Author: Ophelia Benson

Girls yanked around like so much furniture.

Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home. Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes…About 40 percent of the Pakistani and other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the district here are home-schooled…Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence…As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.

How nice to know that Lodi has so much in common with Luton.

Aishah Bashir, now an 18-year-old Independent School student, was sent back to Pakistan when she was 12 and stayed till she was 16. She had no education there. Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”

Too bad Aishah can’t have what she wants for her daughter. Too bad she can’t be more educated too.

And speaking of sanctimony, there’s nothing like letting a child die miserably while you pray over her instead of going to a doctor.

An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday…”She got sicker and sicker until she was dead,” [the police chief] said…[S]he had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. The girl’s parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to “apparently they didn’t have enough faith,” the police chief said. They believed the key to healing “was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray,” he said.

Which might be understandable if they lived on some other planet, but they lived in a town in Wisconsin, they owned a coffee shop, they had sent their daughter to school. They lived on planet earth and were not cut off from knowledge of what people do when they get sick. They were not cut off from available knowledge of what is the right thing to do when a powerless child gets sick.

But we are told we shouldn’t judge.

It’s important not to be moralistic or pass judgment on parents who think they can heal a child through prayer, said Dr. Norman Fost, professor of bioethics and pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison. “They believe they’re helping their child; they love their child, and they believe prayer has an effect,” Fost said.

How does he know they love their child? Does he know that? Is he just assuming it? Is he just thinking well all parents love their children so even parents who are delusional and reckless enough to let their children suffer and die for lack of medical treatment, must love their children? Probably. Which doesn’t give one much confidence in his powers of reasoning.

David Aaronovitch murmurs a quiet word in the ear of the bishop of Durham.

Sermon continues: “This secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people…” Now, this is as close to a lie as makes no difference. Dr Wright may reply directly to the Times letters page, which, even in this fallen age, generally prints the words of high clergymen, to tell me which significant secularist body, or scientific group, or gaggle of atheists is it that believes “we” have the right “to kill surplus old people”?

Ah, you see, we must allow for episcopal hyperbole, and we must respect the beliefs which prompt them to indulge in such hyperbole. We’re not allowed to tell whoppers like that about them, but when they do it about us, why, they’re…um…following their consciences. Or something.

This almost wanton disregard of fairness was being deployed for the specific purpose of attacking the proposals to allow the creation and use of hybrid embryo tissue in scientific and medical research…[T]he argument about what is actually in the Bill has been sidetracked by the mass complaints about the decision by the Government to put a three-line whip on Labour MPs. This has led, among other miracles, to the call by the Catholic hierarchy for there to be a free vote – a “conscience” vote – on the entirely contradictory basis that, according to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor: “Catholics have got to act according to their Catholic convictions.” But these are not personal convictions, they’re matters of doctrine. Churches constantly change their collective minds about what God says, so what is being asked is that MPs put their Church – not their conscience – above everything else.

Not personal convictions? Matters of doctrine?! That’s blasphemy! It’s insulting! Of course the embryo nonsense is a matter of personal conviction; it’s totally a coincidence that it’s Catholics who have it and who keep saying that as Catholic MPs they – um – well let’s talk about something else now.

Naturally, despite this, just about every editorial in every newspaper lined up, almost languidly, behind the free-vote demand…It is an easy concession to make to the religious lobby…providing that you don’t believe they’ll win. That way the churchy can go back to their bishops and say they’ve done their bit, and the rest of us can have our Bills to ameliorate or improve the human condition. Then, when the Bill becomes law and, over time, the advances save lives, the bishops and their flocks can quietly benefit from the measures they so denigrated, have the operation, swig the medicine and move on, sanctimoniously, to the next bit of opposition.

Sanctimoniously. Just so. That’s what’s so irritating: the preening, self-admiring parade of ‘conscience’ superior to everyone else’s – when they’re putting a handful of cells ahead of the well-being of real humans.