Amid the customary hokum, there’s a flickering of realism in today’s Guardian. Further to this, Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association picks up on yesterday’s piece by Andrew Anthony and spies a possible explanation for Rowan Williams’ rhetorical contortions.
So, if the Catholic church wants exemption from laws to protect gay people from discrimination, you give them your support and even when you have to accept the case for abolishing the legal protection your own religion has from “blasphemy”, you can still salvage something by raising the spectre of offence caused to other religions (as the archbishop says, “The grounds for legal restraint in respect of language and behaviour offensive to religious believers are pretty clear”).
And if you want to protect the special status of the church and Christianity in law, then you speak up for the rights of those of other religions to have their religious law recognised (to quote the archbishop again, “Christians cannot claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds (for instance in situations where Christian doctors might not be compelled to perform abortions), if they are not willing to consider how a unitary system can accommodate other religious consciences”). Replacing “Church of England” with “faith” makes any defence of special treatment seem a whole lot more reasonable.
And replacing Williams’ “secular unitary system” with something clearer and more precise – say, “the law” – makes his claim to special treatment, whether for Anglicans or Muslims, rather less reasonable. Which is presumably why the archbishop chose to deploy such opaque and circuitous language. And there I was thinking dishonesty is a sin.
Wow.
I’ve actually managed to read an entire CiF article and comment thread and come away with my optimism for the future of humanity still intact.
Amazing. Miracles really can happen.
Scary, isn’t it? I thought the stars had aligned. That said, I’m sure the normal witlessness will resume almost immediately. And if it all gets too much you could always plough through Andrew Murray’s latest missive from the Stoppers’ parallel universe.
Meanwhile, in other news…
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/archbishop-of-canterbury-loses-mind-20080208713/
If this is indeed the ploy that the ABC is using, he is playing a very dangerous game. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Catholic adoption agencies and think that they should not be bound by laws forcing them to consider gay adopters, but for Christians to join forces with Muslims wanting Sharia courts (and that means only males at the extreme end of the spectrum) is a desperate play in their battle with intolerant secularism. Such anti-pluralist secularism comes from the neo-jacobins of the Left, and always has.
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev010908a.cfm
Setting aside Williams’ dishonesty, perhaps his greatest failing is the inability to grasp how his statements will motivate Islamists and advocates of cultural jihad. So much of what Williams said, and has said previously, is an encouragement precisely to those who should be thwarted at every turn.
Regarding Catholic adoption agencies, a number of interests collide, too many to list in detail. But a few thoughts come to mind.
There’s the point that institutions are generally the worst places for a child to be raised – worse than with a stable, loving couple of whatever configuration. There’s the likelihood that children at Catholic adoption agencies will have been placed there by Catholic parents, or relatives thereof, who may have wishes similar to those of the agencies concerned. There’s also the claim that Catholic agencies should be allowed to discriminate against gay people if that is their religious conviction. This is perhaps the least convincing claim, at least if state funding is involved.
From an epistemological point of view, this last argument doesn’t have too much going for it, beyond a belief that Catholics should be allowed to discriminate against gay people because, er, they think God wants them to. And there’s an obvious question here. What happens if there are more children hoping to be adopted than there are suitably heterosexual couples willing to adopt them?
And whatever arguments are presented, especially if framed as matters of conscientious objection, it would be unwise to rely on a claim that one knows the alleged adoption preferences of a hypothetical deity.
David have you seen these?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/12/anglicanism.islam1
http://www.platform10.org/the-view-from-here/article/?no=183
Thanks for those. The smell of condescension is hard to miss:
“This whole business has exposed a visceral stain of anti-clericalism and its second cousin, anti-intellectualism.”
“It seems that Rowan Williams’ main mistake was not to make his message simple enough for the media… It is as if cleverness must be mocked rather than understood.”
Oh, if only that were the sole mistake of this pompous, bearded fool. Whether by carelessness or design, Williams has lent the CofE’s institutional weight – i.e., political weight – to a divisive and deeply regressive cause. (Discussed at link below.)
http://sinclairsmusings.blogspot.com/2008/02/archbishop-of-canterburys-call-for.html
Whatever the subsequent blather about Williams “merely raising issues” and being “subtle” rather than political, his advocacy is clearly political in its implications and the issues he raised are neither novel nor insightful. They’re merely an extension of commonplace multicultural assumptions, fogged in needless verbiage and wilful ambiguity. (This would be the “cleverness” and “intellectualism” we keep hearing about.) He is, in effect, prioritising what he perversely calls “social cohesion” (i.e. accommodating the self-inflicted alienation and supremacist urges of some Muslims) over a founding principle of democracy, British culture and civilised society. Equality before one law is a tricky thing to fudge, however wordily one tries.
That Williams and many others, chiefly on the left, should affect not to see the implications of what was said is difficult to excuse, as is the glib and condescending dismissal of popular objections. The Guardian’s Steve Bell drew a suitably patronising cartoon depicting those who took exception to Williams’ remarks as knuckle-dragging chavs. One wonders how Mr Bell reconciles that image with his professed leftwing credentials and alleged solidarity with the proletariat.