Author: Ophelia Benson

I’ve been reading the Goldenbridge chapter of the Ryan report again. (Reading the whole report will be the work of months, if not years.) One thing (among others) struck me anew…

Sr Alida recalls her early years in religious life as being dominated by fear. On reflection she cannot understand how she accepted so many demands and pressures without protest. (7.219)

Exactly. This is how authoritarian religions work, after all, and Catholicism is nothing if not authoritarian – still, now, let alone in Ireland in the 1940s. Sister ‘Alida’ was trained by fear and she passed it on to the children she was in charge of.

The religious sisters who subsequently held management responsibility lived in a tightly controlled and authoritarian world. Questioning was defined as arrogance and led to blaming of the individual…No distinction appears to have been made between being a ‘good’ religious and being a ‘good’ childcare worker. The characteristics that were valued appear to have been obedience and dedication…The unsafe world of Goldenbridge developed a very particular culture which could not meet the needs of children. Very powerless people had enormous and immediate power over troubled and troublesome children. The abuse of the power and powerlessness was almost inevitable. (7.224)

In other words, a recipe for a disastrous way to take care of desolate children: fear, control, authoritarianism, slavishness, sadism, all gathered together into ‘enormous and immediate power’: the perfect nightmare.

Overall, there was a high level of severe corporal punishment in Goldenbridge, resulting in a pervasive climate of fear in the Institution. (7.232)

Yes but not just a pervasive climate of fear…Along with that climate, and inseparable from it, was a pervasive climate of unlove, of hostility, of anger…of hatred.

This is perhaps too obvious to point out, but a pervasive climate of fear created by a harshly punitive regime is inevitably also a pervasive climate of unlove – and that’s what was truly corrosive about Goldenbridge (and the other industrial schools). Reading the report, you just can’t escape that; it jumps off every page. There was no love there, and there was abundant fury and violence and frank hatred. The witnesses all say the same thing – they all felt utterly alone there, they had no one to turn to, that was the worst thing.

Hatred needs to be recognized as such. The pervasive climate of fear at Goldenbridge wasn’t just a matter of excessively harsh discipline. It’s possible to be both loving and strict, even ‘strict’ in the sense of using some corporal punishment…but there is a cut-off point. There is a point at which quantity becomes quality, and the corporal punishment is no longer compatible with anything that can be called love. This applies, mutatis mutandis, to ‘honour’ killings and forced marriage too. Whether God hates women or not, some of God’s fans certainly do hate women, and act accordingly. That needs to be acknowledged.

How obliging of Simon Sarmiento, right on the heels of Bunting’s incomprehension at my claim that laws handed down by an unaccountable god can be oppressive and difficult to change.

Anglican and RC church representatives, giving evidence to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, were very concerned that a new definition of “the purposes of an organised religion” would curtail their own existing right to discriminate against lay people for reasons other than religious belief.

Oh were they. And yet I thought ‘that in any religious tradition there is interpretation’ and ‘the way Christian teaching has changed over two thousand years is enormous and it continues to change’ so surely there can’t be a problem with Christian teaching not having changed enough, because if there were such a problem then Bunting would have understood what I was talking about, and she said she didn’t, so there must not be a problem. Right? Or perhaps not.

Fittall said: “You might believe that some of our rules and disciplines are wrong, but our view is that that is a matter of religious liberty – a matter for the Church of England, Roman Catholics, the Jews or whoever.”

Right, and that’s how you get away with it – you talk pious boilerplate about ‘religious liberty’ so that you can go on treating people unequally. Well – this is what I was saying. Religious laws are very hard to change because religions get this kind of special dispensation called ‘religious liberty’ and because the rule-giver does not answer requests for judicial review. That’s not an unmixed blessing.

And whaddya know – a colleague of Humera Khan’s has a lot more sense than Humera Khan seems to have –

There also seemed to be little support for the churches from their religious colleagues on the witness panel. Indeed Maleiha Malik, speaking for the Muslim Women’s Network said:

“I do not think that there is any evidence that there is a narrowing, but, like the British Humanist Association, we would very much welcome and strongly support any narrowing of the exemptions, for the following reason. The way the exemptions strike the balance between the rights of organised religion to discriminate and the rights of individuals to be free from discrimination is deeply unfair. It gives too much power to organised religions to police their internal members.”

