Author: Ophelia Benson

Aw, that’s nice. A reader alerted me to this blog post which is a favourable review of the dictionary. And it’s by someone I don’t even know, too. Someone in Adelaide. He likes that article by Andrew Weeks on Gibson and God, as well. Good guy, this Adelaide fella. If I’m ever in Adelaide I’ll look him up, see if he’d like to show me around, buy me dinner, laugh at my jokes.

Peter Beinart in The New Republic points out that conservatives, long in the habit of sniggering at political correctness and group whining, have found a disrespected minority of their very own: evangelicals. Yeah they have, haven’t they.

Mind you, in the usual obligatory ritual, Beinart hands a little ground back, which he shouldn’t have.

To be fair, occasionally liberals do treat evangelical Christians with condescension and scorn. Conservatives frequently, and justifiably, expressed outrage at a Washington Post news story that called followers of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”…On November 4, in The New York Times, Garry Wills suggested that America now resembles the theocracies of the Muslim world more than it resembles Western Europe, which is offensive, not to mention absurd.

Well is it false that followers of Falwell and Robertson are largely uneducated? I don’t know any statistics on the subject, but it seems on the face of it unlikely that F & R would appeal to educated people – unless one has a slightly special definition for ‘educated’. And as for the next part, ‘offensive’ is irrelevant – in fact its irrelevance is part of the point of the article, so it seems absent-minded of Beinart to use the word.

But then once he’s got that ‘to be fair’ stuff out of the way, things pick up.

What these (and most other) liberals are saying is that the Christian Right sees politics through the prism of theology, and there’s something dangerous in that. And they’re right. It’s fine if religion influences your moral values. But, when you make public arguments, you have to ground them–as much as possible–in reason and evidence, things that are accessible to people of different religions, or no religion at all. Otherwise, you can’t persuade other people, and they can’t persuade you. In a diverse democracy, there must be a common political language, and that language can’t be theological.

That’s what I keep saying – and I keep being surprised at how much resistance there is to that idea among some intellectuals (those ‘educated’ people again). But it seems so obvious. If you tell me a given piece of legislation would be a good thing because Moloch says so, why should that carry any weight with me? Why would you expect it to? Why should it make any difference if you substitute the generic word ‘God’ for Moloch? They both mean the same thing, after all – ‘the deity I have decided to believe in’. It’s just not reasonable to expect other people to believe in the supernatural being you have chosen to believe in, therefore that being’s word doesn’t carry any weight in public political discussions. Or rather it shouldn’t. Of course, when people use the word used by the majoritarian religion for its deity, they think they are referring to someone that everybody ought to pay attention to – but that’s a kind of trick of the light, an illusion, caused by familiarity and failure to question. And then that illusion goes on to become resentment and truculence.

What many conservatives are now saying is that, since certain views are part of evangelicals’ identity, harshly criticizing those views represents discrimination…Identity politics is a powerful thing–a way of short-circuiting debate by claiming that your views aren’t merely views; they are an integral part of who you are. And who you are must be respected. But harsh criticism is not disrespect–and to claim it is undermines democratic debate by denying opponents the right to aggressively, even impolitely, disagree. That is what conservatives are doing when they accuse liberals of religious bigotry merely for demanding that the Christian Right defend their viewpoints with facts, not faith.

Just so. That’s that special status for religion thing that I keep mentioning. Harsh criticism is not disrespect, and pretending it is is a way of trying to rule out disagreement. Exactly. Of course, it works, so needless to say conservatives are going to go right on doing it, and accusing atheists and secularists of elitism into the bargain, but at least the rest of us can point out how bogus it all is.

Check out this interview with Jane Kramer in the New Yorker. She says some things that it would be good to see said more often, by more people, more forthrightly.

But in France, with all its freedoms, so many young women seem to be capitulating to Islamist pressure. It usually starts with the young men who are recruited, and the symbols of successful recruitment are the women in the family. In other words, the women are the symbol of the new identity of the man. When you see a twelve-year-old girl coming to school in a chador, where for two or three generations no one had worn one, you have to look at this as the expression of an enormous pressure from the men in the girl’s family. You’re really dealing with a born-again movement, and the girls get the short end of the stick, because the boys don’t have to change what they study, how they dress, and so forth. The girls are the proof of the new purity of the family.

