Author: Ophelia Benson

Some people are a little dubious about the, what shall I say, the emotionality surrounding the recent transition of power in the US. Our friend KB Player for instance.

Eyes fixed on the horizon? And with the inspirational statesman look? That was pseudo poetic bombast. As an outsider, I felt faintly embarrassed, and thought that a quick cup of tea with the Queen, a few words in front of Downing Street while the old incumbent leaves by the back door carrying a suitcase, that’s the way to do it. Democracy is a good thing, but it doesn’t need to be turned into a religion.

Some doubt was expressed in comments at Talking Philosophy but we ended up in more or less the same place. Anyway I asked myself (and not for the first time, being a suspicious type, and also being aware that since I make a habit of puncturing sentimentalities and pieties I sort of have to be cautious with my own) if I should be more skeptical. Am I making a messiah out of Obama?

That’s certainly possible, for obvious reasons – I really do admire him, to a very unusual and intense degree. I’m not accustomed to admiring public figures (much less presidents) in this way, in fact to be perfectly honest I have no precedent at all for my attitude to Obama. That is almost a guarantee of a susceptibility to mistakes and blindness.

I’m not so deluded that I think his plans for health care are any good though. Maybe I’ll use that as a meter – I’ll just keep checking myself – ‘Do you think “affordable health care” is meaningful or possible? No? Good; still functioning.’ I wish he hadn’t invited Rick Warren to do the invocation…but on the other hand, Michelle Goldberg pointed out that the outrage about Warren’s homophobia has caused him to remove some of the concrete signs of it, so perhaps the invitation has forced him to do better.

Ah, the hell with it, it’s not worth it; I still think Obama shouldn’t have invited him.

I wish we could ditch all the God-talk. I’m very glad he included non-believers, but I still wish we could ditch the God talk. But…(this is where things get really sinister) I don’t mind it as much as I would from someone else, or as much as I did from Bush or Clinton. Have I lost my mind? Partly, maybe – that is, the euphoria of the whole thing motivates me to bury my normal reaction so that I can go on being euphoric. That’s not what you’d call sound intellectual practice – so that’s a fair cop. I’m giving Obama a break that I wouldn’t give other people. (Fortunately, it makes no difference to him or to them – I don’t want to come over all self-important here! I’m just exploring how this stuff works, from the inside; I’m not saying What I Think Matters.) But some of that is because the God talk trails with it the old civil rightsy rhetoric. I wouldn’t want to be without The Promised Land or All God’s Children or (perhaps least of all) ‘Thank God almighty, we’re free at last.’ That’s in spite of the fact that in any other context that line would irritate the hell out of me, because stricly speaking it’s absurd – thanking god for freedom and just politely ignoring the previous four centuries. In any other context I would rudely ask why god gets the credit for the good stuff and none of the blame for the bad stuff; I would ask why, if god could free the slaves, god didn’t just prevent them from being enslaved in the first place. But – in the civil rights context, I don’t. If I had the choice, I would keep all the presidential language secular, but since I don’t…I feel inclined to turn a blind eye. That’s a double standard. Nolo contendere.

Now we’ve got that out of the way…well it’s the old Wordsworth line, you know, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Yes I know it’s soppy, but I do not care – I want to be soppy. I’ve never seen anything like this. None of us have. You don’t know what it’s like (well you do if you live here and it’s affected you too, but otherwise, you don’t) – you don’t know what it’s like to have all but everyone in the damn country feeling ecstatic and elevated and (cough) well I don’t know how else to put this, kind of united.

I can even explain one reason, one of many. For eight years we’ve lived with the unhappy awareness that everyone outside the US thinks of it as Bush country – with a few dissenters perhaps but at its core, Bush-like. Now it becomes apparent that the US is much more Obama country than it ever was Bush country.

Another reason is that the bliss (to call it that) was unalloyed by compromise. This was not hooray the firstblackpresident who is not otherwise so terrific – this was not (for instance) Al Sharpton. There was absolutely no need to think ‘well this is a great First but we had to compromise to get it…’ – so one could wallow with a clear conscience. Obama is a lot more talented than the usual white pol, not less so, so the First is more than legitimate.

And perhaps best of all – I have earnest hopes that the fashion for falling-down prison pants will die an abrupt death.

It’s always nice to get some spiritual advice, don’t you think? A Melbourne imam gave his male followers some of that a few years ago, in a lecture titled ‘The Keys to a Successful Marriage.’

He said under Islamic law, as described in a koranic verse, it was a man’s right to demand sex from his wife whenever he felt like it. “If the husband was to ask her for a sexual relationship and she is preparing the bread on the stove she must leave it and come and respond to her husband, she must respond,” Mr Hamza told his male followers on the video sermon. He then mocked Australia’s criminal laws, which required consent for sex to be lawful. “In this country if the husband wants to sleep with his wife and she does not want to and she hasn’t got a sickness or whatever, there is nothing wrong with her she just does not feel like it, and he ends up sleeping with her by force…it is known to be as rape,” Mr Hamza said. “Amazing, how can a person rape his wife?”

Well quite – one might as well call it beating a hammer if you use it to pound in a nail, wives being much the same kind of thing as a hammer and husbands being, as Mr Hamza indicates, persons. A man is a person, and his wife is an object owned by the person, so obviously a person can’t ‘rape’ an object – what a silly idea. Amazing.