Well said Maleiha Malik.

A note or two on Night Waves.

I think the most striking thing about both Bunting and Khan is the callous frivolity of their claims. This is probably inevitable when religious apologists are invited to defend religions from charges of injustice and cruelty – but then that’s what’s wrong with religious apologetics, isn’t it.

Bunting for instance started by saying, in a tone of well-feigned bewilderment, that she just really didn’t quite understand what I was talking about, because it seemed to her that in any religious tradition there is interpretation, and ‘the way the way Christian teaching has changed over two thousand years is enormous and it continues to change.’ But she must know perfectly well – how could she not? – that ‘Christian teaching’ hasn’t changed so thoroughly that it has managed to catch up to secular liberal thinking on human rights or women’s rights or gay rights. She must know perfectly well that Catholic bishops are currently insisting precisely on the difference between ‘Church teachings’ and gay rights and demanding that the former be allowed to trump the latter – so what does she mean by saying she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about? I don’t think she means anything, I think she’s just mouthing. And that’s what I mean by callous frivolity. She shouldn’t do that – she should be honest about the subject. This isn’t a game, this is stuff that fucks up people’s lives.

Khan was just as frivolous, talking dismissively about ‘what we call in the Muslim community call “Sheikh google”‘ – which apparently means something like ‘track down news items about various incidents of religious brutality around the world.’ Well look – the incidents are there – they’re real – they happen to real people – so what does it mean to shrug them off in that contemptuous way? Khan may have even had that thought herself, because she promptly added that we’d collected a lot of stuff, but then on third thought she said it was nothing new. No, it’s not new, we never said it was new; the point is not its novelty but that it happens at all. Khan said nothing whatsoever to palliate that – which is not surprising, because what could palliate it? In fact later she said something quite remarkable about ‘the things that aren’t quite working, the violence…’ Ah yes, the violence, which is ‘things not quite working.’

She also talked about the upside of patriarchy, and how if you redefine patriarchy so that it doesn’t mean patriarchy then it’s quite a good thing; she talked about tribes in Indonesia that are an example of matriarchy in Islam; she talked about Eurocentrism. Bunting agreed that there is patriarchy but then shouted that to go from that to the accusation that God hates women is an absurd illogical jump and why not ask do men hate women and how daft that is, there are lots of nice men, it’s a banal argument. Well yes it is a banal argument but it’s not our argument so that takes care of that anyway. Then by way of flourish she interrupted me to tell me the tone of the book is strident and shrill. I would call it, rather, indignant, or heated, or impassioned, in places. That’s because the stuff we talk about is bad – cruel, oppressive, unjust; bad. It’s not something to be callously frivolous about. It’s not something to shrug off with palaver about the Anglican church ordinating women or little pockets of Islamic matriarchy. It’s more serious than that.

Hitchens too sees flaws in Obama’s Cairo speech.

Take the single case in which our president touched upon the best-known fact about the Islamic “world”: its tendency to make women second-class citizens. He mentioned this only to say that “Western countries” were discriminating against Muslim women! And how is this discrimination imposed? By limiting the wearing of the head scarf or hijab…The clear implication was an attack on the French law that prohibits the display of religious garb or symbols in state schools.

He then quotes ‘from an excellent commentary by an Algerian-American visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School, Karima Bennoune, who says’

I have just published research conducted among the many people of Muslim, Arab and North African descent in France who support that country’s 2004 law banning religious symbols in public schools which they see as a necessary deployment of the “law of the republic” to counter the “law of the Brothers,” an informal rule imposed undemocratically on many women and girls in neighborhoods and at home and by fundamentalists.

This is what people who are horrified by bans on wearing the hijab so often neglect to mention, what they so often in fact obscure by calling the hijab a free choice which simply ignores the fact that in some places women are beaten or murdered for not wearing it. That’s an important fact and it shouldn’t be ignored.