Author: Ophelia Benson

Next up. Bush’s bizarro non sequitur.

Mr Bush said: “Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.”

Okay – and? So what? What’s your point? What follows from that? How, exactly, do you get from that to a need to forbid gay marriage? What’s the deal? Are you thinking that the existence of gay marriages will exert some kind of sucking effect on straight marriages, causing them gradually but surely to – um – become something other than straight marriages? To turn into poker dens, or iron smelters, or Manolo Blahnik shoes? But how? How would gay marriages do that? What exactly is the mechanism you think is operating here?

I know, I know; silly question. Silly because it doesn’t matter; silly because irrelevant. The people who pay attention to that kind of drivel won’t notice or think about the non sequitur, and Bush and his caretakers know that, so of course it’s irrelevant. But what the hell. I wanted to point it out anway.

People do keep trampling on the rights of religious believers, don’t they. Have you noticed that? Exhibiting paintings that some Hindus don’t like, putting on plays that some Sikhs don’t like, drawing cartoons that some Muslims don’t like, refusing to give arbitrary unequal treatment to people that some Christians would prefer to see getting arbitrary unequal treatment – there’s just no end to it. So naturally the religious believers are speaking up. Wouldn’t you?

Consider for instance these UK proposals to ‘protect gays and lesbians from being denied “goods, facilities and services” because of their sexual orientation.’

Lord Mackay of Clashfern and the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, said in a statement issued by the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship that the proposals could also undermine people’s rights to exercise their religious beliefs…Lord Mackay said: “For people of religious faith who believe that the practice of homosexuality is wrong, these proposals seem to me to carry a serious threat to their freedom in their voluntary and charitable work and in relation to earning their livelihood in a number of occupations.”

Yes – true. Laws and regulations are like that. They carry of their nature serious threats to freedom. That’s rather the point of them. If they weren’t meant to stop people doing things or to make them do things, they wouldn’t be laws and regulations, they would be something else, like polite advice, or gentle urging, or poetic rumination. The freedom of murderers is badly dented by laws against murder. Is this news to Lord Mackay?

Senior Muslims were also critical. Dr Majid Katme, the spokesman for the Islamic Medical Association, argued that the proposals demonstrated that the Government was prepared to discriminate against faith communities in order to promote “equality”. “The right to hold deep faith convictions that affect the way people think and behave in every aspect of life is sacrificed in these regulations,” he said.

The scare-quotes on ‘equality’ are interesting. Did Dr Katme make the little finger-hooks in the air when he was talking to the Telegraph, or what? How did the Telegraph know to put the scare-quotes on? Whatever. However that happened, it’s fascinating to see people catching on. Ohhhhhh – guess what, there’s a big fat tension in all this cuddly droning about ‘communities’ (I put those scare quotes on myself) and ‘faith communities’ and ‘rights’ and ‘the right to hold deep faith convictions’ on the one hand, and equality and freedom on the other. Guess what, the two don’t always mingle smoothly; guess what, you can’t always have both; guess what, your freedom to hold deep faith convictions that women should be imprisoned and subordinated and silenced conflicts rather sharply with my freedom to be a person like other people. We got a problem here, dude. Same with the gay stuff. Your right to hold deep faith convictions that gay people are wrong and bad and sinful conflicts rather sharply with gay people’s freedom and equality. Unless of course you can bring yourself simply to have the deep faith convictions without trying to enforce them or act on them in any way – but apparently you can’t, or you wouldn’t be complaining about these regulations. You’re not actually talking merely about deep faith convictions, you’re talking about putting them into practice. You’re trying to defend your desire to apply special unequal rules to gay people by calling that unpleasant desire ‘deep faith convictions’ and associating the whole package with freedom and rights. You’re complaining that your right and freedom to treat people unequally is under threat, and you’re dressing it up with talk of deep faith convictions and faith communities and people of religious faith. It’s a low trick. You guys need less in the way of deep faith convictions and a lot more in the way of rational thought about morality.

Oh dear, another ‘community’ has been attacked and defamed and had its human rights abused. Will this kind of thing never end? This time it was an art exhibition that attacked and defamed the Hindu community and abused its human rights. But the Hindu community didn’t take this attacking and abusing lying down – or at least, the group ‘Hindu Human Rights’ didn’t. Bless their hearts.

So we are fully aware of, respect and uphold British laws and traditions, which protect the rights of the Hindu community to protest when attacked and defamed.