Just so. The boys get to go right on dressing as they like, the girls have to turn themslves into symbols. As usual – yawn yawn, same old same old. Men are people, women are things; men get to have autonomy, women don’t; men apply pressure, women become symbols.

Homa Arjomand is in Victoria today to give a speech against the introduction of Sharia law in Ontario. I hope she gets a huge turnout and a lot of press coverage.

On the other hand. One letter to the Independent on the ‘Charles tells lower orders to stay in their places’ matter makes an interesting point.

How ironic that on the same day that Charles Clarke says that Prince Charles is out of touch for commenting that children want to be pop stars and the like without having to do anything to earn it, he chooses to announce that “every school must take its fair share of unruly pupils”. As a supply teacher in this country for the past two years, I think that, at least in this instance, it is Mr Clarke who seems more out of touch than the Prince. When was the last time Mr Clarke was in a classroom? There are many disruptive students who ruin it for the good children. From my experience, these disruptive ones fit the description given by the Prince, thinking that they don’t need an education as they will make it as pop stars or footballers in their teens and early twenties.

The letter-writer then suggests that disruptive students should be isolated so that no school would have to deal with them in their disruptive state, and he points out the burden those disruptive students are to both teachers and students who want to learn. Which is true. That’s a conversation I’ve had more than once with various friends who are teachers – the fact that they often have to spend more time being a cop than being a teacher, and how bad that is for the students who don’t need policing and would rather learn something, as well as for the teachers themselves. Teaching is teaching, not crowd control, not prison guarding, not military basic training. Teachers should be able to devote their energies to teaching their subject matter, not struggling to establish dominance. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and energy to make teachers do that, plus it’s a hell of a good way to discourage people from being teachers at all. If I ran the world, students would either act like students or leave.

However, Charles was talking about his adult secretary, not school children, and he’s still a prat.

Oh dear, oh dear. One shouldn’t. One really shouldn’t. It’s most unkind. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. One feels frightful about it, one feels almost tempted to leave it alone, to do the decent thing. And yet when one sees a barrel with a lot of lazy fish swimming around in it, one shoots at them. One can’t help it. And anyway, what’s the matter with fish today, why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their capabilities? Horrible jumped-up little bastards – where’s one’s gun?

No seriously the hell with all that. The hell with pacifism towards that particular easy fish. I mean – if Charles Windsor, of all the people in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, really thinks he is in a position to rag on other people for wanting to do jobs without qualifications or natural abilities – well I mean to say. I mean to say he is literally the one person in the entire country with the least right to say such a thing. Bar none. His saying it is the exact equivalent of George W Bush and his handlers having the almighty gall to call other people ‘elitist’ when he would be doing well to be a part-time security guard if he had not been born into the shrubbery.

Oh dear, oh dear. It is funny though. Funnier than Bush, because of course Charles is so powerless, despite all the ridiculous sucking up and deference and bowing and Sirring and the bales and bales and bales of money. And it’s so funny that he apparently thinks he himself has natural abilities, at least compared with all these horrible striving proles he’s surrounded with, not to mention all these terrifying PC black women lusting after promotions. It’s always been funny. It was funny that he thought he was so clever compared to Diana because he read (wait for it) boooooks by Laurens van der Post. Oh very deep. Mind you Diana was funny that way too. Katharine Graham once told her she might enjoy going to university and Diana was very amused, saying she’d had plenty of education from life. Uh…right. Perhaps all toffs are like that. It’s a toff thing, apparently, to scorn education. One doesn’t need that sort of thing, thank you very much, that’s for the lower orders who have to do something, aristocrats have only to Be.

There are a lot of good letters on the subject here. And there is an interesting side point in this article –

Mr Clarke’s comments were seized upon by opponents as evidence of a breach of the convention whereby ministers do not criticise the Royal Family.

Well…excuse me, I’m just a Yank and a Republican and I don’t properly understand these things, but that does seem like a stupid convention. Why should the Royal Family be immune from criticism by ministers? I realize it has something to do with separation of government and crown, with keeping the muck of politics out of the more transcendent realm of the monarchy, and that that’s supposed to be good for continuity and the monarchy’s ceremonial role and all that. But still. It just does seem a ridiculous way to go about it. Choose this one person and treat it as if it’s magic, and then make the resulting oddity your head of state.

Since it’s such an odd system, I do wish we could stop trying to mimic it in the US.