain kinds of people for random meaningless ick-based reasons, and in addition to hating them, treat them as a thing apart, and when times get tough, go the rest of the way and kill them.
Those are the rights that Carey is demanding that the state make extra-special room for. If he lived in another country, it would be child witches, or Tutsis, or Bosnians, or untouchables, or Armenians. It’s strange and terrible that he doesn’t have the brains to figure that out.
Carey reacted angrily to a judge who sharply criticised him for previously appealing for a court of hand-picked judges to determine religious rights cases. Carey had also warned of civil unrest over decisions he claimed could lead to Christians being barred from jobs.
Carey wants a theocracy, and he can’t have one. Tough.
Aye, there’s a universal human attribute. Loss of privilege feels like persecution.
Carey seems to be missing that it takes two to have a collision. And that maybe it’s him who’s been driving on the wrong side of the road.
Also, this collision is nothing new. What’s new is that Christianity no longer is in a position of unquestioned authority anymore. Carey is like someone who’s upset that we don’t accept that his mates in the police force let him off the hook for DUI.
Good piece on this here.
Why do religious people take jobs which they know will eventually cross their consciences? A Quaker doesn’t take work in an armaments factory, a Catholic in an abortion clinic, a Muslim in a pig abattoir. Other people have ethical attitudes towards jobs eg working for advertising/public relations on the grounds they lie for a living, or for investment banks because they don’t approve of gambling. Why not take as the price of having a particular belief is that you can’t do certain jobs without moaning about it?
Yikes! need to make full use of the fancy commenting with proper links etc.
What an outrageous man George Carey is! Not very bright either, I’m afraid. (It’s not a qualification, you see.) It’s a nice contrast (and collision. First and ABC who is not very bright, but certainly believes in a straightforward sense, and next an archbishop whose thoughts are so hard to decipher, it’s hard to know what he believes. But both have made a pitch for special religious courts, Rowan for Muslim ones, and now Carey for Christian ones. Now, we’ll have to add Jewish courts (there probably are some in Britain), Hindu courts, Rastafarian courts (which would legalise marijuana first thing), Sikh courts, Baptist Courts, Sunni courts, Shia courts, Druid courts, Animist courts, Jain courts, Buddhist courts, Shinto courts, maybe humanist courts, New Age courts – well, you see, George, it just wouldn’t work out!
Actually, that Rastafarian court sounds like it might have merit :-)
Yes, I’ve nothing against marijuana, except that all I get out of it is a cough. No high, just a cough.
I think there are two issues here, and you aren’t making the distinction between them clear enough.
You seem to be saying “A [believer in x] must not discriminate against someone who is Y by refusing to associate with them”, and you seem to be saying that a refusal to associate is related to wanting to kill someone who is Y.
That’s a very strong statement, and Carey is making another very strong statement “If you are a believer in X, and you decide to discriminate against people who are Y, you cannot be sacked even if that discrimination means that you don’t do your job properly”.
I think you are both wrong (and of course I may have misunderstood your position).
I think that people should be allowed to make their own choices about who they associate with (where association includes counselling, cutting hair etc.), but I also think that they should bear the consequences of that (losing their jobs).
Maybe you think the same thing too, but if you do, perhaps you could make it clearer.
Tom, sure, I agree that people should be allowed to choose their own friends – and for that matter I think Carey should be allowed to talk the dangerous nonsense he talks (depending on how dangerous it gets), but I also think he’s wrong and wicked for talking it, and that it’s urgent to say so.
I think that when people who have high status of the kind that Carey has (and the pope has), their decoration of arbitrary hatreds as matters of “religious belief” make those hatreds respectable to many people. I do indeed think that arbitrary hatreds are “related to wanting to kill” the objects of the hatred – that’s not to say that they always result in that, but it is to say that the two are on a continuum. I think Carey is grossly irresponsible for not realizing that. (Or if he does realize it, he’s worse than irresponsible.)
All this talk of freedom of conscience from religious organisations doesn’t cut the other way.
Just read in the local paper that a parent govenor (I.e. Elected by parents to be on the board of the school) of a local catholic school (i.e. Paid for by everyone) had been suspended.
Why? Because he is running in the general election as a Green Party candidate, and the party’s policies on equality and education are incompatible with the church’s desire to keep it’s schools closed.
http://ow.ly/17el1q