“First of all advise them,” he said. “You beat them … but this is the last resort. After you have advised them (not to be disobedient) for a long, long time then you smack them, you beat them and, please, brothers, calm down, the beating the Mohammed showed is like the toothbrush that you use to brush your teeth.
You are not allowed to bruise them, you are not allowed to make them bleed.”

No, you’re only allowed to beat them, but fortunately you are allowed to do that much, because you are always right and they are always wrong, or if not, it doesn’t signify, because your will is the only one that counts, and theirs is mere disobedience. That’s fair, surely? It must be, because Islam is justice.

Mr Hamza told his followers not to get carried away and become too physical with the beatings. “This is just to shape them up, shape up woman – that is about it,” he said. “You don’t go and grab a broomstick and say that is what Allah has said,” Mr Hamza said to sporadic laughter from his flock.

Oh, ha ha, that’s so funny, ha ha – of course you don’t, who would be so crude and vulgar as to do that? No no, you just hit them on the arms or legs, that’s all.

Mr Hamza runs the Islamic Information and Services Network of Australasia on Sydney Rd, Coburg, which offers spiritual advice, prayer facilities and boxing, karate and gym classes for Muslims.

Spiritual advice is it – yes very spiritual. Highly impressive and thoughtful and elevated, too – but at the same time, charmingly easy to understand. When a man wants to fuck, his wife has to be fucked, and if she refuses, the man can forcibly fuck her, or beat her and then forcibly fuck her, or if he’s really kinky, forcibly fuck her and then beat her. See? No complicated theological niceties, no chatter about ontology or the ground of being, just the man’s right to fuck his wife whenever he wants to; the root of all piety.

Mr Hamza yesterday stood by his comments and blamed controversy over them on a hidden Zionist agenda run by the media. Questioned about his teachings, Mr Hamza said a wife was allowed to be hit on the hand or leg, but “of course, not on the head”. He said if a Muslim wife disobeyed her husband, such as continuing to go out when requested not to, she was able to be subjected to moderate physical punishment. Mr Hamza also reiterated his belief that women should submit to sex when husbands required it. Asked whether it was impossible for a man to rape his wife under Islamic law, Mr Hamza said either male or female partners should be able to demand and receive sex.

And the poor and the rich are both allowed to sleep under bridges. Can’t say fairer than that, can you.

The joys of sharia again.

Islamic authorities in the northern Nigerian city of Kano have told organisers of a planned protest by divorced women to cancel the event. The head of the Sharia police, or Hisbah, said the planned protest was an “embarrassment”, and is “un-Islamic”…Women’s rights activists say divorced women are often thrown out of their homes, lose custody of their children, and many end up destitute. The Director General of the Hisbah…said the idea of street protests was “un-Islamic” and “morally wrong”. “Never in the history of Islam have women taken to the street to press for their demands,” he said.

Well of course they haven’t, because they haven’t been allowed to, but that is not a reason for continuing to not allow them to. It’s just a long history of oppression and coercion, which is not the same thing as a reason.

The Hisbah are in charge of policing the morals of Muslims to make sure they are “Sharia-compliant”…One of their duties is to reconcile quarrelling spouses and prevent divorce. But divorce in polygamous northern Nigeria is very common.

That is, the dumping of unwanted women by men in polygamous northern Nigeria is very common; the dumping of unwanted women who are thrown out of their homes and left destitute and without their children. But sharia forbids women to protest this, and the Hisbah are in charge of forcing all Muslims to be ‘Sharia-compliant’. It’s a nice racket for the men, not so nice for the women. Ho hum.

Once again the Anglican church drops the mask.

In a paper published on Monday, the Church will voice concern over how the [Human Rights Act] is being interpreted and claim that it has been used by secularists to advance a liberal agenda.

Yes…as opposed to a theocratic agenda. And a theocratic agenda would be better because?

Leading Church figures have claimed that there has been an overemphasis on equality legislation at the expense of faith groups…[Christians] have complained that law has failed to allow them freedom of their beliefs. The Church paper suggests that Christians should be wary of resorting to human rights legislation, which it claims has become a “tool of secular liberalism”.

Instead Christians should resort to religious law, which of course cannot be a ‘tool of secular liberalism’ because religious law is authoritarian, dogmatic, unaccountable, unarguable, based on unwarranted beliefs, unconcerned with justice or equality or freedom, and inherently oppressive. Naturally that is much better than poxy old secular liberalism, which viciously wants equal rights for everyone. What could be more loathsome than that?

“The language of human rights, interpreted as the basis for the State’s relationship to faith, is not one with which all Christians can be comfortable. It is all too easy to adopt the tools of secular liberalism as if they straightforwardly reinforce our case against secularism’s deficiencies…It is part of the calling of the Established Church never to be ‘domesticated’ by the administration of the day.”

In other words, it is part of the calling of the Established Church to consider itself above the law, and to do everything it can to defy it and encourage its members to defy it. In other words is part of the calling of the Established Church to pretend that the non-existent laws of a non-existent deity should and do trump the laws of flawed but more or less accountable elected representatives.

“The uncomfortable truth is that a purely secular account of human rights is always going to be problematic if it attempts to establish the language of rights as a supreme and non-contestable governing concept in ethics.”

Because the only supreme and non-contestable governing concept in ethics is that of a hidden (and non-existent) god as interpreted by an unaccountable elite of priests who pretend to know what the hidden non-existent god thinks is right and that whatever that god thinks is right, is right, whatever any pesky secular liberal may say about rights or justice.

Don’t let anybody try to tell you that the Anglican church is ‘liberal’ – it’s no more liberal than Rick Warren is.