That’s a sly one. Yes, of course, British laws and traditions protect the rights of anyone to protest when attacked and defamed, or any other time; British laws and traditions protect rights to protest in general. But the way that’s phrased makes it look (if you read hastily) as if British laws and traditions protect specifically the rights of ‘the Hindu community’ specifically to protest ‘when attacked and defamed’, which is more dubious; it also makes it look, perhaps even if you don’t read hastily, as if ‘the Hindu community’ had in fact been ‘attacked and defamed’, which is highly dubious. It is highly dubious to consider an exhibition of paintings that includes some paintings of naked Hindu deities an exercise in attacking and defaming ‘the Hindu community’. Highly dubious, but also highly popular and highly effective. If you’re religious, just announce that anything that gets up your nose is an attack on and defamation of your ‘community’ and everyone for miles around will turn pale and clammy with anguish, and put a stop to whatever nose-upgetting item is at issue.

We have campaigned for years for these values and freedoms to be granted to the Hindu communities which are persecuted in many parts of the world…As anyone can see from our website and publications, we exist to highlight the abuses of the human rights of Hindus going on in many parts of the world.

By…shutting down art exhibitions? By protesting naked deities in art exhibitions? Because…naked deities in art exhibitions are abuses of human rights? Well, yes; that probably is exactly what Ranbir Singh thinks; that is the way this line is going. Remember that cardinal last month who said exactly that? About the DaVinci Code? “This is one of the fundamental human rights – that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected,” said Cardinal Arinze.” A nice modest humble claim, that we all have to respect everyone else’s religious beliefs and (as if that weren’t enough) religious founders as well. Walls creeping ever closer.

Bad. ‘Uganda was a beacon of hope in Africa’s struggle against HIV, but the Christian right’s grip on US policy is undermining this effort with fatal consequences, reports Oliver Duff from Kampala.’

Aids activists and development officials point to the 130,000 Ugandans infected with HIV last year alone – up from 70,000 in 2002 – and say the recent obsession with abstinence is handicapping the country’s once-successful fight against the virus. Health workers see the fingerprints of America’s Christian right all over the chastity message and believe the Bush administration is using its financial might to bully them into accepting evangelical ideology at the expense of public health…Uganda receives more US money than ever…But that cash comes with conditions: in a gesture to the Christian right in the US, at least one-third of all prevention money must go to “abstinence-only” projects…Critics counting each new infection in field clinics say this has dangerously skewed Uganda’s previous “balanced” approach which seemed to be working.

Working, yes, but at the price of allowing some people to go with condoms instead of abstinence, and that’s dirty. It’s better to make the dirty people be dead and only the clean people live. Except that gets tricky, because you can get people who are faithful (one of the items in Uganda’s ABC – abstinence, be faithful, condoms) but are infected by their partners; that usually means women being infected, because male to female transmission is much easier. And then there are the children they have, and the children they leave orphans, some of whom are forced to become prostitutes to survive, and quickly get Aids and die themselves. But maybe it’s worth it, to keep from allowing condoms to appear on billboards and remind everyone of sex? Maybe not.

“Because of the US, our government now says Abstain and Be faithful only,” says Dr Katamba. “So people stop trusting our advice. They think we were lying about how condoms can stop Aids. Confusion is deadly.” And so it is proving to be: the number of infections is again rising, after years of decline…The trusted and influential first lady, Janet Museveni, is a born-again Christian. She has publicly equated condom use with theft and murder and said that Aids is God’s way of punishing immoral behaviour.

Aids is God’s way of punishing immoral behaviour in men by infecting their wives and leaving their children orphans. Interesting view of punishment, isn’t it.

People on both sides of the argument agree that Washington is prolonging tens of thousands of Ugandans’ lives through treatment – and that abstinence is crucial. “The evangelicals are absolutely right: abstinence is the best way of preventing the spread of HIV/Aids,” says Sigurd Illing, the EU ambassador to Uganda. “But some people aren’t receptive. We need an end to this bedevilling of condoms by people who take a high moralistic stance and don’t care about the impact that this has on reality.”

Ah yes, reality. Now where have we heard about that before…

“Saying ‘abstain’ is not realistic.” Nor is saying “Be faithful” at present, given the widespread and accepted male infidelity in Uganda that results in one infected person spreading the virus quickly…Constance Namuyiga, a 28-year-old mother of three young children, found out she was HIV-positive two years ago. “Men think they own us here,” she says…Not everyone is sad about the escalating epidemic. In a roadside timber yard near Kampala’s Mulago Hospital, coffin makers report that business has never been better.

Oh, good, that’s cheering.